Photos: Islamic State fighters’ children in Iraq’s orphanages
Thousands of children of Islamic State group members, many of them abandoned, are the innocent victims of the brutal rise and destructive fall of Daesh. Most children of Iraqi IS members live mingled among the hundreds of thousands still languishing in camps for those displaced by the three years of fighting. More than 1,000 live with incarcerated mothers in overcrowded jails or juvenile detention facilities. A few dozen are in orphanages. One, in Baghdad, houses the children of foreign jihadis who came from abroad to join the IS and are now dead or imprisoned.
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A worker comforts a toddler at Salhiya Orphanage in Baghdad, Iraq. In Iraqi orphanages, one finds all the ways that war wreaks its destruction, embodied in the most innocent of faces: Children of those killed, children born of rape, children abandoned in the chaos of battle. There are also the children of the enemy. (Maya Alleruzzo / AP)
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A boy plays in the hallway at the orphanage. Salhiya is Iraq’s state-run facility in Baghdad, and is now home to children of foreign jihadis who came to join the Islamic State group and are now either dead or incarcerated. (Maya Alleruzzo / AP)
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During a recent visit by The Associated Press, more than a dozen cribs were arranged end-to-end in a room set for babies. Toddlers able to stand rocked side to side, holding the sides of the cribs. There were plenty of cuddles by staff, who left no baby to cry. (Maya Alleruzzo / AP)
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The facility houses a mix of infants born to Iraqi women enslaved by militants and older children brought to Iraq; some were simply abandoned. A newborn given the name Helen by the caretakers was left by her mother at a hospital after her birth. (Maya Alleruzzo / AP)
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