Isil widows left living in fear as Iraq’s victors turn to vengeance
SOMETIMES Umm Leith gets warning notices pushed under her front door. Other times, her tormentors threaten her to her face.
“We’ll kill you if we see you out of the house, you are not welcome here,” they say. One letter ominously just reads: “Death is close.”
For more than two months Umm Leith, the widow of an Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) fighter, has faced near-daily harassment from Iraqi security forces and neighbours.
The 51-year-old’s husband and three sons joined the jihadist group back in 2015 but all were killed in coalition air strikes in Mosul sometime last year, leaving her alone in her house in Hammam al-Alil with just her elderly mother and daughter.
In the battle to liberate the town in November, most of the militants were either killed or arrested. But that has not been enough to placate its residents, who have begun directing their anger towards surviving relatives.
“We don’t sleep, worried that someone will come in the middle of the night,” says Umm Leith, who uses a pseudonym to protect her identity.
She says families of Isil fighters in Hammam al-Alil are being denied monthly government food handouts, which has forced people like her to rely on the generosity of a dwindling number of friends and family.
“We cannot go outside, so every day we just wait here for my nephew to bring us food,” she told The Daily Telegraph. “Everyone hates us, we trust no one. Life was tough under Isil but it was better than now.”
Her neighbours question why they should show compassion to the spouses of fighters who so mercilessly denied it to them not so long ago.
“Yes, it was not her that was doing these things to the people, but she was married to one of them and was the mother of three others,” says 27-yearold Omar Abdullah. “When your whole family joins Daesh you are no longer innocent.” Last month the security services ordered her to move to a refugee camp outside the town, but she refused. She said more than two dozen other Isil families had been forcibly bussed out in recent months and that she feared the same fate.
While Haider al-Abadi, Iraq’s prime minister, has given lip service to the importance of reconciliation in the wake of Isil, the central government has remained silent on the issue of revenge attacks and the punishment of fighters’ families.
In the camps there is some refuge for the widows and children, who are afforded a degree of anonymity among the tens of thousands of other civilians.
One mother-of-five at Hammam alAlil camp said her husband had been an oil refinery worker before Isil forced him to quit. Bushra says the group offered him a job as a chef in one of their bases outside Mosul, for which he was given a basic salary of 50,000 Iraqi dinars (£35) a month plus 20,000 extra for each child and 25,000 for his wife. She says he worked for just six weeks before he was killed. “Not everyone who joined Isil was a bad person,” Bushra, 34, says. “Some were just trying to earn money to feed their children.”
Each of the Isil widows The Daily Telegraph spoke to told a similar story. “They’re lying,” one of the camp coordinators said dismissively after we finish our last interview. “They all say their husbands only joined Daesh for a few months and left or died, because it helps their case. At least they have some shame, which is more than you can say for their husbands.”
He claims the government is considering plans for a separate camp for Isil families, which human rights groups warn would be a collective punishment.
“Authorities shouldn’t punish entire families because of their relatives’ actions,” says Lama Fakih, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.