Ten years after her ex took their children to live in Lebanonagainst her wishes, Aussie woman Sally Faulkner recently celebrated Christmas with them for the first time in a decade.
“We’ve missed out on so much together,” says the brave mum, who never gave up on trying to bring her two children back home to Queensland.
Sally’s plight became global news in 2016 when she was arrested in Lebanon for attempting to recover her then-five-year-old daughter Lahela and her two-year-old brother Noah. The previous year, her former partner Ali Elamine had taken the two kids to his native Beirut on a holiday and refused to return them.
Aussie TV network Nine enlisted former soldier Adam Whittington, founder of Child Abduction Recovery International (CARI), to snatch back the kids in a desperate bid to bring them home. The mission was filmed for current affairs show 60 Minutes.
But the recovery effort went horribly wrong and it was later revealed that Elamine was tracking the team’s progress using their daughter’s iPad, which was connected to the email account Sally used to coordinate the operation.
A brief but joyful reunion
Sally, 40, got to spend just a few hours with the children before the Lebanese police arrested her and journalist Tara Brown, as well as the camera crew and CARI team.
“I spent 20 minutes with Sally and the kids in the safe house,” Adam said of their brief reunion.
“They were so happy – so, so happy. All they kept saying was, ‘Mummy, we’re going back to Australia! We’re going back home!’”
Six weeks behind bars
Adam and his team remained in jail for six weeks, while Sally and the Nine team were released after two. Sally was only freed after signing, while handcuffed, an agreement giving up her claims to custody. Meanwhile, Nine paid Elamine $800,000 to encourage him to drop charges against the crew.
What followed were nine torturous years for Sally, who was not allowed to see her children again, besides infrequent phone calls and video messages – until November 2024, when they were finally reunited in the United States.
Sally revealed on a podcast in October 2023 that Elamine had opened “a line of communication” because he needed her permission to get passports for their children to escape the bombing in the southern Lebanese town where he lived.
Justice in Georgia
When he and the kids fled Lebanon for the US in 2024, Sally lodged a temporary protection order in the state of Georgia, where they landed and Elamine was separated from the children. In January 2025, a euphoric Sally was finally granted temporary custody of her beloved kids.
The Georgia judge who made the decision called it “the most screwed-up case I’ve ever had in my entire 45 years of being a lawyer and a judge” and “the most bizarre lawsuit I’ve ever seen in my life”.
Soon afterwards, Sally was able to bring Lahela and Noah back to Queensland, where she lives with her new partner Brendan Pierce, the father of her other three kids, Eli, nine, Izac, seven, and Lylah, three. The couple now runs a cleaning company together.
Clinging to connection
Sally, who has previously said she felt “numb” after losing her older children, never gave up the battle to reunite with the kids. In the time they were apart, infrequent video and phone calls were her only contact with them.
“When we do talk, it’s blissful,” she posted on Facebook back then.
“It’s full of laughter, with lots of joking around. “They are very curious to know certain things about their childhood here in Australia. They love when I tell them stories of when they were young.”
Sally said these video calls allowed her abducted kids to bond with their three younger siblings. She has also shared some of her journey with the millions who have supported her on social media. In 2020, Sally set up an emotional Facebook page in the hope that her kids would read it and realise she never gave up her fight to see them.
She says, “I never stopped thinking about them and loving them.”
