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When I ask Rayan about her sister Fahima, she shows me a photograph of her in captivity, taken with other Ezidi woman captives in Raqqa.
Rayan was taken captive together with her elder sister Selime and younger sister Fahima. Fahima was rescued two years ago but there is no news yet of Selime, now 28. Rayan, now 25, is still in Syria's El Hol camp with her two girls, where she is surrounded by ISIL sympathizers.
When I ask Fahima why her sister is in the El Hol camp and not in one of the other camps where Ezidi women stay, she replies by describing her own regrets.
"Before I was taken captive, I had no thoughts of marriage or motherhood, but the child I yearn after today was born to me of rape," she says averting her eyes.
Fahima has been in this camp together with her three elder brothers and family for three years now. When her brothers picked her up at the border, they forced her to leave her child behind.
The young girl was forced to leave the child behind, not even having time to bid it goodbye.
"Iraqi soldiers rescued me and several other women from Kayyara, where many ISIL sympathizer families were living. They took us then to a village close to the border with Iraqi Kurdistan."
"When we went there, we saw many women and children already there. There were many women with children who had been rescued together, but there were also many children who had been left behind by their mothers who had been taken back home."
'I could not wish my child goodbye'
When her brothers arrived to take her back, she told them she had a child she wished to bring back with her. An Iraqi soldier standing nearby then said in her brothers' hearing, "She still calls it 'My child!'".
Fahima weeps when she tells me she could not wish the child farewell that day.
"I left the child with a Kazakh woman who had been with ISIL. She had two children of her own. When I heard my name over the loudspeaker, with the announcement that my brothers were here to see me, I left my son with her for what I thought would be a brief interval. If I had known I would never see him again, I would never have left him in her cruel lap. Even I could not have taken him back with me, I would have at least left him between the two borders, together with the many children already there."
"My brothers, angry at me for saying 'My child', did not permit me to go back and bid my son farewell. My son thus remained with that heartless woman, a woman without a conscience."
Fahima repeats to me that she never wanted to leave the children behind and goes on to tell me that her brothers would constantly criticize for this and blame her in every argument they had.
After Fahima returned with her brothers, she once searched for the name of the woman she had left her son with, using her elder brother's Facebook account. He found out about this from the search history and beat her for it. She is not permitted to use the internet and has not been permitted to own a cellphone since.
A forbidden name
Fahima tells me she is resigned to never seeing her son again and has accepted that there is a void in her that will never be filled.
"My sister Rayan had a similar experience. She was liberated a year ago in Syria. From the first day she got in touch with us, everyone in the family told her she could only return if she left her children behind. When she refused, the entire family stoped speaking with her and even her name has not been uttered for seven-eight months now."
Fahima tells me that the family has not told any of their relatives that Rayan has been freed and that they are all ashamed of her for her decision.
Fahima has been able to speak to her sister, using her cousin Seher's cellphone. She has learnt to delete the call history. No one knows she speaks with Rayan.
Seher, on her part, tells me she supports Rayan and other women who have chosen not to give up their children. "If I had known it would be like this, I would never have returned. Do you call this living, breathing? I died every night on that mattress," she tells me pointing to it.
"What happened now that we have returned? This is just as much a camp as that was. When we weep for the children we left behind, they accuse us of being ISIL sympathizers. My cousin Rayan and many other Ezidi women are in black Burqas for the sake of their children. Not because they support the ISIL ideology or because they have gone mad. A little child, helpless, was left there," she says.
When I ask her how old it is, she replies, "No longer than this arm."
SDF
Seher was rescued after the battle of Baghouz, during which she was herself lightly injured. She was taken with her children and several female ISIL militants to the El Hol camp.
When asked for her name and nationality by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), she first told them the name she had been given in ISIL captivity and that she was from Syria, speaking in Arabic.
"I was taken to El Hol after the place was bombed from the air for hours, together with many ISIL women, their faces covered and with only their eyes visible."
"After waiting for hours, I was called for questioning. The uniforms and guns the men in the registration office carried frightened me and the ISIL women by me had been speaking amongst themselves, 'They will kill us all'. Frightened by this, at first, I only told the SDF officer that I had been kidnapped".
But after a while, an SDF officer asked her in Kurdish, "Are you Ezidi?" And she had replied that she was, in a whisper. After her statement was taken, the officer pointed at the child on her lap and asked her, "Are you taking it or leaving it?" She hadn't understood the question but the officer did not pursue the matter further.
"Without knowing where I was being taken, I was put on a vehicle. A uniformed female SDF officer told her, 'You are free now and will return home. It was wrong to bring you to this camp.' But another female SDF officer told me, "But you cannot return home with this child. Even if you don't leave the child here, you will be made to leave the child when you return home' and it was then I understood what the male officer had been referring to."
"They took me and the child to the Mala Ezidiyan. I was met at the gate of the building by other rescued Ezidi women. They greeted me with cheers and told me 'Take off that Burqa and burn it!' But I was not properly dressed underneath and I did not take it off then. I instead gave my head cover to a woman who immediately threw it onto a fire."
The Mala Ezidiyan, a house for Ezidis is in Cizre in Syria and also has a branch in Sengal. It is an NGO that works towards reuniting freed Ezidi women with their families.
Seher tells me, "At the Mala Ezidiyan, they asked me for the details of my family, gave me fresh clothes to wear and showed me a place to take a bath. With the help of another woman, I washed my baby on my lap for the first time," and begins to relate details of her child.
"We were in Baghouz when the baby was born and the midwife washed it with water from the bidet in the toilet before giving it to me. When the air strikes began, it was four months old. I was taken to El Hol together with several ISIL women after the city was taken."
"When I washed the child in the Mala Ezidiyan, I don't know why, I began to cry uncontrollably. The women next to me, who had come to help, began to cry as well."
"After leaving the shower, when I wore normal clothes again, I felt I had all along been naked under that Burqa I had worn for four years."
The heavy price of freedom
Seher's uncle reached Mala Ezidiyan over the phone and told Seher her family had moved to Germany and were well. He told her, "Leave the child there, get on the bus, I will come meet you in Sengal."
"After my uncle told me to leave my child behind, I ran to it in a state of panic. I didn't have enough milk and when I could not find yoghurt, I used to feed it bread soaked in sugary water. I fed it but was called to the office soon after."
"I spoke to my family, who I had just learnt were alive and well in Germany. I realized then that I was free, but also that there was a heavy price to this freedom."
"After speaking to my mother and brothers and weeping all together, my father too asked me to leave the child behind. After hanging up, I went to my child again and thought back on all the horrors I had lived through."
"My fırst miscarriage after the Moroccan ISIL miilitant who called himself my owner beat me for not doing what he wanted, my second pregnancy after being raped by the Iraqi ISIL militant who bought me from the Moroccan in Raqqa. At first I had wanted to hate the child I delivered, but no matter how I tried, I could not, it was such a beautiful child. I remember its cute little chin and how I used to constantly worry about its eyes crusting."
"In the same way that the woman had told me when leaving El Hol that I could not return with it, my father had told me to leave the child behind. And other women who had just arrived at the Mala Ezidiyan had already been told the same things in the few hours they had been there, by their families and relatives."
"When I was making dinner. The SDF brought a young woman my age and a child I reckoned to be around two years old there. The other women greeted her in the same they had greeted me when I had arrived. I overheard the SDF telling a worker at the Mala Ezidiyan that the woman had spent weeks in El Hol, fearing the child would be taken away from her."
The orphanage in Mosul or the El Hol camp?
"During the days I was at the Mala Ezidiyan, four women who had come there with their children left for Iraq after leaving their children behind. Each of them had been told by their families, 'Look at the situation we are in, we have lost our relatives, the men who did this to us were these children's fathers.' It was time for me to make a decision. Everyone told me that even if I were to take the child with me, I would eventually be forced to give it up to an orphanage, where it would be registered as Muslim, possibly given up for adoption and who I would never again be able to see."
"This was the first time I had heard of these orphanages and unable to make sense of all this, I went to visit other women at the Mala Ezidiyan who had refused to give up their children. The told me, 'If you do not want to give up your child, do not let anyone convince you otherwise'."
"It was then that I chose to return to the El Hol camp rather than go to my family in Iraq. SDF officers who were in the registration office told me, 'If you don't have any luggage, we can leave immediately.' When I returned to the El Hol camp, I was not wearing a Burqa. I was taken to the same office where I had signed out. The SDF woman officer who had traveled with me left without even bidding me goodbye."
"The women in the registration office told me my father would ring me again soon. He told me he could never accept the child of a terrorist and that if I chose to stay in the camp, he would disown me and never ring me again."
"He hung up without giving me the chance to speak. An officer at the office told me pityingly that I was too young for the camp and that I would suffer if I stayed there."
"She pointed to two Ezidi women in Burqas sitting a corner and told me, 'Look, they have decided to lave their children behind and will leave soon.'"
"In a daze, I got back on the same bus that had brought me back and in a while, found myself at the Mala Ezidiyan again. This time I was without my child and did not have a Burqa on. Two women by me were also without children but were wearing Burqas. The bus took back not me, but my corpse back to Sengal."
"Don't see me as someone living, don't be deceived by my breathing. I died again and again on that mattress," she says pointing to the mattress in the tent. "Like others in my family, I tried to hate that little child, no longer than my arm, I though again and again about all that happened to me during my years of captivity. I repeated to myself what my father and others constantly told me, 'That is a child born of rape, a child of those who massacred my community.' But I could not do it, the child was so small and innocent, it did not deserve to be hated."
Hope again in Germany?
Seher will turn 18 in a few months and travel to her family in Germany. She tells me she is hopeful and excited. Not just because she will see her family again but because she hopes that German authorities will help her reach her child Muhammed Huseyin in El Hol and says, "They tell me they will take a syringeful of blood from me and go to El Hol and after proving he is my child, will reunite me with him."
A worker for the UNHCR in the camp she is in told her that such a thing would be possible. She hopes that after this DNA test, after the child is brought to her, even if her family rejects her, she will be able to stay in a refuge for women run by the German government.
Seher, pauses, then asks me if this is indeed possible, but unable to have the heart to tell this is farfetched, I tell her I do not know. She suddenly laughs and says, "It is possible, it will happen! And you will come visit me and Zidan in Germany." When I ask her who Zidan is, she replies, "Muhammed Huseyin."
Seher is hopeful for being reunited with the seven month old child taken from her an year ago. She tells me though that Fahima, now with her family has not been able to locate her child and has given up hope. "All she wants to know is how the child is doing, to know the child is well." (NK/SD)
Tomorrow: One Day with Viyan and Mizgin
Êzidî Women Speak Out: 'S/he is My Child'
Zozan's Family: You Have No Choice But to Give up Your Child for Adoption
Meyrem: We are Left With No Choice But to Leave for Afar
Leyla: The Only Thing That Keeps me Going is the Hope to See My Son Again
The Mosul Dar Al-Zahur Orphanage
'Êzidî Women are Breaking the Mould and Remaking Their Society'
