A single sniper’s bullet cost the pregnant woman half her family as she struggled to escape across the rubble.
The bullet struck her daughter, killing the two-year-old instantly. It passed though the child’s body into her husband, a 33-year-old art teacher who was clasping the girl to his chest. He fell and died two hours later in the debris of a west Mosul garden as a battle raged about them.
“I buried my daughter in a scrape beneath the earth, then lay with my dying husband through the night until he had died too,” she told The Times. “At dawn I found a soldier and a wheelbarrow. Together we pushed my husband’s body through the ruins and away from the battle to bury him in a cemetery.
“It was exhausting. I started bleeding. Three hours later I lost my unborn child. I was six months pregnant.”
As if the bullet had not wrought enough damage, that June 2017 battle is still opening wounds today. The woman, Umm Amara, has lost guardianship of her two remaining children — her six-year-old surviving twin boy and her daughter, 11 — and has been expelled from Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan where she had sought to rebuild her life.
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Her crime is that her dead husband’s cousins had included four members of Islamic State’s infamous al-Hisba, the morality police. It is a connection deemed sufficient to classify his widow, 33, as being of “perceived Islamic State affiliation”.
The term affects as many as 250,000 Iraqis, predominantly women and children. They are stuck at the fringes of Iraqi society, unable to reintegrate due to decisions made by husbands, brothers, sons or fathers – now dead, missing or imprisoned - over which, as women, they had no control. And they are vulnerable to exploitation.
“The vast majority of these families are headed by females, who have no ability to make money and are therefore becoming an underclass as they can’t escape the label of ‘perceived Isis affiliate’,” said Belkis Wille, senior crisis and conflict researcher at Human Rights Watch.
“There is a risk that extremist groups will prey on these impoverished, disenfranchised communities as effectively as they have done before, unless the government makes a push to reintegrate them back into society.”
She added: “What is outrageous is the thought that in Iraqi society you as a wife could have done anything about decisions of a husband or father. It is ridiculous. Women from the West may have chosen to pick up a passport and get on a plane to travel to the caliphate; women in Iraq had no such choice.”
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The issue has been thrown into stark relief as Iraqi authorities press ahead with the closure of camps for the tens of thousands of civilians displaced by the conflict with Isis. Only three of 18 IDP (internally displaced people) camps remain open, and the government is pushing to have them closed this year.
The absence of a coherent reintegration strategy has meant families of “perceived Isis affiliation” being ejected into already riven communities. Punitive officialdom and the desire for revenge has left them marginalised or again displaced. Poverty and disenfranchisement are the norm, sexual predation common.
“Even among the well-educated, the response to these ‘perceived affiliation’ families is shocking,” said an official from the International Organisation for Migration in Mosul.
“The issue of their return and reintegration, whether or not they were ever in an IDP camp, is the biggest challenge facing Mosul. Without a solution and reintegration these families may become vulnerable to radicalisation.”
To escape the Isis label, families first need security clearance. To obtain this, a relative of an alleged Isis member must file a claim against them, whether they are missing or dead.
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This practice is known as “tabriya” and absolves the claimant of their relative’s affiliation with the jihadists. Providing a judge approves, a stamped document confirms the family’s innocence.
Without this security clearance and documentation, Iraqis are not allowed to move freely within their own country. They cannot be employed, rent property or qualify for any government benefits such as healthcare.
Security clearance is also required to obtain birth and death certificates. Without it, children born in areas previously controlled by Isis cannot be enrolled in schools.
Three months ago, when Kurdish security agents in Arbil caught up with Umm Amara (not her real name), they cited the absence of tabriya as a reason to revoke her residency card and expel her from the city.
Unusually, they did give her the choice to take her two surviving children with her back to Mosul or surrender their guardianship and leave them with relatives to continue their schooling in Arbil.
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“It was no choice at all,” she told me in Mosul, where she now ekes out a life alone, dependent on the goodwill of extended family for money. Without documents, she cannot claim her husband’s pension.
“At least in Arbil my kids can have an education. Here in Mosul, I cannot send them to school until I have made tabriya and my security clearance is processed. It takes a long time and even then is uncertain.”
Even after making tabriya, many families accused of Isis affiliation are ostracised, threatened and sometimes attacked.
The Times met one “perceived affiliation” family unit comprising a mother and seven children living in an improvised squat in east Mosul.
Originally from Hatra, there was no doubting their Isis links: the children’s missing father was arrested as an Isis member during the battle of 2017 and had subsequently disappeared. An eighth child, an 11-year-old boy, had been killed in an airstrike in 2014 after being inducted into a training camp for “ashbal al-khalifa” — the cubs of the caliphate.
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Shunned by their tribe, they were unable to return to their destroyed home in Hatra despite having gone through the tabriya process. Last year her eldest remaining son had been shot twice in the leg with a pistol not long after his 13th birthday as he was deemed to be old enough to receive vengeance for his father’s crimes.
“He was shot for revenge,” said the woman, 42. “We knew the attackers. But when I tried to open a case against them the police said they were not interested and a judge told me to drop it, so I did.”
She added: “We live as squatters as I can’t rent property here without divorce papers or a residency card.”
Beside her, one of her teenage daughters burst into tears and fled the shack. “I bake bread to try to get by, but many people refuse to buy from me as my husband was in Isis.”
Asked about this family’s specific case, the mayor of Hatra, Basman Ahmed Sultan, explained matter-of-factly that he had to calibrate local tribal feelings when considering the return of any Isis affiliated family.
“Islamic State’s hobby was to kill people,” he said. “It is not surprising we don’t want their families back. You say this Daesh family have no future. I say there are many families in Hatra whose men were killed by Daesh and lives ruined who have no future either because of Daesh.”
These remarks have instant emotional resonance, yet they underline a fact about the polemics of vengeance in Iraq: they are mainly promoted by men, in response to decisions made by other men, and impact most heavily on women and children.
“I lost half my family in battle that I had no say in,” wept Umm Amara. “Then I lost my last two children as I was accused of being part of a ‘Daesh family’ because of other decisions I had no control over.
“Now I must declare tabriya to disassociate myself from a husband I loved, as without it I will not be able to live with my children again and will be stuck here permanently harassed by officials who want me, who desire me. There is no shortage of men in Mosul who want ownership of an Isis wife. I see no escape from the decisions of men whichever way I turn.”
