Marriage Takes a Dark Turn
By the time she was 34, Maureen was divorced with three kids. A debilitating illness forced her to give custody to her first husband, according to the Associated Press.
She later went on to meet Mohamad when they worked together in the Florida healthcare industry—she was a nurse, and he was a medical lab technician. The couple married in 1988 following a six-month romance and relocated to Medina, Ohio, the Pilot reported.
Two years later, they welcomed baby Nadia, and Maureen said the dynamic of their relationship shifted.
Mohamad made it clear he wanted Maureen to fall into a more submissive role, aligned with his Muslim religion and Syrian background. He even suggested an arranged marriage between Nadia and one of his cousins in Syria.
“There’s a culture clash, and when you have kids, your cultural values come out,” Maureen told the paper in 2019. “I was one of a gazillion; my situation is not unique.”
Maureen took their daughter and left. She filed for divorce and custody of Nadia, triggering a prolonged court battle between the former couple. As a result, Nadia was shuffled between Ohio with her mother, and Florida with her father, one month at a time, until she wasn’t.
By February 1993, it was suspected that Mohamad kidnapped Nadia and took her back to his native country of Syria, where his family helped raise her. Nadia’s absence sent Maureen on a relentless journey to find her missing daughter.
The Crawl Toward Federal Charges
Legal snags and diplomatic barriers would impede the case for years.
It wasn’t until 1994 that the FBI issued a warrant for Mohamad’s arrest on charges of international child abduction—a law making that illegal didn’t exist until December 1993—and Maureen was granted full legal custody of Nadia in the U.S. It would take two more years for the Syrian government to also acknowledge Maureen as her daughter’s primary legal guardian, according to the Pilot.
Still, overcoming that hurdle didn’t guarantee Nadia would be back in her arms, and the battle to be reunited with her daughter dragged on for several more years, forcing Maureen to continue to navigate the lonely world of international child abduction on her own.
“Every day you get up to the same unresolved grief,” she confessed.
Driven By Desperation
Maureen dipped into her own pockets and embarked on several personal trips to Syria in an attempt to rescue her daughter, spending a quarter of a million dollars in the process.
Her desperation led her to explore the clandestine “snatchback” sector—an underground industry where ex-military, mercenaries and former CIA agents rescue children who are illegally whisked away overseas to hostile nations by their non-custodial parent. Opting for that route, however, presented exponential dangers that could oftentimes result in imprisonment or even death, according to the AP.
Maureen subsequently rejected the idea to “snatchback” Nadia and instead became part of the movement to help retrieve other abducted children in similar situations, acting as a “snatchback” agent herself, the outlet reported. She gained connections, intel and arcane knowledge traversing the dark side of child retrieval in enemy territory.
The experience prepared her for what she anticipated would be the gratifying moment she would be reunited with her daughter. But in that instance in 1997, as she waited outside a home in Syria where she thought Nadia had been living, she reevaluated the chaos she believed she was at risk of unleashing on the life of her unsuspecting child.
“What are you doing?” Maureen thought to herself in that moment as she forced herself to drive away from the residence, she recalled to the Pilot. “I realized I was not after a little baby anymore. That child did not know who I was.”
The grieving mom admitted she “was in my rage stage.”
“My focus was vindication and revenge and punishment,” she explained. “It was all targeted toward the ex, his family, his country, his culture, I was angry at the system. My focus was on hurting him like he hurt me.”
Maureen made the difficult decision to pull back her efforts to reunite with Nadia, with a heavy awareness that she was essentially a stranger to her daughter.
In the meantime, she used her personal experience and passion to found PARENT, a worldwide network for parents whose children had been kidnapped by ex-spouses, and become a certified Supreme Court juvenile and domestic relations mediator in Virginia, according to Mediate.com. She also published the books Parental Kidnapping in America and The Recovery of Internationally Abducted Children.
Then came that fateful night in April 2010 when her phone rang.
It was her ex, Mohamad, who explained that now that Nadia was an adult, she was curious about her mom. He put Nadia on the phone, and the mother-daughter eventually agreed to reunite in the Syrian capital of Damascus, the Pilot reported.
Ripped Apart, Then Reunited
At the airport, Mohamad apologized to Maureen, and Nadia and her mom took their time getting to know each other over the next two weeks. Maureen, a Christian by faith, opened up about the religious differences that led to the crumbling of her marriage to Mohamad.
The discussion led to a mutual understanding.
“We are supposed to be archenemies. Our countries are at war and there’s this religious conflict injected into the whole of it. If she was a young child, it would not be the case, but she was older. It was bigger than both of us. But both of us were trying to find common ground. We could love each other anyway,” Maureen said.
Nadia stayed behind in Syria while Maureen went back home to Virginia. Afterward, the pair stayed in touch via phone and email.
Maureen said she reflected on Mohamad’s apology and later on forgave him for the decades of turmoil he inflicted upon her.
“It was very hard for me to sort that out,” she said. “But I did accept it. Even though I didn’t mean it then, it’s OK now. You asked for forgiveness, and I gave it. It’s a huge thing to ask for, and it’s a huge thing to give.”
Today, Maureen continues her work as an international child abduction specialist, according to LinkedIn.
