In 2016, at the age of 16, Badriya was married off to an ISIS fighter. Three months into their marriage, the ISIS fighter was killed during clashes with Iraqi armed forces during their reign in Mosul. Mutaz is now five years old and the Iraqi government does not grant him any identification card because they ask for his father's DNA, something that does not exist.
Given that Badriya has not registered her marriage with the ISIS fighter at any Iraqi government court, she is still considered unmarried. This forced her to register her son's identification card under her father's name in order to be able to enroll him in school.
"My family married me off to a Daesh [ISIS] fighter. I gave birth to this child. He was not issued an identification card. Therefore, I was forced to register his name under my father's name in order for an identification card to be issued for him. I did not have any documents. We did not have any documents at all. According to his ID, he is my brother. But in reality, he is my son," Badriya Samir, Mutaz's mother told Rudaw's Hunar Rashid last week.
The Mosul Civil Statutes Court has decided not to grant identification cards to any child born to ISIS fathers so the mothers are forced to register their children under their own fathers or other male relatives.
"This is a very big problem in Mosul," Adnan Chalabi, a judge at the Mosul Civil Statues Court told Rudaw over the weekend.
"At the age of six, children should go to school and their fathers must be present and those children who were born to Daesh fathers, cannot be enrolled in school because their fathers are unavailable. Therefore, their mothers are forced to register their names under the name of their brothers or fathers. This thing will be a big problem for them in the future when they grow up," Chalabi detailed.
According to relevant judicial authorities, parents' DNA tests must match in order to grant identification cards to their children.
According to the Mosul Civil Statutes Court, around 3,500 similar cases similar to that of Mutaz and Badriya have been registered with them since 2017.
ISIS controlled large swathes of territory in Iraq from 2014 to 2017.
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