Plucked from ruins of Mosul, orphans left behind by Isil’s foreign ‘martyrs’
‘We were two days without water. One fighter said you can have water but I will kill one of your children’
Amina sat on the makeshift medical examination table staring at her wounds, her blonde hair matted and caked in dust.
The little girl, who looked no older than three, was pulled out from the rubble of Mosul’s Old City where she had been trapped for days before Iraqi rescue workers heard her faint cries.
When asked about her parents, she replied only that they had become “martyrs”.
Speaking little Arabic, she is thought to be the daughter of Chechen Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) fighters who died in battle.
Dozens of children have been pulled, both dead and alive, from the rubble in recent days.
Many of them are the children of Isil fighters who either blew themselves up in suicide attacks or were killed by Iraqi forces in the jihadists’ final redoubt.
Iraqi commanders have said most of those killed in the final days of battle were foreign jihadists who “fought to the last” rather than surrender.
While Haidar al-abadi, Iraq’s prime minister, declared the fight for Mosul over a week ago, a pocket of diehard Isil fighters remains in the Old City.
Us-led coalition air strikes are being used to dislodge them, but houses are flattened in the process, leaving residents trapped underneath.
One young boy was found by soldiers so desperately hungry that he was eating raw meat from the ground.
A Chechen girl, who gave her name as Khadija, told medics treating her that her father had become a “shahid” or martyr. “She is now an orphan,” one doctor said.
In the past three days, Unicef, the children’s charity, said it had seen an increase in the number of unaccompanied children arriving at medical facilities. Some babies brought in have been found alone in the debris. “One doctor we spoke to told us that infants as young as one week old, children and mothers were emerging wounded and covered in dust and soil, some were malnourished,” said Hamida Ramadhani, Unicef ’s deputy representative in Iraq.
While there is little doubt that the last gunmen will shortly be killed or surrender, many in Mosul worry that unless the city is rebuilt rapidly and governed justly, future generations of extremists will be drawn from the ranks of their children.
Worryingly too, as fears of retributive killings and collective punishment grow, both authorities and civilians are warning there can be no reconciliation with Isil sympathisers – or the relatives of Isil fighters.
From an apartment on the eastern side of Mosul, which is divided by the Tigris river, a group of men sat and watched the plumes of smoke rising from the ancient quarter last week.
“Damn them,” one man said of the remaining Isil militants and their families still holed up in the rubble across the river. “They killed our families, why should they get to live?” asked 28-year-old Walid Khalid.
It was a sombre reunion as the men accounted the personal cost of the past three years of Isil occupation. Each sharing harrowing stories of the deaths of relatives, destroyed homes, and extended privation.
One young man spoke only to tell of how Isil fighters had denied him water when his children were nearly dying of thirst in an Old City basement. “We had been two days without water,” said Yehyeh Zekeria, a gaunt man with sunken cheeks. “One fighter said you can have water but in exchange I will kill one of your children.
“Another fighter stood by a running hose and said: ‘This water is for the brothers only’.” Yasir Samir Ahmed, 25, escaped fighting in the Old City last week with his parents. His brothers, Mohamed and Ahmed, were killed by a mortar blast two months ago as they drew water from a well less than 100 metres from their home.
“You should have left a long time ago,” another friend, Mohamed Yehyeh, shouted in a tearful rebuke. “There were three of you and now there’s one.”
“We never knew it would get so bad,” Ahmed replied. Even with Isil facing military defeat in the city, the men fear for the future. Insurgent attacks have shaken any notion that the violence would end with the battle. Mr Khalid reopened a cosmetics store in east Mosul after the liberation but stopped going several weeks ago after three suicide bombers in military uniform detonated themselves nearby.
“Mosul will never be the same again,” he said. “There’s nothing to be optimistic about.” The men said the only way to restore security was a thorough purge of Isil supporters.
“The best way is to build a camp outside the city and they can all live there together,” said Samir Ahmed Sofi. “Their ideology is like a cancer and we don’t want it infecting us.”
Iraqi authorities appear to share that sentiment. A closed “rehabilitation camp” east of Mosul already holds at least 170 families with relatives alleged to be Isil members. Human Rights Watch has called the camp a de facto detention centre, noting it lacked a rehabilitation programme or facilities.
In the long term, the prospects for the city will also depend on the federal government’s commitment to rebuilding and the future behaviour of the armed forces, whose abuses prior to 2014 stoked Isil support.
“People welcomed Daesh because they suffered so much before when the army was here,” said Mr Sofi, using another name for Isil.
“Right now, because of what they saw under Daesh, the people of Mosul are very happy to see the army again. But if the army goes back to hurting people that could change.”