 Thank you, Platon. I'm a photographer, as he just introduced me, and my job is to observe humanity, and as I do so I learn a great deal about empathy, about seeing the other. There's a quote by Albert Einstein, which really summarizes it well for me. Empathy is patiently and sincerely seeing the world through another person's eyes. He also says that we don't learn it in school, that we cultivate it over a lifetime. But today we stand at the brink of a new age, the fourth industrial revolution, and as we rely more on machine intelligence, we tend to relinquish our emotional intelligence and faces disappear behind data, and my job is to bring those faces back. So in light of this, I'd like to share with you a story. The story revolves around a single man. It's a story of leadership, tenacity, and a show of goodwill in the most unlikely places. On assignment for the Wall Street Journal, I was commissioned to follow Mr. Patricio Galvez, a Chilean-Swedish musician and poet, a father of three, and a grandfather of seven children. Mr. Galvez went on a journey for which he packed a suitcase full of clothes, but none of these clothes were actually for him. They were for his seven grandchildren. Four of which he hasn't seen for years, and three of which he has never met. He also took his smartphone with a backpack and just a few essentials that he packed for himself. He wanted to document his visual journey. Now by looking at this picture, you might think that he is just a tourist in a strange country, but he was not an ordinary trip. He was the quest to rescue his seven orphaned grandchildren from a war zone. Now, let's go back in time. This is Amanda, Patricio's first-born daughter, pictured here when she was just 17 years old. According to Patricio, Amanda was a very empathetic child, always taking the side of the underdog. Her parents divorced when she was just a toddler. This is the last picture of Amanda with her face exposed. When she turned 18, she converted to Islam, for reasons, as she explained later, that Muslims had not been treated fairly in her own society. Father and daughter began to drift apart when Amanda met a fellow convert, a Swedish-Norwegian Islamist by the name of Michael Scrammel. They soon got married, and by 2014, when Amanda was still in her early 20s, they already had four children. The same year, Amanda and Michael and children went on a holiday to Turkey. She wrote her father saying that Michael was looking for a job in Istanbul, that the family was going to settle down there. But a month later, Patricio receives another text, where she apologized to her father for lying. The family crossed into Syria, where Michael Scrammel became the jihadist recruiter for the Islamic State. I know you think it's crazy, but it's better for us here, Amanda's text read. Now, little is known about the family's life in the so-called Halifat, and it's the facto capital of Raqqa. But by the end of their stay there, they had three more children. As the coalition airstrikes intensified on ISIS territory, Patricio feared for his family's safety, but nothing he said or did could convince Amanda to return back to Sweden. The last picture of her he received was that of an unmarked grave, just a mound of earth where his daughter's body was buried. She was gravely injured in an airstrike and died shortly from her injuries. In the months preceding Amanda's death, the family was constantly on the run and in hiding as the US-backed forces retook Raqqa. In one of her texts, Amanda wrote that they had to make soup out of boiled grass, because there was nothing else to eat. A few months after Amanda, Michael Scrammel, her husband, was wounded into his neck by a bullet, got paralyzed, and it resulted in his death. The children, all seven of them, survived and ended up in Al Hol, a sprawling refugee camp along with 70,000 other people, mostly ISIS family members. News reports spread that children were dying of malnutrition and disease in Al Hol, and Patricio knew that he had to act fast if he wanted to save his grandchildren. Still in mourning over the loss of his daughter and eager to atone for her death, Patricio pled with the Swedish authorities, asking them to help him rescue the grandchildren, but the government response was dispassionate. The situation is complicated both legally and in terms of security, the government email read. So Patricio decided he could no longer wanted to wait for his government's action. He boarded an airplane to Erbil, Iraq, and drove to the city nearest to the border, to Dohuk, with an intention to cross into Syria as soon as possible. For two days in Dohuk, the border between Syria and Iraq over the Euphrates River was shut down due to heavy rainfall. Stuck in his hotel room, Patricio grew increasingly anxious. Before this journey for which he took out all his savings, he has never set foot in the Middle East. The morning after the two days when the border reopened, Patricio spent hours getting processed for entry, and then finally he took a two-minute bus ride, just a two-minute bus ride, over the overflowing bridge, and he was in Syria. On the other side of the border, this inconspicuous city of Kamishle, mainly controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces, which defeated ISIS, would be his base as he struggled to reunite with his grandchildren. Patricio learned that his youngest grandson, Muhammad, one-year-old Muhammad, was hospitalized in Hasaka Hospital with malnutrition and lung infection. The hospital was in the Christian area of the city, and security was very precarious there. It was mainly controlled by the Syrian regime forces, and Patricio did not have a visa for Syria. When he came to the hospital and reached the infirmary floor, he collapsed on the bench, crying. He has never seen Muhammad before. He only had a picture of the baby on his phone, on his smartphone, which he kept showing to the nurses, Have you seen this baby? Where can I find him? He kept asking. Muhammad was right in front of him, but he had trouble recognizing the child, lined up in a row of cribs with other babies of ISIS fighters in them. When he finally identified Muhammad by his whiff of blonde hair, he picked him up and cradled him in his arms. He spoke softly to the boy in Swedish. He is so small, so small, he kept repeating. Muhammad at age one was too frail to hold up his neck and head. Blue veins pulsated under his translucent skin. He was nimble with malnourishment. Shortly after this moment, the local security forces urged Patricio to leave the hospital. He set out to reunite with the rest of his grandchildren. But access to Al-Hol camp was shut down that week due to a security incident. So he had to spend hours in the various offices of security chiefs begging for access in spite of the lockdown. He was in a very difficult situation because he had to rely on empathy and support of the very same people who fought an enemy organization which his daughter had joined. Access was finally granted, but for the grandfather alone, we were not allowed to accompany him into the camp. This is Patricio's first family picture with all seven grandchildren together. He brought the children food which they devoured. If they spend any more months or days in this camp, I think they will die, he said. Just that spring alone, 250 people died in Al-Hol because of malnutrition and disease. Patricio was distraught on the way back from Syria to Iraq. The uncertainty was crushing him. He feared for the lives of his grandchildren. He made phone calls to the Chilean and Swedish consulates in Iraq, pressuring them for an urgent humanitarian action that his children's lives were at stake while the world was watching. So the authorities finally caved in. The Chileans cast a vote in a parliament where unanimously they voted in favor of the children to be brought to Chile. Following the Chilean vote, the Swedes reassured Patricio that they will now begin negotiations for their children repatriation back to Sweden. Patricio was adamant about staying in Iraq and not living without his grandchildren. With the help of his friends, he ran out of all his money by then. He got a large hotel room with six beds. He bought toys and shoes and clothes for the children. He stacked up the cabinets with formula for baby Muhammad. He was expecting his children to arrive any moment and he waited four weeks in an empty hotel room. The children arrived abruptly with a phone call from the Swedish government telling Patricio to pick them up within three hours. The reunion was bittersweet. The children cried for their mother. They were, you know, their stomachs were upset. Their heads were shaved to prevent lies. Their faces were sunburned. The oldest boy, Ibrahim, kept making colorless drawings of his memories of war. He drew tanks and helicopters. Fallen soldiers, which he called Mujahideen. And flags with the upside down smiley faces, which he called Jajadu, which means enemy army in Arabic. It was chaotic. Two of the girls contracted chicken pox at the camp. They were feverish and refused to eat. The room smelled of diapers and vomit. For a week, the family was not allowed to leave the hotel room as their documents were being processed for travel. Patricio was exhausted. Finally, at the end of the week, he received a phone call from the Swedish government saying that the documents are ready and the family had to leave on the same day. They flew home via Frankfurt. Patricio's friend Gorky and Swedish volunteer Beatrice joined to help with the kids. Struggling to get seven kids out of bed at 5 a.m., they forgot diapers and had to improvise out of paper napkins later. They finally arrived in Frankfurt Airport at the gate. People recognized Patricio. Strangers, random people, they walked up to the group and they hugged them and they congratulated them. The airline pilot gave them a bag of toys for the kids. In the last two days, Patricio's friends collected $9,000 in a crowdfunding campaign to help finance the flights. On the short flight from Frankfurt to Gothenburg, the children were at peace. They were playing quietly. They perhaps sensed the end of their arduous journey. Against all odds, their grandfather managed to take them back home to safety. As the plane descended to land, Patricio tried to soothe Ibrahim's earache. Just tried to swallow, he told them, and then he pointed to the window and said, we are almost home. As the plane landed, Patricio collapsed with tears of relief. His friends clapped their hands with joy and other passengers joined in jubilation. The family was met by police in the airport and escorted to a special section where the social workers were ready to take them to a safe home. Outside of France, Patricio is the first man in Europe who managed to repatriate ISIS family members. Public opinion was never on his side. Swedish poll results showed that most people did not want to see children of jihadists brought back home. Thanks to Patricio, this grandfather's efforts, these seven children now have a chance for a normal life. But today, we have 28,000 children still trapped in squalid refugee camps and detention centers of northeastern Syria. Enduring in human conditions, having lived through what no child should live through under ISIS, they continue living amidst disease and violence. Their wounds of war, their emotional traumas are festering instead of healing. The world has decided to brand them as children of ISIS, a stigma like no other in our day. But they themselves have not committed any crime. Yet they're punished by association and their governments are violating their basic human rights. The vast majority of these children are 20,000 of them are Iraqi and Syrian children like this Yazidi boy born to a mother who was kidnapped, enslaved and raped by ISIS. She was forced to abandon him due to the stigma brought upon her in her community. He now lives in an orphanage in Syria where local administration is protecting his identity. The rest of the children, 8,000 of them, are citizens of 60 countries of the world, 60 countries. It's important to note that some of these countries are the same western governments that championed human rights, that signed up to the Convention on the Rights of the Child 30 years ago. Al-Hol, this camp, is a glaring example of how these governments are now failing to uphold these rights. Now some countries are taking steps towards repatriation of their citizens, but many reasons such as security risks, political complications, you know, lack of legal framework. But all those are solvable issues compared to the fact that these children are trapped in an environment of violence and radicalization. And more than half of them are under the age of five. So how, you know, children that are less than five-year-olds and five-year-olds can be a security risk. I went to the foreign citizens annex of the Al-Hol camp in piercing cold wind. Women of different nations surrounded me, asking me about repatriation if I knew anything about it, about the plan. In an instance that evoked the tragedies of Second World War, one Russian mother came up to me and said, let them take my children if they don't want to take me. Okay? There are no clinics or hospitals in Al-Hol. Children die of cold and malnourishment. Murders are committed. Courts are upheld. Corporal punishments are administered. Some hardcore ISIS ideologues imposed a self-rule where they issued death threats to women who refused to follow their strict code. You know, riots routinely broke out and get subdued by gunfire which once killed an infant. This is a major humanitarian disaster which the world has been ignoring for far too long. Rejected by their societies, these women and children will pose a far greater security risk one day to the world. Just think about it. It's dangerous. Because their state perpetuates the idea, the narrative of victimhood upon which some of the most radical ideologies such as ISIS, violent ideologies, are based, you know, one day these vulnerable women and children will join the next call for war. They will be too vulnerable and they will be exploited in this call for war. The call for war that will be fueled by the blatant human injustices committed against them. Thank you.