Born in Captivity: The Children ISIS Left Behind and the State That Refuses to Recognize Them
By Hussein Zainulabdeen | Independent Researcher — Iraqi Minority Rights | husseinmonitor.com
She was 24 years old, living in an overcrowded displacement camp in Sheikhan, Iraq, looking at pictures of her two children — a six-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl. It had been four months since she last saw them. To come home, she had left them behind.
This is the impossible choice that Iraqi law imposes on Yazidi women who survived ISIS captivity and bore children during it: return to your community, or keep your children. The law does not allow both.
The Legal Trap
Under Iraq's National Card Law, a child born to one Muslim parent — even as a result of rape — must be registered as Muslim. For Yazidi women who were sexually enslaved by ISIS fighters, this means that any child born in captivity is automatically designated Muslim under Iraqi law, regardless of the mother's religion or the circumstances of the child's birth.
The Yazidi faith defines membership by birth from two Yazidi parents. Children born of ISIS rape therefore face a double exclusion: legally designated as Muslim by the state, and unable to be accepted into the Yazidi community by religious law. They exist in a gap between two identities, belonging fully to neither.
The consequences are not merely symbolic. Children born in captivity whose fathers are unknown, missing, or deceased face a high risk of statelessness. Without a registered father, they cannot easily obtain birth certificates. Without birth certificates, they cannot obtain national identity cards. Without identity documents, they cannot access education, healthcare, or social services. They cannot inherit property. They cannot prove they exist.
What the Survivors Law Left Out
In March 2021, the Iraqi parliament passed the Law on Yazidi Female Survivors — legislation that recognized as genocide many crimes committed by ISIS against Yazidi, Turkmen, Christian, and Shabak women and girls. The law provided for compensation, rehabilitation, and reintegration support for survivors.
It did not mention children born of rape.
This omission was not an oversight. It reflected the political difficulty of addressing a category of children whose very existence challenges deeply held religious and social norms in both the Yazidi community and the broader Iraqi society. The law that was supposed to provide justice for survivors left their children in legal limbo — unacknowledged, unprotected, and uncompensated.
The Choice No Mother Should Face
For Yazidi women rescued from Al Hol camp in Syria — where ISIS families and captives were held after the group's territorial defeat — the return home came with a condition. To go back to their community, they had to leave their children behind.
Kovan knew this when she was rescued. "I had no choice but to leave my children behind," she explained. She left a six-year-old and a four-year-old in a camp plagued by daily violence, intimidation, and sexual exploitation — because bringing them home would mean raising them in a community that could not accept them, in a legal system that would designate them as something they were not, in a country that had no framework for their existence.
This is not a private tragedy. It is a policy failure — one created by the intersection of discriminatory national identity laws, inadequate transitional justice legislation, and the absence of political will to confront the full human cost of what ISIS did.
The Documentation Crisis for All Minority Children
The children born in captivity represent the most acute dimension of a broader documentation crisis affecting minority children across Iraq.
Many Yazidi children lost their identity documents during the 2014 genocide. Younger children may never have been registered at birth. Without documents, children cannot enroll in school. Save the Children documented that eight years after the Sinjar massacre, Yazidi children were still living without the civil documentation needed to access basic services — not because the system failed to notice, but because fixing it requires legal and political reforms that remain stalled.
Children born in captivity face the greatest barriers of all. Proof of paternity is required in Iraq for registration by unmarried parents. For children whose fathers were ISIS fighters — unknown, dead, or in detention — this requirement is often impossible to meet. The result is a generation of children growing up outside the administrative systems that define citizenship and access to rights.
Two Impossible Futures
Legal scholars analyzing the situation have identified what they describe as two problematic paradigms facing children born of ISIS captivity. The first is statelessness — having no recognized nationality at all. The second is what they call "dangerously stigmatized" Iraqi citizenship — a nationality that associates the child with the identity of the perpetrator father, designating them as Muslim in a community that defines itself in opposition to what ISIS represented.
Neither future is acceptable. And Iraq's legal system currently offers no third option.
What Justice Requires
The Georgetown Law Human Rights Institute, which conducted research on this issue between 2022 and 2023, reached a clear conclusion: without amending the discriminatory provisions of the National Card Law, survivors of ISIS captivity and their children will continue to be excluded from their communities and from Iraq's rebuilding efforts.
The specific reforms required are clear:
- Amendment of Article 20(2) of the National Card Law to remove the automatic designation of children with unknown fathers as Muslim
- Explicit inclusion of children born of conflict-related sexual violence in the Yazidi Survivors Law and any equivalent legislation
- A simplified civil documentation process for children born in captivity, without requiring proof of paternity
- Recognition of the right of these children to choose their own religious identity when they reach adulthood
These are not radical demands. They are the minimum required to give these children a future that is not defined entirely by the circumstances of their birth.
Conclusion
The children born in ISIS captivity did not choose the circumstances of their birth. They did not choose their fathers. They did not choose the war that created them. And they did not choose a legal system that has decided, by default, that they belong to the identity of the men who violated their mothers.
Iraq's transitional justice process has made progress — imperfect, slow, politically compromised progress — in addressing the crimes committed against adult survivors. It has not yet found the political will to address the children those crimes produced.
These children are growing up now. The window for giving them a legal identity, a documented existence, and a future that is not defined by their origins is not unlimited. The longer Iraq waits, the more deeply entrenched the injustice becomes.
Independent Research & Analysis
Hussein Monitor
Hussein Monitor publishes in-depth field research on Iraqi minority rights, post-ISIS accountability, and the human cost of impunity. By Hussein Zainulabdeen — former UNAMI Liaison Officer and independent researcher.
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