Suburban mom to Obama: Help with my daughters in Middle East
A Midlothian woman appealed today for Sen. Barack Obama’s help, asking the Democratic presidential hopeful to pay a visit during his Middle East trip this week to check up on the well-being of her four young daughters on the West Bank.
Colleen Davis Bargouthi said she is desperate to make contact with her daughters, Emily, Hannah, Amanda and Sarah, ages 6 to 11, who she said are being held by her Palestinian husband there with the intention of forcing them into arranged marriages.
(Jean Lachat/Sun-Times)
“My heart breaks everyday we are apart,” she said at a Chicago news conference.
Bargouthi, a cab driver, said what was supposed to have been a short visit in June 2007 to her husband’s family on the West Bank stretched until May and ended in domestic violence, threats of murder and her expulsion from her in-laws’ house by her husband, Yasser Shibli Bargouthi Yasser.
Yasser has obtained Palestinian passports for the couple’s daughters and intends to raise them in the Middle East, despite their previous upbringing in the United States, Bargouthi said. Except for a recent phone call, Bargouthi said Yasser has kept her from contacting the girls.
Yasser has also been planning arranged marriages for his daughters and is planning to remarry, according to Bargouthi.
When Bargouthi spoke to one of her daughters by phone recently, the little girl informed her mother she’d gotten a new bed.
Bargouthi said asked how the bed felt and the girl replied, “Momma, it feels like a doughnut. It’s empty in the middle without you.”