In an overcrowded camp for internally displaced persons (IDP) in Sheikhan, Iraq, 24 years old Kovan looks at pictures 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, since their rescue from the notorious Al Hol camp, a sprawling tent city that houses wives, widows, children and other family members of Islamic State (IS) militants.
Like other Yazidi women rescued from Al Hol in recent years, Kovan knew that if she wanted to return home, she would have to leave behind her children born in IS captivity.
“I had no choice but to leave my children behind,” explains Kovan. “I cried a lot, but my family and other Yazidis told me I couldn’t bring them home.”
Kovan’s story is tragic, yet familiar.
The fate of the children of IS fighters and their Yazidi victims remains an ongoing and extremely complex issue for a community still grappling with the traumas of the past decade.
They are a painful reminder of the atrocities committed against the community and the thousands of family members who are still missing. Some 2,700 Yazidi women and children remain missing.
Kovan was one of thousands of Yazidi women captured in 2014 when ISIS fighters moved through the Yazidis’ historic homeland of Sinjar in northern Iraq.
When news of IS’s advance reached Kovan’s village, her family – along with thousands of other desperate Yazidi families – tried to flee towards the Syrian border.
They did not get far before they were stopped at a checkpoint by IS fighters and forcibly loaded into trucks. They were then driven to the Iraqi-Syrian border and held for nine days.
IS fighters divided the Yazidis into groups 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 my younger sister alive,” says Kovan. “What they did to us was unimaginable.”
IS declared the Yazidis infidels and massacred thousands of Yazidi men. Boys were tortured and forced to fight for the group. Women and girls as young as ten were kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery.
During this time, hundreds, if not thousands, of children were born to Yazidi women held as slaves and their IS captors.
Kovan was bought several times by IS fighters and raped several times. Her children were the result of rapes by two different fighters, with whom she was forced to marry. Both are now presumed dead.
In 2019, Yazidi elders were persuaded to accept these traumatized and devastated Yazidi women back into the community.
Days later, however, the elders declared that no children born in IS would be allowed to join them. It is impossible for conservative Yazidis to take in children of IS fathers due to the purity rules of the Yazidi bloodline. The Yazidi faith only recognizes children born to two Yazidi parents.
Iraqi law further exacerbates the problem. Under the country’s national identity law, a child born to a Muslim parent – even if the child is the result of rape – must be registered as a Muslim.
After the fall of the so-called territorial caliphate of the terrorist militia 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 made their way to the Al Hol camp. Kovan was among them.
Conditions in Al Hol are terrible. The camp is plagued by daily violence, intimidation and sexual exploitation. Fear of the women she lived with – 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 of the women in Al Hol,” says Kovan. “Many of them are raising their children believing in the ideology of the Islamic State.”
Kovan was only rescued by a night-time operation by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). They entered the camp armed with pictures of residents, who were presumably Yazidis.
After her veil was lifted and her face became visible, Kovan and her children were taken out of the camp and taken to a secret location to verify their identities.
“The fact that women understand that there is no place for them in the Yazidi community is the reason why some continue to go missing,” explains former US diplomat Peter W. Galbraith.
“It is counterproductive that the Yazidis are taking their children away, and it is extremely unfair that the IS mothers are allowed to keep their children.”
Since 2021, Galbraith has organized four operations to reunite Yazidi mothers with their children who were taken from them after the fall of ISIS.
Many of the children ended up in an orphanage in northeastern Syria. Their rescue was a long process that required complex negotiations with the SDF and the government of the Autonomous Administration of Northern and Eastern Syria (AANES).
To date, all reunited mothers and children have been resettled in third countries. There have been no comparable rescue operations for children who were taken away from their Yazidi mothers and placed in orphanages in Iraq.
These operations remain Kovan’s greatest hope. “All I want is to be with my children again and to get asylum in Europe,” says Kovan. “I think about them every day.”
Even though they continue to be rejected by their community, Yazidi women will continue to suffer the wounds of their IS captivity and violent separation from their children.
Hannah Wallace is a London-based writer and researcher on armed violence and foreign policy.