DOHUK – The day they came to take her children, the young mother bundled them up against the cold. She asked her nearly 6-year-old son to take care of his younger sister.
“Don’t let anyone hit her,” she told the boy. “OK, Mama,” she remembers him replying.
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Much else was left unsaid.
Then, as the car carried her little boy and girl away to a life without her in a children's home in Syria, a country she knew she would soon leave, the woman wept.
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Nearly a decade ago, K, the mother, had been a child herself, about 13, when she and her family were captured in Iraq by militants from the Islamic State group. The extremists waged an onslaught that started in August 2014 and ravaged her Yazidi community, a small religious minority.
Many were forced to flee their homes. Thousands were killed or abducted, including many women and girls subjected to sexual violence and enslavement.
Ten years on, a traumatized Yazidi community is still convulsed by the legacy of IS’s brutal campaign, well after the group’s territorial defeat. Nearly 2,600 Yazidis are still considered missing, to the anguish of their families. Former captives grapple with the trauma of what they endured. Many have been weathering life in displacement camps.
Among the most fraught questions is the fate of children who, like K’s, were born to women who had been captured and raped by or married to the extremists. The Associated Press is identifying K only by her first initial due to the backlash that mothers in her sensitive situation might face.
While the community has embraced the return of formerly kidnapped mothers like her, the children’s status has proved much more contentious, colliding with long-standing Yazidi beliefs and newer scars. Many vehemently reject accepting these children in the community, viewing them as the non-Yazidi offspring of men who inflicted on them unimaginable horrors and humiliations.
In her dreams, K would see herself back with her family, but she said she knew she couldn’t have both: her family and children. Then came the moment when she was found living in Syria’s notorious al-Hol camp housing IS-linked families.
“My family said they won’t receive them. The Yazidi community, too, won’t receive them,” she said of the children.
Heartbroken as she is by what the militants did to her and others, she said the children to her are simply the babies who came out of her body.
“They’re kids; they’ve committed no sin,” she said. “They’re a piece of my heart.”
The Islamic State militants are gone but widespread anguish remains
As the 10th anniversary of the IS onslaught approaches, K finds herself reeling.
Her ordeal is one stark example of the very personal toll that IS crimes against Yazidis, which a United Nations team characterized as genocide, continue to exact on many lives.
“A lot of our problems are still pending, like missing people, mass graves, justice, reconciliation, return, everything,” said Natia Navrouzov, executive director of Yazda, an NGO supporting the Yazidi community.
“We’re facing existential threats, and at the same time we’re not equipped because of the trauma, the division and the lack of unity to find any way forward.”
In the case of children like K’s, the challenges are multifaceted.
Under long-standing beliefs, community members must have two Yazidi parents. Even if the community accepted the children, Iraqi laws would require them to be registered as Muslim, said Hadi Babasheikh, whose now-deceased brother was the Yazidi spiritual leader during IS atrocities. He questioned how a family can raise children whose father may have killed some of its own.
Navrouzov agreed these cases were complex and said the community needs help to find a resolution: “You don’t know how to approach this issue without harming the mother, harming the child, harming the community.”
Families who accept these children might be ostracized, she added.
The result: Some missing Yazidi women don’t return, staying behind with IS-linked families to avoid being separated from their children, Navrouzov said.
Hussein al Qaidi, director of an office tasked with rescuing kidnapped Yazidis, said many of those missing are believed to be in Syria, especially in al-Hol, and suggested they could be hiding their Yazidi identity for fear of what IS supporters in the camp would do to them.
Hadi Babasheikh noted that his brother had urged the community to welcome back the formerly captured survivors — a position that was considered relatively progressive given stigma surrounding rapes and forced conversions.
But he said it’s "impossible” for a mother to stay in Iraq with children from IS-affiliated fathers and urges the international community to resettle those who want to keep their children.
Some Yazidi mothers, he added, want nothing to do with children from IS-affiliated fathers.
But for those yearning for their children, the options are tormenting.
“On the one hand, I want my family and on the other, I keep thinking about my children,” K said.
The onslaught tore Yazidi families in a multitude of ways
Back in Iraq for her family reunion, K was embraced by greeters. Jubilant clapping and celebratory ululations intermingled with sobs of relief.
Despite sadness for leaving her children, “It felt good ... to see my family and my people,” she said.
But the community she returned to is not the one of her childhood.
Many Yazidis have scattered around the world; more are desperate to leave. Some have been orphaned; others don’t know the fate of loved ones.
Saeed Talal’s missing relatives include a daughter, brothers and nephews. He and others have given blood samples and wait to hear if remains in mass graves are a match. Talal figured older male relatives must have perished but holds out hope for others.
“My mind is never at ease,” he said. “Since 2014, I can hardly say that I’ve had a good night’s sleep.”
According to Talal, after he was captured, militants gave him and men in his group an ultimatum: Convert to Islam or be killed. He converted.
While his life was spared, he had to exist under IS rules. Some of his children were separated from him and their mother. At one point, he was reunited with one of his daughters and had to disguise her as a boy, fearing that the militants would marry her off like they did an older daughter. That daughter remains missing. In 2015, Talal, his wife, two sons and two other daughters escaped.
Some of the long-missing return estranged from all they were and knew; relations with families can be strained.
Cheman Rasheed, director of Jinda NGO, said some come back “brainwashed,” and harboring “terrorist and violent” thoughts.
She recalled a teenager brought by his Yazidi mother for rehabilitation several years ago. The boy, Rasheed said, initially wanted to return to the militants, who had captured him earlier, and he considered his mom an infidel. According to Rasheed, he had taken part in violence while in IS hands.
“I can’t forget the stories I’ve heard,” Rasheed said. “So, how is it for those who’ve lived through them?”
Surviving captivity and life in an Islamic State group's world
The young mother, too, had changed.
The familiar pieces of K’s previous life faded away during an adolescence and young adulthood spent in an IS-dominated world.
The militants separated her from family members. She had to trade her Kurdish dialect for Arabic. For years, she’s lived under a different name.
Gradually, she started praying and fasting without being told to. She became so used to being swathed in the IS-required garb for women — black robes, gloves and a face covering — that, at first, she felt virtually naked when she changed into other clothes.
She had been robbed of her childhood.
“They raped us and sold us off and deprived us of our families when we were kids. They’ve slaughtered our men,” she said, her words coming in like rapid fire. “Our lives have been wasted.”
The militants, she said, spared Yazidi girls and women no humiliation.
“We would wash for them, cook for them. They’d wake me up ... and tell me to work,” she said.
“Life was so bitter,” she added. “It was for our kids’ sake that we’ve endured.”
She recalled how she told a much older man who raped her that she “was just a child.” It didn’t matter. “He had a heart of stone.”
Her life took sharp turns during her years away from home. She was sold to a man who freed her from enslavement and, eventually, she said, ended up getting married more than once, including to the men who became her children's fathers. To her, things got slightly easier after she no longer was considered enslaved in the IS universe. But, she said, she also continued enduring the al-Hol camp’s hardships rather than identify herself to authorities as a Yazidi primarily so she could stay with her children.
After she was found, K learned that there’s no word about the fate of her parents and one of her sisters.
After captivity, women navigate life without their children
For all her anguish, K’s face lights up when she talks about her children; her demeanor changes; she giggles, becomes more animated.
She recalls how she would kiss and hug them before going to sleep; how the children, especially her son, would ask for a bedtime story; how she would sleep between her son and daughter. She talks proudly about raising them well despite everything, teaching them to be polite, to respect her.
Now, she wonders what her son and daughter are doing. Their absence stings every time she tastes foods they like (eggs and instant noodles are their favorites). She believes she can feel them too, feel them asking where she is, why she isn’t with them.
She recalls how after they separated, she would sniff the clothes they left behind and cry.
“I am so worn out,” she said. “I wonder how we still have any soul left in us.”
Some, like Asimah Khedr, try to move on, to start over.
Khedr married a Yazidi man she met after surviving IS captivity and returning to Iraq.
She said she too had left a son behind in Syria.
She was 12 when she was abducted and then, she said, gifted to a man who raped her.
“I understood nothing. I cried, but it got me nowhere.”
Eventually, he sold her to a married man in Syria, at least 55 years old. That captor later freed her from enslavement and sent her into an IS guest house.
Life there was tough and so, she said, she got married to escape it. She didn’t want children, but said her then-husband insisted.
After Khedr wrestled free, a sister and an uncle came to Syria to see her. She said she asked about bringing her boy home, but was told “this cannot be, that Yazidis wouldn’t accept.” At first, she didn’t return, but her heart softened for her family.
She also thought about the future, wondered if her son could turn out like his father, if he would even accept her, she said. And, so, she left.
Adjusting to life back was a struggle in the beginning. Gone were her parents and a few of her siblings who remain missing.
When others slept, she would cry.
“I would think about the boy. I would think about myself, about what’s happened to me, about my family, everything.”
She said she doesn’t regret leaving her son.
Sometimes though she still sees him in fleeting dreams. She wakes up with tears in her eyes.
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K vows to never forget her children. She swears that she won’t, that she can’t.
“No mother should leave her children,” she said. “I was told there was no other solution.”
She yearns for a life with the three of them together abroad — a life that she says they can’t have in Iraq.
“We’ve been through so much,” she said. “I only want my kids. That’s it.”
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.