Almasa from Skejići: her brother Abdulah was taken away in Potočari, only part of his bones was found

Childhood in the war

The Salihović family comes from Skejići, a village about twenty kilometers from Srebrenica. The father died before the war, so the mother cared alone for five children: the sons Abdulah and a younger brother, and the daughters Fatima, Sabaheta and Almasa. At the time of the fall of Srebrenica Almasa was a child: according to one source she was eight, according to another five years old.

According to the testimony of Almasa Salihović, on 18 September 1992, 14 people were killed in the shelling of the village school in Skejići. The family then fled to Srebrenica. As Almasa says, artillery razed their village to the ground.

Potočari, July 1995

After the fall of Srebrenica on 11 July 1995, the family set out toward the base of the Dutch battalion of UNPROFOR (Dutchbat) in Potočari, where they hoped to find safety. They spent about two days near the base, next to the former battery factory, in a mass of refugees crowded into an overfilled space.

According to the testimony of Almasa Salihović, in Potočari she saw General Ratko Mladić separating young men. She also recounted that Mladić asked her for valuables, and she handed him her doll, saying: "take it, take it, it's all I have."

Members of the Vojska Republike Srpske (VRS) separated men and boys from women and children. Almasa, her mother and Fatima were put on buses and deported. The eldest sister, Sabaheta, made her way to safety on her own.

Saved in a bus

The younger brother, then fifteen years old, was hidden by the mother in the bus under a pile of clothes, and she thus saved his life. According to one source, a soldier nevertheless told him on the bus: "You will go on another bus." The boy survived.

Abdulah

Eighteen-year-old Abdulah Salihović, a sports enthusiast, remained in Potočari. He was detained when he tried to leave the base with his sister Fatima, and was then killed. The sources do not state who carried out his execution. Most of the family reached free territory on 13 July 1995, where they waited for months for news of Abdulah.

Identification and burial

Only in 2008 did the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) inform the family that DNA analysis had confirmed the identity of Abdulah's remains. They were found in a mass grave and are incomplete; according to the portal genocid.ba, they were found in Čančari. Abdulah Salihović was buried at the Potočari Memorial Center, where two of Almasa's paternal uncles are also laid to rest.

Testimony and justice

Almasa Salihović is today the spokesperson of the Srebrenica–Potočari Memorial Center and speaks publicly about the fates of the victims, among them that of her brother. She stresses that genocide took place in Srebrenica and calls for visits to Potočari so that future generations learn what happened. At the first commemoration of the genocide in Srebrenica in New York, on 11 July 2024, she told her story.

On 8 June 2021, the Appeals Chamber of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) upheld the sentence of life imprisonment for Ratko Mladić, commander of the VRS Main Staff, among other things for genocide in Srebrenica.