Iraqi minority shunning children born out of rape

IRAQ» The 26Yazidi mother heartbreaking yearold faces a choice.

Her family is preparing to emigrate from Iraq to Australia and start a new life after the suffering the Islamic State group wreaked on their small religious minority. She is desperate to go with them, but there is also someone she can’t bear to leave behind: Her 2yearold daughter, Maria, fathered by the Islamic State fighter who enslaved her.

She knows her family will never allow her to bring Maria. They don’t even know the girl exists. The only relative who knows is an uncle who took the girl from her mother and put her in an orphanage in Baghdad after they were freed from captivity last year.

“My heart bursts from my chest every time I think of leaving her. She is a piece of me, but I don’t know what to do,” she said, speaking to The Associated Press at a camp in northern Iraq for displaced Yazidis.

The woman spoke on condition she be identified only as Umm Maria, or “mother of Maria,” for fear her family and community would find out.

Umm Maria’s torment points to the gaping wounds suffered by Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority at the hands of the Islamic State group.

When the militants overran the Yazidis’ northern Iraqi heartland of Sinjar in 2014, they inflicted on the community an almost medieval fate. Hundreds of Yazidi men and boys were massacred, tens of thousands fled their homes and the militants took thousands of women and girls as sex slaves, viewing them as heretics worthy of subjugation and rape.

The women were distributed among Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria and over the following years were traded and sold as chattel. Many women bore children from their captors — the numbers of children are not known, but they are no doubt in the hundreds.

The Nobel Peace Prize this year put a focus on victims of sexual violence and on the Yazidis in particular, when one of the women abducted by the Islamic State, Nadia Murad, was named a cowinner of the award.

Many, though not all, of the women have returned home, as the extremist group’s “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria has been brought down. While some of them want nothing to do with babies born of rape and slavery, some, such as Umm Maria, want to keep them.