DUHOK,
Iraq – By 16, Siham Fayruz had witnessed more horror than any human being should in a lifetime. Her teenage dreams of becoming a doctor ended when 1,500
ISIS fighters stormed her home in Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul and declared control, in June 2014. During their bloody occupation, she lost her education, her childhood, and eventually, her husband. The teenager witnessed girls from her school being seized by ISIS, never to be seen again. To avoid this fate, Siham was entered into an arranged marriage with an older man in a bid to prevent her being taken as a terrorist’s bride. Ten years later, Siham is one of a group of
Women reclaiming their lives by clearing the explosives ISIS left behind. Armed with only a metal detector and set of tools, Siham has been trained to carefully deconstruct bombs designed to kill or maim innocent civilians. A decade after their rise to power shocked the world, i travelled to former ISIS heartlands in northern Iraq to discover the inside story of their bloody reign of terror and the ongoing impact still felt today. At its peak, ISIS held around a third of
Syria and 40 per cent of Iraq, tyrannising civilians and plotting terror attacks across Europe. Just this week, the group claimed responsibility for a terrorist attack in
Moscow which killed at least 137 people. “I lost my life,” Siham, now 24, says of the group’s rule. “We didn’t finish school. I wanted to become a doctor or an engineer, but we couldn’t continue our education because they would come to school and take girls.” “I remember one day, they came to the school. They were arguing about why we weren’t wearing hijabs. We didn’t know what they wanted. I was worried. They took one girl just because she wasn’t wearing socks. Nobody knows where they took her. There are many girls who haven’t returned to their families. We have heard a lot about the families here, about the killing and the slaughtering. After that, we left school [out of fear].” Fearing she would be taken as an ISIS bride and feeling they had no other choice, Siham’s parents married her to a man twelve years her senior. “I had to get married during ISIS. I got married at the age of 15, because they started taking the girls. So out of fear and anxiety, my parents said, we will marry you.” One day, ISIS fighters appeared at her front door; they were rounding up the residents to go and pray. Her husband, who was about to leave to go to the mosque, opened the door. Without asking questions, they shot him Siham said. He died in Siham’s arms. “The marriage didn’t last six months, I lost my husband because of them. They killed him. My life was destroyed,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine that I would stand on my feet again.” Siham remained in Mosul for the three years ISIS occupied the city, largely unable to leave due to the strict control the terror group maintained. The city became one of ISIS’s ‘twin capitals’ along with Raqqa in Syria, and was described by the US as a “jewel of their so-called Caliphate”. The terrorist occupation Siham lived under saw widespread killing and sexual violence, along with destruction of some of Mosul’s most cherished cultural and historical sites. A study of 40 households who lived under ISIS occupation in Mosul found just 20 per cent of homes were undamaged, only 2 per cent of children had remained in school, almost no one brought in a salary and no house had regular electricity. “At first, they didn’t control us too much. They said they came in the name of religion and they entered our community as Muslims. The second month, they told us you must wear burqa, khimar and long clothes,” Siham says. “They said, if you try to leave, you will be killed. Or if you stay with us, we are a state. For the three years after my husband died, I barely left the house. We only went to the shops or relatives’ houses. I wouldn’t wear their clothes. They started killing people, and they started to hang people and crucify them. The worst crimes they committed.” Between 9,000 and 11,000 civilians are estimated to have been killed in the battle for control of the city . Of these, around a third were attributed to airstrikes from an international coalition including the
UK, and a third by ISIS, according to an Associated Press investigation. In 2017, the group were defeated in Mosul by the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), the Kurdish Peshmerga army and coalition airstrikes. It was at this moment that Siham says her life began again. “After the liberation of Mosul, I gradually came back to life,” she said. “With ISIS, I felt like a dead person living. I lost my youth because of ISIS. Thank God, I had another chance.” As it was ousted from Iraq, the terror group booby-trapped homes, rigging up furniture, household items and even games to blow up if moved. They littered improvised explosive devices (IEDs) across the country, building on layers of landmines already left across Iraq by decades of conflict. Siham is one of a team of deminers clearing the legacy of Iraq’s conflicts, doing dangerous work with the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) so her community can recover from the terror group. Each day, wearing a pale brown helmet and flak jacket, she steps out into minefields or boobytrapped homes, locating bombs and carefully helping to disarm them. Siham’s blood type is printed on the side of her uniform in case she urgently needs a transfusion; a constant reminder of the peril of her
Job. “We tried to remove the risks for ourselves and build a better life. We tried to preserve our lives. We lived with them and saw their thinking and beliefs; what they were trying to achieve. They did the worst things. They killed, they displaced,” she says, sitting down at the foot of a minefield in Duhok, northern Iraq. “I have decided not to stop my life because of a person or because of a situation.” But beyond clearing communities, this work has also helped reverse the dramatic gender imbalance ISIS imposed upon Siham and other women. “[This work] also opened up opportunities for women to be equal to men,” she said. “[It proves] there is no difference between women and men. We are proud to tell girls that there is nothing to say that you can’t go to work. To break the barrier that has been put on us through all our lives. “Today, we are going to the fields or dangerous areas, and we don’t know what is in front of us. But we are going without fear. We are protecting our lives and the lives of more people and more people around the world. We will give people the opportunity to go out and play, or to walk without fear. The things that I saw, I don’t want anyone to see.”