Children of Iraq struck dumb by Isil horror

By her mother’s account, Amina had been the apple of her father’s eye. She may be one of five sisters, but the four-year-old had a special bond with mechanic Mahmoud. The pair would wake up early together each morning, and in the kitchen of their home in Mosul they would sit enjoying breakfast while the rest of the family slept.

On weekends, when he wasn’t busy at the garage, he would spend hours pushing Amina around on her favourite pink tricycle.

“Most Iraqi men want sons, but Mahmoud always wanted girls,” Maryam, Amina’s mother, smiles. “And I think he saw his strong will in Amina.” It was for this reason that she took the death of her father much harder than the others.

One afternoon in late March, the family home was hit by an Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) mortar. Their street, in the Hay al-tanak neighbourhood of the city, had become the front line between the militants and advancing troops.

Mahmoud had been standing in the doorway at the time, while the others had been hiding in the basement. He was hit by shrapnel, which pierced his chest and lodged close to his heart.

“He was slumped on the ground, very badly injured,” Maryam recalls. “He called out only for Amina. He gestured for her to come to him. He knew what was happening and I think he wanted one last hug. ‘Come here baba, come here’, he kept saying.

“It was the first time she had ever seen blood. You could tell she was desperate to go to him, but she just stood there, frozen.”

Mahmoud didn’t die right away. His brother carried him to a makeshift clinic, but it didn’t have the equipment or medicine to treat his wounds. It took several days for him to die.

Surrounded by Isil fighters who had threatened to kill those who tried to flee, he had to bury Mahmoud there.

By this time 30 members of the family, including Amira’s aunts, uncles and grandparents, were crammed into one house, having sought refuge from their own destroyed homes.

They designated a watchman who would venture into the street each day to see if it was safe to try to escape. On the night of April 15, they decided they could wait no longer.

They had to walk quickly under the cover of darkness, dodging snipers as they went. The children walked in a line, each responsible for making sure the younger one before them made no noise that could give them away.

After making it to an army base, they then spent more than a day on foot to reach Hammam al-alil camp.

Amina has said little since arriving at the camp, a sprawling facility 20 miles south of Mosul that has taken in tens of thousands displaced by the fighting. Her mother says that for the first few weeks she was mute.

“Amina is the only one of my daughters who has behaved differently since the death. It was like she was one little girl before and a completely different one after,” Maryam says.

She withdrew from the family. Every day at breakfast she would scream, demanding to be left alone. “The times she used to spend with her dad she wanted to be by herself and got so angry if we didn’t leave her,” the 34-year-old mother-of-five says.

Maryam says it feels as if Amina had regressed as a way to deal with the trauma of losing her father: the muteness, the tantrums, and more recently, the bed-wetting. We visited her in the family’s tent on a Wednesday. We handed chocolate biscuits to all the children, who devoured them in seconds.

Amina just looked at hers. She sat listlessly in her mother’s lap, her stare fixed on the ground. Her sisters – three older and one younger – giggled among themselves in the corner. They seemed to have got used to playing without Amina.

Maryam tried to make Amina laugh by tickling her and pulling silly faces. She says she hasn’t seen her smile in four months. “She may look like she’s not aware, but she has an incredible understanding of what’s going on,” says Maryam. “She is like this now because we are talking about Mahmoud.”

A month ago, Amina and her mother began seeing a Save the Children child psychologist at a psychosocial centre in the camp.

“When I first saw Amina, she was crying all the time. She was not speaking or playing at all,” says Nour, a case worker. “It’s not unusual for children who’ve experienced a lot to become non-verbal. It’s a physical manifestation of not being able to express one’s feelings. We’re seeing a lot of it unfortunately.”

It was only after two weeks of daily contact that Amina began to feel safe with Nour and started playing in the charity’s “safe learning space”. She has been slowly improving, but Nour says it will take time.

The camp, home to some 50,000 people, is one of around six of similar size set up around Mosul, putting into perspective the scale of the challenge humanitarian organisations are facing.

Dr Marcia Brophy, a senior mental health adviser who has spent 15 years assessing children in war-torn countries, says nothing prepared her for what she has seen in Iraq.

In each country she uses a simple dice exercise to get a measure of the children’s psychological state. The dice feature pictures representing six emotions: anger, sadness, shock, fear, anxiety, boredom and upset, and the children are asked to pick one.

They gave the test to children in rebel-held areas of Syria who had been living under near-constant air strikes and mortar fire, not too dissimilar to the experience many had in Mosul. “When we played it with Syrian children, they expressed a lot of anger; some had lost parents, some had even watched them die; while others demonstrated profound sadness. There was a range of emotions. But in Iraq that wasn’t what we were seeing. They had no emotion.”

Children were showing robotic behaviour, meaning there was no laughter, no sadness, nothing. They talked about dark, horrible things they had seen with no appropriate response.

The difference between the two countries, she offered, was the level of repression experienced by the children. It was not just the extreme violence they had witnessed, but the psychological terror Isil had inflicted in the years leading up to it.

Amina had not only seen the death of family members and destruction of her neighbourhood, but had spent her formative years under the jihadists’ brutal and restrictive rule.

For Maryam, her only hope now is that the counselling will help Amina find some joy in her world again.

And when she is ready, hopefully, school will follow.

‘In Syria, the children expressed a range of emotions ... but in Iraq the children had no emotion’