Yazidis forcibly separated from children of IS fighters

In an overcrowded camp for internally displaced persons (IDP) in Sheikhan, Iraq, 24 years old Kovan looks at photos of her absent children, a six-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl.

It has been four months since she last saw them, after her rescue from the notorious Al Hol camp, a sprawling tented camp housing wives, widows, children and other relatives of Islamic State (IS) militants.

Kovan, like other Yazidi women rescued from Al Hol in recent years, knew she would have to leave her children, who were born in ISIS captivity, behind to return home.

“I had no choice but to leave my children behind,” Kovan explains. “I cried a lot, but my family and other Yazidi people said I couldn’t take them home.”

Kovan’s story is tragic, yet relatable.

The fate of the children of IS fighters and their female Yazidi victims remains an ongoing and extremely complex problem for a community still struggling with the trauma of the past decade.

They serve as a painful reminder of the horrors inflicted on the community and the thousands of family members who remain missing. Some 2,700 Yazidi women and children remain missing.

Kovan was one of thousands of Yazidi women captured in 2014 when IS fighters invaded the historic Yazidi homeland of Sinjar in northern Iraq.

When news of the IS advance reached Kovan’s village, her family – along with thousands of other desperate Yazidi families – tried to flee to the Syrian border.

They didn’t get far before they were stopped by ISIS fighters at a checkpoint and forcibly loaded into trucks, driven to the Iraqi-Syrian border and held for nine days.

IS militants divided the Yazidis into groups at that point and sent Kovan and her two older sisters to Mosul. She still has no idea what happened to her brother.

“It was the last time I saw my parents and younger sister alive,” Kovan says. “What they did to us is beyond imagination.”

Declaring the Yazidis infidels, IS summarily murdered thousands of Yazidi men, while torturing boys and forcing them to fight for the group. Women and girls as young as 10 were kidnapped and sold as sex slaves.

During this period, hundreds, possibly thousands of children were born to Yazidi women who were held as slaves and captured by IS.

Kovan was bought multiple times by ISIS militants and repeatedly raped. Her children were born from rape by two separate fighters she was forced to marry, both of whom are now presumed dead.

In 2019, Yazidi elders were convinced to reintegrate these traumatized and devastated Yazidi women into the community.

Days later, however, the elders said that children born to ISIS would not be allowed to join them. For conservative Yazidis, rules surrounding the purity of the Yazidi bloodline make it impossible to accept children born to ISIS fathers. The Yazidi faith only recognizes children born to two Yazidi parents.

Iraqi law exacerbates the problem. Under the country’s National Identity Law, a child born to a Muslim parent, even as a result of rape, must be registered as Muslim.

After the fall of the so-called territorial caliphate of the Islamic State in 2019, tens of thousands of IS fighters, women, children and Yazidi prisoners surrendered in Baghouz, the group’s last stronghold in eastern Syria, and headed to the Al Hol camp. Kovan was among them.

Conditions in Al Hol are appalling. The camp is plagued by violence, intimidation and sexual exploitation on a daily basis. Fear for the women she lived among – the camp remains a breeding ground for extremist IS ideology – and the prospect of abandoning her children forced Kovan to live under a different name. There are believed to be hundreds more like her.

“I was so afraid for the women in Al Hol,” says Kovan. “Many of them are raising their children to believe in the ideology of the Islamic State.”

Kovan was only rescued after a midnight operation by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who entered the camp with photographs of residents they believed to be Yazidis.

After lifting her veil to reveal her face, Kovan and her children were taken out of the camp and to a secret location to verify her identity.

“The fact that women understand that there is no place for them in the Yazidi community is the reason some are still missing,” explains former US diplomat Peter W. Galbraith.

“It is counterproductive for Yazidis to take away their children and downright unfair that ISIS mothers are allowed to keep their children.”

Since 2021, Galbraith has organized four operations to reunite Yazidi mothers with children taken from them after ISIS fell.

Many children ended up in an orphanage in northeastern Syria. Getting them out was a lengthy process, involving complicated negotiations with the SDF and the government of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES).

To date, all reunited mothers and children have been transferred to third countries. No similar rescue operations have been conducted to save children taken from Yazidi mothers and placed in orphanages in Iraq.

These operations remain Kovan’s best hope. “All I want is to be with my children again and to be granted asylum in Europe,” Kovan says. “I think about them every day.”

As Yazidi women are ostracized by their community, they carry the wounds of life after ISIS captivity and being forcibly separated from their children.

Hannah Wallace is a London-based writer and researcher on gun violence and foreign affairs