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in wars against terrorist groups with no
fixed address. The territory ISIS briefly
did claim as a state served to enhance its
attraction as something more difficult to
confront: a global movement. Thus the
question that now preoccupies counter-
terrorism officials: What devotion does
the group retain among the 8 million
Iraqis and Syrians it ruled at the height
of its power, the estimated 40,000 peo-
ple who traveled from elsewhere to join
its caliphate and the millions around the
globe who may be entertaining its ex-
treme vision of Islam?
And what will become of the thou-
sands of youngsters press-ganged into
ISIS’s forces in northern Iraq? The ter-
rorists separated Yezidi children from
their families, sometimes killing their
parents in front of them. In the soil of
that trauma, they planted the idea that
the boys were the future army of ISIS,
indoctrinating them with the arrogance
of conquerors. They laced the boys’ food
with Captagon, an amphetamine, to dull
their fear and trained some as suicide
attackers. Many more were sent to the
front lines where fighting was bloodiest,
forced to wear suicide belts at all times,
with instructions to blow themselves up
if the enemy got too close.
Each of these boys could grow up to
become a threat to thousands, and each
must be healed. In Iraq, some 1,500
Sunni Muslim children ages 13 to 17 are
being held, charged with being mem-
bers of ISIS, according to Human Rights
Watch. Hundreds of others have re-
turned to live with relatives, bearing the
scars of battle, inside and out.
The Yezidi boys like S. now occupy
the gray zone between guilty and forgot-
ten. No one experienced the violence of
ISIS as they did. It came from every side.
The NiNeveh PlaiN, which extends
north and east of the city of Mosul,
has for centuries been a kind of
showcase for ancient faiths: Assyrian,
Chaldean, Syriac. Yet there the perhaps
half- million Yezidi believers were such
frequent targets of persecution that the BECOME A THREAT
group’s elders speak of 72 “genocides”
even before ISIS swept over the entire TO THOUSANDS,
region in 2014. The extremists displaced
around half the Yezidis, killing, AND EACH MUST
capturing and enslaving more than
6,000, according to Hussein al-Qaidi, BE HEALED
58 Time June 3–10, 2019
director of the Kurdish government’s
kidnapped affairs department. As ISIS
retreated from its last redoubt, around
3,000 were still missing.
Some survivors tell how their Arab
neighbors joined ISIS to seize their
lands, kill their loved ones and drive
them out. Hundreds of thousands now
live in refugee camps, in the homes of
relatives or in drafty, half- constructed
buildings at the edges of Kurdish towns
and villages. They say they don’t trust
the Iraqi government to protect them
from the next attempt at genocide, and
many are seeking sanctuary in Canada,
Germany, Australia or anywhere else
that will have them.
The scattering will make it harder
for their tribe to survive. The ancient
Yezidi religion is inherited through
birth, based on bloodlines via the father,
and the tribe is divided into three castes
that cannot intermarry. Shrinking the
available pool makes the survival of the
faith even harder—one more reason
the boys who were taken, then brought
back, need to be healed and woven back
into the fabric of their community.
TIME met a number of survivors,
interviewing several older boys exten-
sively about their time with ISIS. Those
under 18 were asked limited questions,
with guardians or caregivers present.
Every boy’s story starts the same way.
They tell you the moment ISIS attacked
and their fathers, brothers or uncles
were taken away. Sometimes they were
permitted to stay with their mother and
sisters for a while, but somewhere along
their journey, moved like cattle from
EACH OF THESE BOYS
COULD GROW UP TO
schoolrooms or wedding halls, they were
singled out and taken away with other
boys for religious indoctrination and
military training. Around the age of 13,
the unlucky ones were sent to fight.
Thikran Kamiran, 19, described the
moment ISIS arrived in his large north-
ern village and tricked his grandfather,
the village leader, into gathering every-
one together in the school courtyard,
allegedly for safe passage out if they
chose not to convert to Islam.
ISIS fighters led the Yezidi men and
older boys away in three truckloads,
supposedly carrying them to safety at
nearby Sinjar mountain. Thikran, then
15, was with his mother and sister,
cowering in the school courtyard, when
they heard thundering volleys of gunfire
in the distance. The ISIS fighters told
the panicked women and children that
it was just animals, but everyone knew
their husbands, brothers and sons had
just been killed.
The ISIS fighters saved Thikran’s
grandfather for last, letting him listen
in horror to that gunfire and realize he’d
led his people into a trap, before taking
him outside and shooting him too.
That’s the day Thikran learned to hide
his anger and fear. He was taken with his
mother and sister to the ISIS strong-
hold of Tal Afar, and sent to an Islamist
school to study the Quran from sunrise to
sometimes well after sunset. He said he
learned to recite the Quran and ISIS ide-
ology better than his peers—so well that
his ISIS overseer offered to make him an
instructor, though he turned that “pro-
motion” down. He said his scholarship is
why he never had to fight.
“We converted to Islam and told
them ‘We will obey you,’” he said. “I
made that sacrifice to protect myself
and my family.” He doesn’t feel guilty for
playing along, he says; he “feels noth-
ing,” a frequent answer from many of
the boys. Burying anger, pain and fear
was a survival skill. Reactivating emo-
tion means facing grief over loved ones
killed, guilt over anyone they may have
killed or whatever else they did to re-
main alive. So they stay numb.
The Yezidi child soldiers were often
grouped together with others of their
tribe, yet ISIS trainers also worked to
break down any connection among MAGNUM PHOTOS
them, by putting one of them in charge