Former Captive in Kuwait Tells of Her Ordeal

After more than a month of being held captive in Kuwait, Kasco Younis walked into her home late Monday night filled with bittersweet emotions.

“I’m extremely happy to be back, but I fear for my husband who is still being held,” said Younis, 42.

It was a “long and frightening” ordeal, said Younis, who finally arrived in Orange County on Monday, along with her three children.

Younis, who left the Middle East a week ago, said the string of the plane trips and different time zones made them all “very tired. . . . All we really want to do now that we’re home is sleep,” she said.

“The whole thing was very scary.”

Younis and her 14-year-old son, Abdullah, and 11-year-old and 8-year-old daughters Alia and Ablla, were visiting the children’s father, Awni, who works for a Kuwaiti import company, when the Iraqi invasion occurred. “We were there for the summer,” she said.

On the morning of Aug. 2, Younis said, her family awoke in their beachside apartment in Kuwait to the sounds of gunfire. “We knew it was an invasion.”

Because Younis held a Japanese passport and her children and husband, a native Palestinian, had American papers, the family went to a Palestinian section of the country to hide.

“We knew Westerners were easy targets,” she said. “We wanted to get away from the Western part of town.”

But after a day of hiding, the group went home, where they stayed until they were instructed to go to the Japanese Embassy.

Younis and her husband decided it would be best not to try to cross the border to Saudi Arabia.

“It’s a hot and a long trip,” she said. “We thought it would be more dangerous to try and cross. The BBC and Voice of America kept repeating to not do it.”

When Iraqi President Saddam Hussein announced that women and children were free to leave Kuwait, “we didn’t trust him,” Younis said. “We just waited until it was true.”

Now that Younis and her children are back home, her main concern is “getting my husband back safely. . . . All we can do is hope.”