Not punish my children’

I couldn’t move back home,” she said. “He told me that if I returned I would be killed by the people who suffered under Isil. He said I should reap what I have sown.”

Khawla’s daughter, Amina, 10, has suspected kidney failure. Water gathering around her organs has swollen her stomach three times its normal size. She can no longer sleep lying down for fear of asphyxia by drowning.

She is in desperate need of surgery but cannot be treated at the local hospital without presenting identification papers proving she is Iraqi. Her mother says they are in the home they are not allowed to return to, leaving them in a catch 22 situation.

Khawla says she had to resort to selling some of their food rations to buy laxatives, which only relieve the symptoms.

Iraq last month floated plans to set up special courts that would allow children born to Isil parents to apply for documentation but critics say it could be years before this is in place and would risk further stigmatising them by taking them out of the mainstream legal system. NGOs accuse the Iraqi government of meting out a “collective punishment”. Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which helps administer Hammam al-Alil camp, said: “Children are not responsible for crimes committed by their relatives, yet many are denied their basic rights as Iraqi citizens. “Undocumented children risk being left on the margins of society if this issue is not addressed immediately.” Without any economic or legal p protection, , they y are at real risk of recruitment from armed groups as they get older, he warned.

“We cheered the Iraqi army when they took back the area,” says Ashwaq, who initia initially welcomed Isil when they reached Hawija in the summer of 2014, but had grown disillusioned by the time the town was liberated in late 2016. The way she sees it, the government squandered that goodwill by leaving an entire generation of children “to rot”.

“It feels like us and them, but it shouldn’t be like this,” she says.

It is the same complaint many Sunni Iraqis had during the de-Baathification period following the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The minority felt marginalised and, at times, persecuted, by the Shiadominant government in Baghdad.

Lama Fakih, acting Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, told The Sunday Telegraph: “The Iraqi government is effectively disenfranchising an entire group of people on the basis of actions committed by others.

“Criminalising broad swathes of people won’t make them disappear, the government cannot simply make the problem go away by ignoring it. You need only to look to Iraq’s recent history to see how that can turn out,” she said. “By putting them in camps and separating them from society they are increasing the risk of further radicalising these women and children,” she said.

Ashwaq can see no future for her children, who themselves struggle to remember what life was like outside Hammam al-Alil’s gates.

When 10-year-old Amina was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she stared blankly and shrugged.

Nobody had ever asked her that question before.