“Of course I couldn’t bring them home. They’re Daesh (ISIS) children,” said Jihan Qassem matter-of-factly, sitting in a sparse concrete structure she now calls home.
“How could I, when my three siblings are still in ISIS hands?,” she added, highlighting the harsh reality that the children serve as constant reminders of the brutalities inflicted on the closed, tight-knit Yezidi community by the so-called Islamic State group.
Dozens of Yezidi women and girls systematically raped, sold and married off to jihadists after being abducted by ISIS from their ancestral Iraqi home of Sinjar (Shingal) in 2014 have faced the same gut-wrenching dilemma. What to do about the children born of these forced unions?
Now freed, the women are desperate to heal from the wounds inflicted on the conservative minority – but raising jihadist offspring would make closure impossible, they said.
Kidnapped at 13, Jihan was forced to marry a Tunisian IS fighter at 15 and then fled with him and their children from ISIS’s bombarded Syrian holdout of Baghouz four months ago.
When US-backed forces learned she was Yezidi, they whisked her and her two-year-old boy, year-old girl and four-month-old infant to a northeast Syria shelter hosting other mothers from the brutalised minority.
The safehouse, known as the Yezidi House, circulated her photograph on Facebook and her older brother Saman, still in northern Iraq, recognised his long-lost sister.
He wanted her home. But without the children.
After days of an anguished back-and-forth, Jihan decided she would leave her infants with Syrian Kurdish authorities in exchange for what she said was her real family.
“They were so young. They were attached to me and I to them... but they're Daesh children,” she murmured.
She said she doesn’t have any pictures of her children and doesn’t want to remember them.
“The first day is hard, and then little by little, we forget them,” she said.
‘No one asks about them’
For centuries, Yezidis who married outside the sect – even against their will – were ex-communicated.
Girls forcefully taken by ISIS in 2014 risked suffering the same fate, but a landmark decree by Yezidi spiritual leader Baba Sheikh said survivors of ISIS’s sexual abuse should be honoured by the community.
That compassion however has not been extended to their children.
In April, the Yezidis’ Higher Spiritual Council issued an ambiguous decree welcoming “children of survivors”, sparking hope of a second reformation to accept those born of a Yezidi mother and IS father.
But a ferocious backlash from conservative Yezidis prompted the Council to clarify that nothing had changed: it would only welcome children born to two Yezidi parents.
Any further reform was seen as a threat, opening the floodgates of change to a traumatised community, said Yezidi activist Talal Murad.
“If there’s this kind of change in the creed, other things could change too – there will be a breakdown, a total collapse of the Yezidi religion,” said Murad, who also heads Ezidi24, an outlet covering Yezidi affairs.
Council representative Ali Kheder told AFP the debate wasn’t solely about dogmatic reform.
“First, according to Iraqi law, any child with a missing father will be registered as a Muslim, automatically,” said Kheder in the Council’s headquarters in Sheikhan.
Islamic law, on which the Iraqi constitution is based, stipulates that religion is inherited from the father.
Psychologically too, Kheder said the Yezidi society remained too scarred by the prolonged abduction of their own people to accept raising the children of their abusers.
“Until now, we have thousands of Yezidi women and girls in ISIS hands. No one asks about them. They ask about a few children that can be counted on one hand,” said Kheder.
The Council said it does not keep statistics on returning Yezidi survivors with infants born of rape.
Flesh, blood, tears
While most Yezidi mothers leave their children at the Yezidi House in Syria, some brought ISIS-born infants home to Iraq. They declined interviews because of the subject’s sensitivity.
One woman insisted to her Yezidi family that she would raise her year-old infant fathered by a missing ISIS fighter, but balked when she discovered she could not acquire Iraqi identification papers for him as his father was not present.
She gave him up for adoption, her doctor said.
Another 18-year-old arrived in Iraq in the spring after finally being freed, but was heavily pregnant by her ISIS captor, according to a social worker involved in her case.
She spent weeks in a safehouse without her family’s knowledge until she gave birth, sent the newborn away and joined her relatives in a displacement camp.
Last year, five children born to Yezidi mothers and ISIS fathers were left at an orphanage in Mosul, which helped local Muslim families adopt them, according to Mosul’s director of women and children’s issues Sukaynah Younes.
They are now registered as Muslim.
The psychological impact of this separation will likely be long-lasting. Jihan herself still seemed torn.
Weeks ago, she had described her children to a social worker as her “flesh and blood”, saying she missed them.
While she sounded more detached when speaking to AFP, a shy smile crossed her face as she remembered them. When she was out of her brother’s earshot, she cried quietly.
“If it was up to me, I would have brought them,” she said.
‘The genocide goes on’
Yezidis believe the events of 2014 were the 74th “genocide” suffered by the minority in its 4,000-year history, and that it has not ended.
The most painful wound is that hundreds of men, women, and children remain missing, despite hopes they would be found after ISIS’s “caliphate” collapsed in March.
Some 100,000, nearly a fifth of the pre-war community, have been resettled abroad and another 360,000 remain displaced in Iraq with their villages lying in ruins.
“The genocide is ongoing. People can’t go home to Sinjar, we still have women and girls missing, everyone is looking to leave to Europe,” said Kheder.
Baba Shawish, a cleric and custodian of the Yezidis’ holiest site at Lalish, blamed Baghdad.
“The federal government in Baghdad knows very well that thousands of Yezidis remain captive, but it has not decided to arrest the kidnappers. It’s not cooperating with us.”
A bill introduced in April by Iraq’s president proposes reparations for Yezidis and a way to determine children’s legal status, but parliament has yet to debate it.
Gripped by such pressing issues, Yezidis expressed frustration with what they saw as misplaced global pressure to enact religious reform and welcome children born of ISIS.
The best option, community figures said almost unanimously, was for Yezidi mothers to be resettled abroad.
“It’s a very complicated issue, and the most appropriate solution right now can be found outside Iraq,” said Vian Dakheel, a Yezidi and former parliamentarian.
“In my view, it’s for these women to go to Europe with their children.”
Dr. Nagham Hasan, an obstetrician-gynecologist who has worked extensively with Yezidi survivors since 2014, said patients with young children had all but given up on Iraq.
“I’ve been warning that we would be dealing with the issue of mothers for years,” she said.
“Everyone wants to leave. The Yezidi community is broken.”
By Maya Gebeily
