Yazidis raped as ISIS slaves must abandon children
ZAKHO, Iraq — Hiyam never expected to love her daughter.
The father was an Islamic State fighter, who bought her as a slave after the militants swept through the homeland of Iraq’s Yazidi minority. News of the pregnancy filled her with dread.
But when a midwife placed the baby in her arms — the tiny girl scrunching her face up and yawning — Hiyam knew that she had to protect her. “I could feel it. She was a piece of my soul,” she said. “I loved her from that first moment.” Hiyam named her Hiba, meaning “a gift” in Arabic.
Now 21, the young mother is among thousands of women who have made it back to the Yazidi community. But for many of those survivors, homecoming has been marred by difficult questions about what it means to belong again.
Iraq’s largely Kurdishspeaking Yazidi minority has survived centuries of persecution. When the Islamic State tore across Iraq in 2014, it shot and beheaded Yazidis by the thousands. But women were reserved for a separate fate. Instead of death, they were given as sex slaves to the fighters, then abused and traded like chattel.
The mass enslavement has pushed Yazidi elders to break with centuries of precedent and decree that women and girls could be welcomed back, despite long-standing stigma about having sexual relations outside of the faith.
But children born of those forced unions are another matter.
According to the religion, a child cannot be counted as a Yazidi unless he or she has two Yazidi parents. “To make special examples in this case would be to whitewash the result of the Yazidi genocide,” said Karim Sulaiman, a spokesman for the Yazidi Supreme Spiritual Council.
“We know that they’re just children, and that they have no guilt,” he said, “But in this case, religion and society just cannot accept them.”
Hiyam, who gave only her first name for fear of provoking a greater backlash, said she was bought and sold four times, and that every one of her male owners used her as a sex slave. She became pregnant at the hands of her fourth owner, an Iraqi fighter from Mosul, whom she remembers as an “animal.”
Back in northern Iraq, Hiyam’s family was desperate for news. They found smugglers and girls who had escaped. But no one had seen her.
Then came a call from an unknown number. It was Hiyam, using a phone she had hidden in the baby’s diapers.
News of the child hit Shireen, Hiyam’s mother, with dread. Rescue was the priority for now, she thought, but deep down she knew that Hiba couldn’t stay.
Hiyam was finally freed in the summer of 2017, her mother collecting her from close to the city of Mosul, and then driving her back to see the displacement camp where they now lived.
News of the child spread. So did the pressure. She stopped leaving her tent. Then neighbors threatened to burn it down.
And so on the morning of Aug. 13, 2017, she rose as normal to bathe Hiba, brushing unruly curls from the little girl’s eyes and wriggling a new dress over her head. She looked, Hiyam said, like she was ready for a celebration.
Then she lay down, wrapped her arms around the child, and watched as her eyelids fluttered and sleep took over.
“I held her so tight, and I kissed her until it was time to go,” Hiyam remembers.
She scooped Hiba up, pulled back the tent door, and walked through the camp to a nondescript prefab building.
Once you hand the baby over, that’s it, the aid workers told her. No follow-up, no phone calls, no contact. In some cases, orphanage workers in Mosul and Baghdad say, the mothers arrive in a daze. Other times, they are sobbing, and have to be carried away.
“They gave me a receipt for her,” Hiyam said.
During the rare times that Hiyam now leaves her tent, she says she has seen other children who, like Hiba, were fathered inside the self-declared caliphate.
Their mothers have convinced elders that the babies were born to Yazidi, not Muslim, fathers.
“The difference is that I was honest, and these mothers were not,” Hiyam said.
Two years on, there are no photographs left of the child. Hiba’s possessions have almost all been given away, aside from a small pair of white shoes and a headband that Hiyam packed away and out of sight.
Isolated and distraught, she has attempted suicide several times.
“They told me to get rid of my daughter, they said I had no honor,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Now it’s done. No one cares anymore. It’s just silence.”