Love and hate at the refuge for the lost children of Isil
Sir, sir – he insulted my parents,” the young boy complains to one of his carers at the orphanage after a petty playground row. Zahar al-atheel waits for the child to leave his office before breaking into a fit of laughter. “There isn’t a curse word rude enough for his parents,” he jokes. “They were Isil.”
All the children at the Al-zahour Centre in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul – once Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s largest stronghold – are the sons and daughters of jihadists.
Last year’s bloody battle to liberate Mosul levelled half the city, and in the process left hundreds, possibly thousands, orphaned. Zahour is the test-case for the enormous challenge Iraqi authorities face to reconcile the surviving relatives with society and prevent history repeating itself.
One-year-old Hamoudi lies asleep in one of the wooden cots that fill the nursery. The sleeve of his babygrow hangs limply from his right arm, where his hand should be.
His carers say his father, an Isil fighter, left him in the rubble of the Old City as bait for the Iraqi army.
Seeing the baby, three soldiers went to rescue him and were ambushed by snipers. A stray dog then grabbed Hamoudi and dragged him away.
Soldiers pulled the dog away, but Hamoud’s wounds became infected and his hand had to be amputated in hospital. The carers say he suffers from fitful sleep and phantom pains.
Some of the older children at the centre were found wandering in an abandoned fairground near the banks of the Tigris, which runs through Mosul, eating any scraps of food they found. Others were dropped off anonymously by civilians scared of being seen as sympathetic to the jihadists. Three siblings, aged four, nine, and 11, have not spoken since they were brought here four months ago. It is unclear whether their muteness is congenital or the result of extreme trauma. It is not even certain they are Iraqi.
While most of the foreign children have already been claimed by relatives abroad, some who arrive each month are infants with mothers from the Yazidi minority, whose women were raped and enslaved by Isil on an industrial scale.
“One Yazidi woman who was kept as a slave and had two children by a Daesh fighter did not want to keep them once she was freed,” said Sukayna Mohammed Ali Younes, the head of the local government’s Office of Women and Children, who oversees the running of the orphanage. “Her husband, a Yazidi, would not allow them into the house.
“She was made to feel great shame for what had happened and felt she had no choice but to give them away.”
To many in Iraq, the children of Isil are living reminders of the brutal reign; devil’s spawn undeserving of even the most basic care. The staff face anger from members of the community, who resent the sympathy the children are afforded.
After sustained abuse, Zahour had to take its sign off the door.
“All my friends ask me why I help these kids, when there’s so many others more in need,” said Mr Atheel, who teaches the older boys. “I tell them if we don’t change them today, they will become another Isil tomorrow.”
Mrs Younes estimates that on top of the 65 children at the orphanage there are hundreds more in refugee camps around northern Iraq, where they are placed with the widows and wives of Isil fighters and largely separated from the general population. Others beg on the streets. She says the plan – provided they continue to receive the funding – is to keep the children at the centre until they turn 16. After that, their future is uncertain.
Many of those born in Isil territory have not had their births officially registered, effectively making them non-citizens. Without ID cards, Iraqis cannot graduate, work, vote, apply for a passport or receive medical care. The older ones face greater psychological hurdles. Isil enlisted thousands of children into its schools and training camps in a radicalisation process so wide-reaching it is without parallel in contemporary history.
Millions more were exposed to Isil ideology for years and will take a long time to readjust.
Last week, a six-year-old boy asked his teachers for a knife. He repeated the request over and over. Upon being told no, he grabbed a pencil and stabbed the hand of the little girl next to him so hard it pierced the skin.
“Some of the things they do are just things naughty kids do, but other things are quite disturbing for their age,” says Bushra, in the nursery.
‘People ask why I help them. If we don’t change them today, they will become another Isil tomorrow’
“We’re trying to work with him to stop his behaviour, but it hasn’t had much effect. He is still young, though. I think you can change them if you get them before 10 or 11.”
The older boys arrived reciting Isil nasheeds (religious songs), praising “Dawla Islamiya”, the Islamic State.
“They weren’t used to playing football or painting. Fun was banned by Daesh,” says Mr Atheel, using the Arabic acronym for the group. Ahmed, 11, told how his family moved in 2014 from Tikrit to Mosul, where his father began work as a mechanic. He said they were there for just a year before his father was “killed in a car crash”.
As fighting in the city intensified, Ahmed’s house was hit by an air strike, killing his family. A neighbour rescued him unconscious from the rubble and took him in until they were found by soldiers, who handed him to an NGO.
He stayed with the organisation for four months before he was brought to the orphanage in December.
Mr Atheel said Ahmed’s father was not a mechanic but a mid-ranking Isil commander. It was common for the children of Isil parents to lie about roles within the jihadist group, he explained. “They all say they died in accidents or car crashes. Truth is, most were killed in fighting or air strikes.
“They were told by their parents to hide details about themselves and their family. Such information has cost some people their lives. But since Daesh’s defeat there is a newfound sense of shame about where they are from.”
Ahmed, dressed in an old Real Madrid football strip, stares at his scuffed sandals as he talks about the horrors that marked his childhood.
“I saw things no one should see. I saw dead bodies almost every day – women with their heads chopped off, men who had been tortured,” he said. “At first the guns and violence scared me, then I got used to it.”
His teachers say when he first arrived he prayed five times a day, but since receiving lessons on religion and civil society in weekly classes called “Hope” and “Love of the Land”, he has stopped worshipping. “They (Isil) made us go to the mosque, telling us the right way, but nothing positive ever came of it so I just stopped when I could,” said Ahmed.
Save the Children, which has spent a year studying children from Mosul who lived under the terrorist group, said many suffered from a condition known as “toxic stress”.
It is the most dangerous form of stress response, where the mind is constantly in a fight or flight response. Left untreated, the damage can have a lifelong impact on children’s mental and physical health.
They recommended intense psychotherapy – the kind that has helped rehabilitate the child soldiers of Rwanda and Sierra Leone.
But the scale of the problem in Iraq means most will slip through the net.
“The ones that are of great concern are the ones not in the orphanage,” says Mrs Younes. “There are 17,000 children on the streets and I tell you, they’d kill you for a couple of dollars.
“We can’t fix them all. We just do what we can.”