[Published here on September 3, 2019]
One man lost his uncle. Another is mourning for two sons. Farmers and herders in Iraq’s Baiji say mines left by the Islamic State group turned their beloved orchards into killing fields.
ISIS
Flesh and Blood | AFP
[Published here July 16, 2019]
Her dark hair was pulled back by a white scrunchie and she had chipped pink polish on her nails. Like any teenager, I thought. But the words she spoke were as far from a carefree teenagedom as you could get.
In Iraq, minority children haunted by ghosts of IS captivity | AFP
[Published here July 14, 2019]
Khanke Displacement Camp (Iraq) (AFP) – Brainwashed and broken, the Islamic State group’s youngest victims are struggling to recover from years of jihadist captivity as they return to their own traumatised minority communities in Iraq.
Blood, bones paired to probe IS crimes against Iraq’s Yazidis | AFP
[Published here July 14, 2019]
Baghdad (AFP) – Six drops of blood and a vial of ground-up bone: a sample of evidence that an Iraqi forensics lab has gathered of the Islamic State group’s multiple brutal crimes against the Yazidis.
Men still missing, Yazidi women stitch together incomes after IS | AFP
[Published here July 14, 2019]
On the floor of her stuffy, dimly-lit tent in Iraq, Yazidi survivor Layleh Shemmo nimbly tugs floral pink fabric through her sewing machine, stitching together a living for her broken family.
Agony of Yazidi women torn between IS kids, or return home | AFP
[Published here July 14, 2019]
Baadre (Iraq) (AFP) – Freed after years in jihadist captivity, Jihan faced an agonising ultimatum: abandon her three small children fathered by an Islamic State fighter or risk being shunned by her community.
Our Tales of Two Cities | AFP
[Published on AFP’s Correspondent Blog on May 24, 2019]
Mosul — “There are families living in this alleyway.” The Arabic words were hand-painted in red, black, and blue on a tattered canvas, pinned up where a small side street led off a main thoroughfare in Iraq’s Mosul. The alleyway looked anything but livable — bullet holes and craters from mortar rounds still scarred the walls around it nearly two years after the fighting had stopped, and sewage water gurgled down the cracked pavement. The banner, my AFP colleagues said, was hung to alert passing aid groups to needy residents eking out a living, unseen, in the battered labyrinth of west Mosul.
Born under IS, sick Iraqi children left undocumented, untreated | AFP
[Published here May 16, 2019]
Laylan (Iraq) (AFP) – No documents? No doctor. Without state-issued IDs, Iraqi mothers struggle to have children born under the now-defeated Islamic State group treated for conditions ranging from asthma to epilepsy.
IS chief refers to Syria defeat in first video in five years | AFP
[Co-written with AFP’s Ali Choukeir; published here on April 29, 2019]
Baghdad (AFP) – The Islamic State group’s elusive supremo Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi made his first purported appearance in five years in a propaganda video released Monday, acknowledging IS’s defeat in the Syrian town of Baghouz while threatening “revenge” attacks.
Iraq offers to try foreign IS suspects, for a price | AFP
[Published here April 10, 2019]
Iraq has offered to put on trial hundreds of accused foreign jihadists in Baghdad in exchange for millions of dollars, potentially solving a legal conundrum for Western governments but sparking rights concerns. Continue reading
