(Global News) On Sunday, Oct. 4, 2020, a Canadian government delegation crossed the Tigris River into northeast Syria to take custody of a five-year-old orphan.
Amira was the only survivor of a Canadian family killed by an airstrike during the fight against ISIS, to which her parents had allegedly belonged.
A year later, internal documents released to Global News under the Access to Information Act describe the months of discussions that preceded the handover.
They show Canadian officials knew about Amira in April 2019, located her that December, and in February 2020 were invited by U.S.-backed Kurdish authorities to come get her.
But Canadian officials instead spent months exchanging memos over what to do, and insisting northeast Syria wasn’t safe for them to visit, the documents show.
