One Toronto mother is trying to bring her children back to Canada after their father took them to Afghanistan and is refusing to bring them home.
According to CBC News, Zaiba Zaiba, who was awarded full custody of her two children by a Canadian court, gave her ex-husband permission to take the children on a trip to Europe this June. But when she received a call from him in mid-July, she had a harrowing realization.
"When I saw the number I was shocked because I don't get [many] calls from Afghanistan," she said. "When I said 'hello' and recognized his voice I was in tears and I knew that he took them."
Zaiba then contacted the police and the Canadian government in an attempt to bring her children back, but because Afghanistan is not a signatory to the Hague Act -- an international agreement that protects children from abduction -- she has been told there is little that can be done.
Still, she is not giving up hope, and is working to bring her children back home to Canada, where they were born and raised.
"I just need my children back. I don't know how I'm [going to] live without them. It's so hard," she said.
Sadly, this is far from the first documented case of international parental child abduction. In December 2012, Rachel Neustadt allowed her estranged husband to take two of their three children on a trip to Russia, but when school resumed in January, he refused to return them to their mother in England. Neustadt is not giving up hope however, and although her estranged husband has ignored several orders from the English High Court to return the boys, she maintains a Go Fund Me page to aid in her efforts to be reunited with her sons.
But some of these cases do have happy endings. In January 2013, an Indiana man was reunited with his three children almost five years after their mother fled with them to Argentina.
Watch the full video above for more on Zaiba's case and what is being done to bring her children back to Canada from Afghanistan.
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