Sex slaves leave IS kids behind
When night fell on Baghuz, 18-year-old Jehan would take off her suicide vest and lie in the tent with her infant children, gun close at hand, listening to the fighting as Isis made its last stand around her – unaware that both freedom and heartbreak lay ahead.
For nearly five years, since she was captured at the age of 13 and forced into sexual slavery and motherhood, the slight Yazidi teenager had lived under the selfproclaimed caliphate with her ‘‘owner’’, a Tunisian jihadist. As they hunkered down under heavy bombardment for the final battle last month, he gave her a gun and a suicide vest and told her to shoot the first infidel she saw. She had been brainwashed into believing that this was right.
Three weeks ago, however, Jehan escaped with her baby and two toddlers as Kurdish-majority forces advanced on Baghuz, the battered Syrian village where Isis is still holding out in its bunkers this weekend. She took off her black robes and face-covering niqab, and abandoned the extremist ideology she was taught.
Her relief was shortlived. As she prepared in a refugee camp for the journey back to her Yazidi homeland in Sinjar, northern Iraq, she was presented with an ultimatum: she could not take her children. If she wanted to keep them, she would have to stay in Syria, living in penury as an ostracised single mother.
Although her daughters, Hafsa, 4 months, and Juairia, 14 months, and 2 and a half-year-old son, Qahqa, had been conceived by force, she had raised and loved them. But faced with this wrenching dilemma, she handed them over to a charity. ‘‘I wanted to see my family, that’s why I left them,’’ Jehan explained last week, back home in northern Iraq. ‘‘I was thinking to bring them but they told me it’s not good to take them, that they’ll have a better life here. My family would not have accepted it.’’
Jehan, who looks and seems young for her age, struggled to speak about the children she had left behind. The two eldest, she said, would remember her. They did not know that she was a slave or was Yazidi – only that she was their mother.
The fate of hundreds of Isis children is one of the tragic legacies of the caliphate.
The children of sex slaves face a particularly distressing plight as they are not wanted by the Yazidi community. Most female captives emerging from the ruins of the caliphate are, activists say, being pressured or forced to abandon them.
Numbers are hard to pin down. Yazidi activists believe about 200 children have been abandoned; others say 80. Groups in Syria insisted last week that almost all of them were in Iraq, and groups in Iraq insisted they were almost all in Syria.
They are a problem that many in the Yazidi community would rather forget. The minority group is deeply insular. Followers of a monotheistic faith, Yazidis worship a peacock angel, whom they consider God’s representative on earth. Intermarriage with other religions is punishable by excommunication.
‘‘These rules kept the small religion alive in the face of outside threats for centuries,’’ said Cathy Otten, a journalist and author of With Ash On Their Faces: Yazidi Women Islamic State.
After Isis swept into Sinjar in 2014, capturing more than 6000 Yazidi women, Baba Sheikh, the Yazidi spiritual leader, ruled that they would be welcomed back. But nothing has been said about their children with Isis fathers.
‘‘These kids aren’t allowed in Yazidi culture,’’ said Tahseen Murad Haider, a Yazidi activist. ‘‘Many people tried with Baba Sheikh. You allowed the women to come back. Why not the children? It’s not the kids’ fault, it’s Isis.’’
Any children who appeared to be under 4 and a half – meaning they were born after Isis took Sinjar – were routinely removed from their mothers before they returned home, he said.
‘‘They [the women] get upset when they lose their kids,’’ said Haider. ‘‘There are some kids of a Yazidi mother and an Isis father where the mothers are trying to see the kids again. But it’s impossible.’’
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His account was confirmed by others in the Yazidi community. The children are spread across Iraq and Syria, according to Yazidi charities and activists. Some get taken to Yazidi House, a charity in Syria. Others go to the YPJ (the Women’s Protection Units) and the YPG (the People’s Protection Units), Kurdish militias whose fighters form part of the American-backed Syrian Democratic Forces. Still more end up in orphanages in Iraq.
A source in the Kurdish militias denied that they knowingly separated children from their mothers, and said they only took custody of Yazidi children who did not know where their families were. The militias made every effort to reunite them with their families, the source said.
Jehan’s relatives in Sinjar say openly that her children have no place in their community. ‘‘If she sees her family, it’s much better than having Isis children,’’ said her uncle.
Her future may lie in Germany, where her parents and sisters, also former Isis captives, have been given asylum along with thousands of other Yazidis. Sitting on the floor of her family’s living room in Iraq last week, Jehan tried to talk about her children but her voice trailed off.
‘‘Of course I miss them,’’ she said quietly, staring at the floor.
One of her female relatives interrupted. ‘‘But it’s better they’re not here,’’ she said, sunnily. ‘‘Isn’t it?’’ – The Times
‘‘These rules kept the small religion alive in the face of outside threats for centuries.’’
With Ash On Their Faces: Yazidi Women and the Islamic State