Freed By ISIS, Yazidi Mothers Face Wrenching Choice: Abandon Kids Or Never Go Home
Women kidnapped by ISIS five years ago are now being freed. But the Yazidi community does not allow children born in captivity of militant fathers to return with them.
It's the night before a group of Yazidi women and children freed from ISIS in Syria cross the border home to Iraq.
A pale young woman with shrapnel wounds stretches out on a mattress. An older woman in a velveteen housedress leans against the wall cradling her bandaged arm â broken by an ISIS wife who accused her of taking food in the last days of the caliphate.
On the floor near a small heater warming the concrete room, a 5-year-old girl has been crying for so long that her sobs have turned to jagged coughs.
Her mother, who is 22, sits on the floor holding the girl's head in her lap, smoothing the hair off her face as she cries. The
