The boy who was grabbed by Isil … and got away
Ahmed was taken from his Yazidi family, trained as a killer and whipped brutally before fleeing the jihadists
Ahmed al-Hardani hands over his mobile phone and it starts to play a video. It shows young boys, around his age, wearing black headbands and holding guns as they tumble in unison on rubber mats. Some of the older children then perform a well-rehearsed nasheed, or Islamic chant, for the teachers.
“That small boy in the blue uniform is me,” he says, pointing to the screen.
Ahmed, aged 13 at the time, was one of thousands of Yazidi men and boys taken from their home in the Sinjar mountains of northern Iraq by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) in 2014.
Most of the men were either later found in mass graves or never heard from again. The boys were taken to training camps, where they were taught to become soldiers in Isil’s “caliphate”.
“When Daesh [the Arabic term for Isil] came, we packed 21 of my family members into two cars to escape,” Ahmed remembers.
As they drove through the next village, which was ethnically Arab, they were stopped by a man who said he would help them. “He told us he would shelter us and took us into his house, where he hid us in the attic. We thought we would be safe, but instead he called Daesh,” Ahmed says. “Our Sunni neighbour just handed us over to them when they arrived at the door.”
The women and girls were packed into one truck, the men and boys into another. Squatting in the back of one of them was his father. It was the last time Ahmed saw him.
His mother and sister were taken to Mosul, while Ahmed, his brother and male cousins were taken west of the city to Tel Afar. They spent 15 days being interrogated by Isil commanders in the harsh Badush prison before they were sent to live in the houses of Shia families that had been commandeered by the jihadists.
He was taken from the house one day for questioning after an informant told Isil he had a mobile phone, which are banned in Isil-controlled areas.
“They demanded that I tell them where I had hidden it,” he says. “They whipped me around 250 times over a few days until my skin began to fall off my back. But I wouldn’t tell them.”
Ahmed had been using it to secretly make contact with his mother. “Hello Mama, we’re alive,” or “I miss you,” the text messages read. “I would rather have died from the lashing than have no way to communicate with her, to tell her I was still OK,” he says.
Isil gave up trying to punish Ahmed, seeing it had little effect. It was then they took him to a training camp for so-called “cubs of the caliphate”.
Some 200 Yazidi boys were kept in a school building in Tel Afar. They were woken daily at 6am and made to recite long passages of the Koran by heart.
The Yazidis practise a 4,000-year-old religion which contains elements of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They are considered devil-worshippers by the hardline Sunni Islamists.
“They told us again and again that the Yazidis were infidels. I was made to convert, but I didn’t take it into my heart,” Ahmed says. “One time I refused to say [the prophet] Mohammed’s name and they shot at me between my legs.”
After two months of lessons the group were taken to Mosul for practical training.
They were taught how to shoot and were shown grisly beheading videos. After instruction they were forced to practise cutting the throat of fellow pupils in mock executions.
They were shown how to make an explosive vest and how to carry out suicide missions. The Isil enforcers gave them drugs to make them more compliant, Ahmed says.
“I didn’t want to do these things,” he says, breaking down in tears. He found it hard to talk about this time in his life, still feeling a sense of shame.
The youngest of the boys were just eight years old. Ahmed says he tried to take them under his wing, but at such a young age they were much more susceptible to Isil’s indoctrination.
“They were lost little kids who didn’t know what to believe. The fighters gave them sweets and the boys began to like them and wanted to impress them.”
He graduated after nine months and was told he would be sent to another Arab country to carry out an attack.
It was then he realised that he was not going to be sent back to Sinjar and decided to try to escape.
Ahmed found his opportunity one day when the jihadists brought all the boys to mosque for prayers one Friday.
“My cousin and I hid in the roof until they were finished. They didn’t notice I wasn’t there,” he says. “I waited a few hours and then escaped when it was dark.”
He walked with his cousin for nine days and nine nights until he reached the closest Yazidi village, 75 miles away.
The militants had told the boys during their time in the camp that all the Yazidi men were dead and all the women had converted to Islam.
“I believed them and thought there were no more Yazidis, so when I saw my mum and my relatives again and they told me it wasn’t true I was so relieved,” he says. “They were trying to wipe our people from the face of this earth.”
Ahmed turned 16 in October. He is slightly built and just 5ft 3ins tall, with a freckled face and a quiet demeanour. He lives in a camp for refugees near the city of Duhok, with his mother, brother, sister, and grandmother, and earns money for them all by working in a clothes shop.
His father is still missing and, while his mother holds out hope, Ahmed has reasoned that he is most likely dead.
The Daily Telegraph interviewed Ahmed through a translator, Adiba Qasim, a Yazidi who volunteers with children who were held by Isil. She affectionately refers to Ahmed as her son, even though she is only 23.
Miss Qasim has taken him out of the camp to Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region of Iraq, for the weekend. He has never been this far from home and is excited about going to the cinema for the second time in his life.
“When he’s in the camp he is like an adult, looking after the shop with his brother and caring for his mother and grandmother,” she says.
“But when he’s outside he becomes like a child, playing with balloons and eating sweets. It’s like he missed out on a big part of his life.”
He still struggles, both physically and psychologically, from his time under Isil.
He pulls up his T-shirt to reveal his chest, which has become contorted after all the beating. It causes him difficulty breathing, but his family do not have the money to pay for the medicine he needs.
“I still hear their voices in my head and think from time to time about what could have happened,” he says. “But I am strong and I think they would never have broken me.”
‘They whipped me around 250 times over a few days until my skin began to fall off my back. But I wouldn’t tell them what they wanted’