Iraq, Children of Shame

August 3rd 2014, Daech invades Irak. On the way to Mossoul, djihadist troops go through Sinjar who was the fief of the Yazidi. As soon as they got there, they separated the families, killed the men and kidnapped thousands of women and girls. Systematically raped, many of them will give birth to kids who are now 1 to 5 years old. Despite the complete failure of Daech in 2019 and the return of peace, around 3000 of these women hostages still haven’t returned. And the kids born out of rape stay invisible: considered as “Daech’s bastards”, they aren’t either in civil registers or in lists of refugee camps. For five years, I’ve been looking for them in Irak and Syria and I am trying to understand.