Children of Islamic State group live under a stigma in Iraq
No one to count
His 12-year-old sister acts as the mother, cooking meals, cleaning and caring for her young siblings.
AP
What after the war
So the Suleiman children are left to fend for themselves. Their father is in prison. Their mother died years ago. They are traumatized by deaths of loved ones in the war and by their own family turmoil. In their temporary home, they lie low, worried their new neighbors will learn of their family's IS connection.
AP
Dawlat Suleiman
Dawlat's childhood has been stripped away. At their apartment in Kirkuk, she cooks three meals a day; while the younger children are at school, she cleans the house, makes the bed, washes dishes and does laundry. She boasts she can now cook lentils and potatoes and chicken, though she admits she doesn't always get the rice right. There are moments when a smile illuminates Dawlat's face, temporarily sweeping away her perpetual haunted look. She talks of how she once loved school and still hopes to become a doctor or teacher.
AP
Destructiveness of Daesh, acronym for IS
The stain they carry points to how thoroughly Iraq's social fabric was torn apart by the militants' nearly 3-year-rule over much of the country's north and west.
When the Sunni Muslim IS took over those territories in a 2014 blitz, it massacred Shiite Muslims, Kurds, Christians, Yazidis, Sunni Muslim fighters and members of the police or military who fell into its hands. And it drove out others, often either destroying or giving away their homes. The children at the center of this resentment are often profoundly traumatized, whether from their lives with the Islamic State group or from the war itself.
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Aftermath and effects
Daesh-linked families have been shot at and had grenades thrown at their homes, he said. Members of the Yazidi religious minority whom the militants singled out for some of their worst brutalities, massacres of the men and enslavement of the women have retaliated by destroying homes in Arab villages in their heartland in the Singar area, he said, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with his agency's regulations.
AP
No one to look for
The relatives may worry about being tainted themselves or come under pressure from their tribes not to accept the kids, she said, speaking on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to talk about the agency's work.
Most children of Iraqi IS members live mingled among the hundreds of thousands still languishing in camps for those displaced by the three years of fighting that brought down IS. More than 1,000 live with incarcerated mothers in overcrowded jails or juvenile detention facilities. A few dozen are in orphanages. One, in Baghdad, houses the children of foreign jihadis who came from abroad to join the IS and are now dead or imprisoned.
AP
