A mother's heart-breaking choice
Adam had blond hair and green eyes. Not like his brothers and sister.
“I loved him the moment I heard his first cry,” Jovan says. He was a light in the darkness.
But Adam’s father had been her captor. And now she had to give him away.
Adam had blond hair and green eyes. Not like his brothers and sister.
“I just loved him the moment I heard his first cry,” his mother Jovan says. He was a light in the darkness.
But Adam’s father had been her captor. And now she had to give him away.
Jovan loved her life, living with her husband Khedr in the beautiful village they had grown up in. She particularly loved the summer evenings, drinking tea on the roof with Khedr. They would sneak up as soon as their children were asleep. The sky was clear and full of stars.
“I was so happy,” Jovan says. “I lived the best life possible.”
But that life changed for ever. in the summer of 2014. One day in early August, shortly after lunch, two cars bearing black flags arrived in their village.
Jovan and Khedr were unsure what was happening but they knew they could be in danger. It was clear the men were from the ruthless militant group Islamic State [IS]. But at the same time some of the faces were familiar - they were from a neighbouring village and Khedr knew them. The men promised they would come to no harm as long as they co-operated.
The family were coerced, along with some 20 other families, into travelling with the convoy from one village to the next in Sinjar valley, northern Iraq.
What the couple did not realise was that this was a co-ordinated multi-pronged attack from IS bases in both Iraq and Syria. At the beginning of the year, the group had taken cities near Baghdad. Mosul, which was closer to Jovan’s and Khedr’s village, was taken five months later. Now IS was on the move again.
The news spread quickly across the valley, and when the convoy finally came to a stop half an hour away, many of the villagers had already fled to the upper plateau of Mount Sinjar.
The UN has described August 2014 as the point that one kind of existence ended in northern Iraq, and another infinitely more brutal one began.
The leader of the convoy told Khedr to go into the mountains and persuade the villagers to return home - they meant no harm.
“We delivered the message but no one believed it,” Khedr says. One of those who had fled into the mountains was his own brother. Khedr wanted to return to his family but his brother said that would be suicidal. IS militants were known to pick off the men they had no use for and kill them. Khedr, like his wife, was of a particularly vulnerable religious community - the Yazidis.
There were no right choices for the Yazidis. Those who had fled to Mount Sinjar became trapped. With no water or supplies, hundreds died in temperatures of more than 50C. Thousands remaining on lower ground were captured by IS. Families were ripped apart - boys forced into IS training camps, girls and women snatched for sexual slavery. Men who refused to convert to Islam were killed.
No-one is sure exactly how many Yazidis were snatched by IS. A UN special representative estimates that of the 400,000 Yazidis living in Sinjar at the time, thousands were killed and more than 6,400 Yazidis - mostly women and children - were enslaved and raped, beaten and sold.
Jovan, her three children, and about 50 other women and children in the village, were put on the back of a lorry. They were eventually driven to Raqqa in Syria - then the de facto capital of the so-called IS caliphate.
“We couldn’t do anything to defend ourselves,” says Jovan. She was not to see Khedr again for another four years.
Jovan loved her life, living with her husband Khedr in the beautiful village they had grown up in. She particularly loved the summer evenings, drinking tea on the roof with Khedr. They would sneak up as soon as their children were asleep. The sky was clear and full of stars.
“I was so happy,” Jovan says. “I lived the best life possible.”
But that life changed for ever in the summer of 2014. One day in early August, shortly after lunch, two cars bearing black flags arrived in their village.
Jovan and Khedr were unsure what was happening but they knew they could be in danger. It was clear the men were from the ruthless militant group Islamic State [IS]. But at the same time some of the faces were familiar - they were from a neighbouring village and Khedr knew them. The men promised they would come to no harm as long as they co-operated.
The family were coerced, along with some 20 other families, into travelling with the convoy from one village to the next in Sinjar valley.
What the couple did not realise was that this was a co-ordinated multi-pronged attack from IS bases in both Iraq and Syria. At the beginning of the year, the group had taken cities near Baghdad. Mosul, which was closer to Jovan’s and Khedr’s village, was taken five months later. Now IS was on the move again.
The news spread quickly across the valley, and when the convoy finally came to a stop half an hour away, many of the villagers had already fled to the upper plateau of Mount Sinjar.
The UN has described August 2014 as the point that one kind of existence ended in northern Iraq, and another infinitely more brutal one began.
The leader of the convoy told Khedr to go into the mountains and persuade the villagers to return home - they meant no harm.
“We delivered the message but no-one believed it,” Khedr says. One of those who had fled into the mountains was his own brother. Khedr wanted to return to his family but his brother said that would be suicidal. IS militants were known to pick off the men they had no use for and kill them. Khedr, like his wife, was of a particularly vulnerable religious community - the Yazidis.
There were no right choices for the Yazidis. Those who had fled to Mount Sinjar became trapped. With no water or supplies, hundreds died in temperatures of more than 50C. Thousands remaining on lower ground were captured by IS. Families were ripped apart - boys forced into IS training camps, girls and women snatched for sexual slavery. Men who refused to convert to Islam were killed.
No-one is sure exactly how many Yazidis were abducted by IS. A UN special representative estimates that of the 400,000 Yazidis living in Sinjar at the time, thousands were killed and more than 6,400 Yazidis - mostly women and children - were enslaved and raped, beaten and sold.
Jovan, her three children, and about 50 other women and children in the village were put on the back of a lorry. They were eventually driven to Raqqa in Syria - then the de facto capital of the so-called IS caliphate.
“We couldn’t do anything to defend ourselves,” says Jovan. She was not to see Khedr again for another four years.
Captive
Jovan soon realised the place she had been taken to in Raqqa was a slave market.
She and her children were held in a three-storey building full of other women and children - about 1,500 people in all. Jovan says she knew many of the women - they were relatives or neighbours from different villages.
“We were trying to give each other hope that a miracle would happen and we would be released,” she says.
Instead, Jovan was forced to draw straws to decide which IS militant she would be given to. She was assigned a Tunisian man nicknamed Abu Muhajir al Tunisi, a high-ranking commander - young and skinny with a long, delicately shaped beard.
Jovan was expected to convert to Islam and then "marry" him.
She cried for days. She tried and failed to escape three times, but her children slowed her down - Haitham, the eldest, was now 13, but Azad, the youngest, was still only three. Every time her escape attempt was discovered Abu Muhajir would lock her in a room.
“I really thought that it would be better to kill myself, but then I thought of my children. What would happen to them if I left them?”
Eventually Jovan felt she had no choice but to convert to Islam. Her fate was sealed.
Jovan is still too traumatised to say much about her kidnapper. But she does say that, unusually, he allowed her to keep her children and promised to take care of them all. Many Yazidi children were separated from their mothers - the boys taken to military training camps, the girls used as sexual slaves and domestic servants.
Jovan, her children and the Tunisian moved to a house in Raqqa that had been abandoned by its owners. By now IS controlled swathes of territory across Iraq and Syria - an area similar in size to the UK, according to the US National Counterterrorism Center.
When he wasn’t in the battlefield, the Tunisian kept his promise to treat Jovan’s children well, taking them to play in a small park nearby.
However, any semblance of stability Jovan might have found over those first five months then imploded. She discovered she was pregnant.
“There was no medicine and I didn’t know what I should do,” Jovan says.
The US-led coalition was bombing IS militants on an almost daily basis, and Iraqi and Kurdish fighters were fighting on different fronts on the ground in both Syria and Iraq. Jovan’s captor was spending so much time in the battlefield that he had recently decided he should sell her to another IS member. Yazidi captives were often sold several times over. When he discovered Jovan was expecting a child, he changed his mind.
And then seven months into her pregnancy, Jovan received the news that Abu Muhajir had been killed in battle.
The responsibility for this baby was now hers alone.
Adam was born at a time when Raqqa was under almost daily air strikes by the US-led coalition.
“His father was a killer, but he was my own flesh and blood”
Hawa and Haitham helped their mother give birth to their new half-brother. Jovan says her children weren’t sure how they should feel about this baby, who looked so very different from them.
“I think my children loved him. They took care of him. Especially Hawa - she was my daughter but also my best friend. She would feed Adam and cradle him until he slept.”
The regular bombardments forced Jovan and her children from one house to another. There were frequent power cuts. Generators provided a back-up, but only when they could find fuel for them. Getting food was also difficult, and Jovan ate smaller amounts so her children could have more.
“Sometimes we just had bread and water and a bit of sugar. I knew if I didn’t eat enough I wouldn’t be able to breastfeed Adam, but I had no other option.”
But despite all the difficulties, she says Adam kept her going.
“He was magnetic. I know he wasn’t my real husband’s, and his father was a killer, but [Adam] was my own flesh and blood.”
Escape
Back in Iraq, Khedr knew nothing of this baby. In fact he knew nothing at all of his family’s whereabouts. It was now 14 months since they had been abducted and he was searching for them endlessly. Every time he heard that a woman and her children had been released he would go to the border and check if it was his family.
Eventually he found out where they were. He tracked them down via a network of people smugglers who were buying back Yazidi women and children from IS. Khedr needed to find $6,000 for each child.
Haitham, Hawa and Azad were reunited with their father. Jovan, however, was to stay in Raqqa for another two years. She couldn’t be sure Khedr would accept Adam.
For months Khedr agonised about what to do. Members of the Yazidi faith, said to be one of the oldest monotheistic religions, whose adherents number fewer than one million across the world, are expected to follow strict rules.
One of these stipulates that whoever leaves the faith cannot return, but the Yazidi Spiritual Council had relaxed that rule to accept women abducted and forced into conversion by IS. The situation for children fathered by IS militants, however, was very different. The religion can only be born into, not converted to, so a child can only be accepted if both parents are Yazidi.
Jovan was by now living with other Yazidi widows of IS captors. All the women were scared of returning to their village in Sinjar because of this taboo.
“Some had more than one child with more than one IS fighter, so they were too afraid to go back to their families,” Jovan says.
Khedr finally decided his children needed their mother, and told Jovan Adam was welcome. Jovan made the journey back to her village in Sinjar with Adam, now a toddler, after four years away. But after only a few days, the mood changed. Jovan says her family started trying to persuade her to give Adam up.
“They started talking to me about the importance of our religion, and how our society would never accept a Muslim child born of an IS father.”
“The wishes of the Yazidi community are more important than the feelings of an individual”
Khedr took Jovan to meet Sakineh Muhammed Ali Younes, the then manager of an orphanage in Mosul. He hoped she could persuade Jovan to let her care for Adam. Sakineh says she spent hours trying to talk Jovan round.
She says Khedr was frustrated and crying. Jovan cuddled Adam, saying she wouldn’t give him up.
“Her tears poured down her face as she handed over her child. There’s nothing worse than taking a Yazidi child away from her mother, it’s like cutting out a piece of her heart,” she says.
“But the wishes of the Yazidi community are more important than the feelings of an individual. Her husband and I agreed that I would take the child, no matter what. In the end there was no other way but to lie.”
Sakineh told Jovan that she should leave Adam with her for just a few weeks, because he was sick and weak and needed to be taken care of.
“I said to her, ‘Your child is in my custody until you find a solution to this issue.’ When she grabbed my hand, I felt something like a fire had extinguished inside her.”
Torn
Yazidi New Year should have been a happy time for Jovan - her first festive occasion with her family after four years apart. They went out shopping together for coloured paints to decorate boiled eggs - a Yazidi tradition.
But despite being reunited with the children she loved, Jovan felt desperate. A few days after leaving the orphanage she had resolved to accept the situation and concentrate on her three other children. Now she was finding it impossible.
“I think about him constantly,” she said at the time.
“Every night I dream about him. How can I forget him? I breastfed him and he’s my baby. I ask you: Are women like us wrong? Are we wrong for missing our children?”
After several weeks, Jovan couldn’t stand it any longer. She made a decision from which she must have suspected there was no way back. She told her children she was going to the city of Dohuk for trauma therapy.
In reality, she was heading back to the orphanage.
“It was such a terrible day when I left them,” she says. “But I felt that I had betrayed my child. My other three children had grown up [the eldest by now was in their late teens], and they had their father. But Adam had no-one. The poor kid had absolutely no-one, and I was missing him day and night.”
When Jovan arrived at the orphanage, she was told Adam was sick, and she couldn’t see him. But what Sakineh eventually confessed - after two or three days - was that the orphanage, overstretched by conflict, had put up some of the children for adoption, via a local judge.
Sakineh says she expressly told the judge that Adam, and four other children whose mothers were IS abduction survivors, should not be offered for adoption as their mothers might one day want to claim them.
Despite this, Adam had been given away.
Sakineh says Jovan cried and cried when she told her the news.
She couldn’t face going home and instead found refuge in a women’s shelter in northern Iraq. A few months later Khedr divorced her, and sent her a message that she could no longer see her other children.
Back in the village, Khedr is sad, but unrelenting.
“I know it wasn’t [Adam’s] fault. I’ve said it was God’s will that he was born. If I thought he was to blame, I would have left him in Syria to die. If I was a bad person I would have killed him, but I didn’t. I let him live and paid to bring him here with my wife.
“But when [IS] comes and kills your entire family, and takes your wife, and has a child with her, we can’t accept it. No one would accept it no matter what religion they believed.”
Jovan's children differ on how they view her disappearance from their lives. Her eldest child Haitham shares his father’s feelings, saying he cannot accept a child of IS as a brother.
“My mother left us for her other child,” he says. He adds that his younger brother Azad was still asking for her several months after she left, but has now stopped.
“I told him that our mum will not come back, so don’t wait. After that he stopped looking for her.”
But Hawa - the girl who rocked Adam to sleep in Raqqa - is more sympathetic.
“When our mother was home, everything was very good. I wish she could come back, but it was also her right to miss Adam.”
Jovan is not the only mother to face such a terrible dilemma. The BBC spoke to 20 Yazidi women with children born to IS fighters - none of them felt able to bring their children home. Many were forced to leave their children in northern Syria before returning to Iraq.
One of those, Laila, was just 16 when she was taken by IS to Syria. She had two children with her abductor, but a Kurdish commander told her they were children “from the devil”.
“I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to go back home and I wasn’t given a choice.”
She says her dream is to go to university and then get a job that will finance her search for her children.
“I just want to see them one more time and die. I don’t want anything else.”
She is furious that the Yazidi Spiritual Council refuses to relax its rules barring IS children from being accepted into the community.
“Sometimes I think that our life was better under IS... at least I had my children with me”
“Sometimes I feel Yazidi men have no heart. They are not women, they are not mothers, they can never understand what we are going through.”
Only one of the women the BBC spoke to was allowed to keep her IS child. Rojin was sold, along with her four-year-old daughter, to seven different IS men. She returned to Iraq almost two months pregnant. Her doctor advised her that as the pregnancy was still in the early stages, she should convince her husband to pretend the baby was his. He agreed, won over by the argument that a child would make it easier to get asylum abroad, should they apply for it.
But nevertheless Rojin lives in fear.
“If my family or any one in our Yazidi community find out the truth about my son, they will take him from me, or would force me to leave my home and my daughter.”
Over the past 18 months, Jovan has received counselling, but she is still very fragile. In her notebook she has drawn a sketch of their days in Raqqa - a fighter jet overhead, Jovan in a house with her four children.
“Sometimes I think that our life was better under IS. We were under siege, and life was difficult, but at least I had my children with me.
“I wasn’t wounded [physically] during those four years, but I felt wounded when I came back to Iraq. I am wounded because of what my family, my community, and the rules did to take my children from me.”
She is so angry with her husband and disappointed in her community that she has decided to remain a Muslim.
“I don’t want to remain a part of the Yazidi community… the truth is that it’s only because of religion that I am now separated from my family.”
But she is terrified that she will be estranged from her three oldest children for ever.
“My biggest fear is that my children forget me, or won’t forgive me because I left them. But I keep telling myself that they wouldn’t forget their mother.”
According to Sakineh, Jovan is eligible to withdraw Adam from adoption as long as she can prove via DNA test that she is his mother. However the fact that Jovan is Yazidi, and the child will have been registered as Muslim because registration takes the ethnicity of a child’s father, could complicate the process.
For the time being, Jovan says she has accepted Adam is better off where he is.
“I think about him every day. But I think for my son it’s better to live with the other person for now. It’s better for him.”
All she has left is the dream she and all her children can eventually be reunited.
“Hopefully, one day, if God has mercy on me, then we will see each other again.”
Some names have been changed to protect the contributors’ identities.
Credits
Author: Nafiseh Kohnavard
Photography: Getty Images
Illustration: Michelle Brand
Editor: Sarah Buckley
Publication date: 1 August 2019