DOHUK, Iraq (AP) — The day they came to take her children, the young mother bundled them up against the cold. She asked her nearly 6-year-old son to take care of his younger sister.
“Don’t let anyone hit her,” she told the boy. “OK, Mama,” she remembers him replying.
Much else was left unsaid.
Then, as the car carried her boy and girl away to a life without her in a children’s home in Syria, a country she knew she would soon leave, the woman wept.
Nearly a decade ago, K, the mother, had been a child herself, about 13, when she and her family were captured in Iraq by militants from the Islamic State group. The extremists waged an onslaught that started in August 2014 and ravaged her Yazidi community, a small religious minority.
Many were forced to flee their homes; thousands were killed or abducted, including many women and girls subjected to sexual violence and enslavement.
Ten years on, a traumatized Yazidi community is still convulsed by the legacy of IS’s brutal campaign, well after the group’s territorial defeat. Nearly 2,600 Yazidis are still considered missing, to the anguish of their families. Former captives grapple with the trauma of what they endured. Many have been weathering life in displacement camps.
Among the most fraught questions is the fate of children like K’s — born to women who had been captured and raped by or married to the extremists. The Associated Press is identifying K only by her first initial due to the backlash that mothers in her sensitive situation might face.
While the community has embraced the return of mothers like her, the children’s status is more contentious, colliding with long-standing Yazidi beliefs and newer scars. Many Yazidis vehemently reject accepting these children in the community, viewing them as the non-Yazidi offspring of men who inflicted unimaginable horrors and humiliations.
In her dreams, K would see herself back with her family, but she knew she couldn’t have both: her family and children. Then came the moment when she was found in Syria’s al-Hol camp housing IS-linked families.
“My family said they won’t receive them. The Yazidi community, too, won’t receive them,” she said of the children.
Though heartbroken by what the militants did to her and others, the children are, to her, simply the babies who came out of her body.
“They’re kids; they’ve committed no sin,” she said. “They’re a piece of my heart.”
Thus, as the 10th anniversary of the IS onslaught approaches, K finds herself reeling.
Her ordeal is one stark example of the very personal toll IS crimes against Yazidis, which a United Nations team characterized as genocide, continue to exact on many lives.
“A lot of our problems are still pending, like missing people, mass graves, justice, reconciliation, return, everything,” said Natia Navrouzov, executive director of Yazda, an NGO supporting the Yazidi community.
“We’re facing existential threats, and at the same time we’re not equipped because of the trauma, the division and the lack of unity to find any way forward.”
For children like K’s, the challenges are multifaceted.
Under long-standing beliefs, community members must have two Yazidi parents. Even if the community accepted the children, Iraqi laws would require them to be registered as Muslim, said Hadi Babasheikh, whose now-deceased brother was the Yazidi spiritual leader during IS atrocities. He questioned how a family can raise children whose father may have killed some of its own.
Navrouzov agreed these cases were complex and called for help resolving them: “You don’t know how to approach this issue without harming the mother, harming the child, harming the community.”
Families who accept these children might be ostracized, she added.
The result: Some missing Yazidi women don’t return, staying behind with IS-linked families to avoid being separated from their children, Navrouzov said.
Hussein al Qaidi, director of an office tasked with rescuing kidnapped Yazidis, said many of the missing are believed to be in Syria, especially in al-Hol, and suggested they could be hiding their Yazidi identity for fear of what IS supporters in the camp would do to them.
Hadi Babasheikh said his brother had urged the community to welcome back the once-captured survivors — a position that was considered relatively progressive given stigma surrounding rape and forced conversions.
But he said it’s “impossible” for a mother to stay in the community and in Iraq with children from IS-affiliated fathers and urges the international community to resettle those who want to keep their children.
Some Yazidi mothers, he added, want nothing to do with children from IS-affiliated fathers.
But for those yearning for their children, the options are tormenting.
“On the one hand, I want my family and on the other, I keep thinking about my children,” K said.
The familiar pieces of K’s previous life faded away during an adolescence and young adulthood spent in an IS-dominated world.
The militants separated her from family members. She had to trade her Kurdish dialect for Arabic. For years, she’s lived under a different name.
Gradually, she started praying and fasting without being told to. She became so used to being swathed in the IS-required garb for women — black robes, gloves, a face covering — that, at first, she felt virtually naked when she donned other clothes.
She had been robbed of her childhood.
“They raped us and sold us off and deprived us of our families when we were kids. They’ve slaughtered our men,” she said, her words coming in like rapid fire. “Our lives have been wasted.”
She recalled how she told a much older man who raped her that she was “just a child.” It didn’t matter. “He had a heart of stone.”
Her life took sharp turns during her years away from home. She was sold to a man who freed her from enslavement and, eventually, she said, ended up getting married more than once, including to the men who became her children’s fathers. She said she continued enduring the al-Hol camp’s hardships rather than identify herself to authorities as a Yazidi, primarily so she could stay with her children.
After she was found, K learned that there’s no word about the fate of her parents and one of her sisters.
For all her anguish, K’s face lights up when she talks about her children; she giggles, becomes more animated.
She recalls how she would hug them before going to sleep; how they would ask for a bedtime story. She talks proudly about raising them well despite everything.
Her reunion with her family and Yazidi community was celebrated and felt good. But she misses her son and daughter. Their absence stings when she tastes foods they like (eggs and instant noodles are their favorites). She believes she can feel them too, asking where she is, why she isn’t with them.
She recalls how, after they separated, she would sniff the clothes they left behind and cry.
She dreams of a life with her children — outside of Iraq.
“I am so worn out,” she said. “I wonder how we still have any soul left in us.”
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