‘We do not accept those children’: Yazidis forbid ISIL offspring

Earlier this month, nine Yazidi women were reunited for the first time in years with their 12 children – all born to members of the armed group ISIL (ISIS) who brutally persecuted the Yazidi community in northern Iraq and enslaved its women.

The reunification followed months of lobbying and negotiations between former US diplomat Peter Galbraith, the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government, and Kurdish officials in Syria. They reached a deal allowing the children to leave the Al-Hol refugee camp in eastern Syria and cross the border into Iraq.

Despite the breakthrough, Yazidi elders have refused to let the children join the small religious community, which considers them outcasts who can never be allowed into society.

The decision has left their mothers, already traumatised by years of violence and atrocities, facing a wrenching choice between keeping their children or staying with their community.

In August 2014, ISIL launched a violent attack on the Yazidis, an ancient religious minority in northern Iraq, when the armed group overran large swathes of Syria and neighbouring Iraq.

The group killed thousands of Yazidi men and abducted hundreds of women, later holding them as sex slaves. While many have since been freed following ISIL’s defeat, more than 3,000 women and girls remain missing.

After ISIL’s so-called caliphate crumbled in 2019, Yazidi leaders declared that enslaved women would be welcomed back into the fold of the community, but their children were not allowed to join them.