Iraqi women must choose between freedom and their children

Five years after the ISIS genocide against the Yazidi religious group in northern Iraq, roughly 3,500 captured women are being freed to their home country of Iraq. However, the conservative religious Yazidi leaders refuse to welcome the children who were born as a result of ISIS soldiers raping captured women. Officials have estimated upwards of 1,000 children under the age of four have been born to Yazidi mothers. Various women have different situations, with some having two or three children of ISIS soldier and others having children from an original Yazidi marriage along with children born of ISIS soldiers.

Strict Yazidi guidelines state that a person’s parents must both be Yazidi in order to identify as a part of the religion. Iraqi law that considers the children Muslim based on their father’s being Muslim further separates mothers and their children. The Yazidi community has made it clear that any child whose biological father is an ISIS soldier would be shunned from the community completely.

Yazidi officials in Syria say that children of Yazidi women will be left in an orphanage run and taken care of by Kurdish Syrian fighters before hopefully being adopted by a local family.