‘How I Saved My Kids From ISIS’

posted on: Apr 27, 2015

When ISIS came knocking on Huda Alrawi’s door, looking to marry off her daughter and draft her son, the Iraqi schoolteacher knew she had to flee.
When Huda Alrawi fled Iraq it was almost exactly 10 years after al Qaeda militants killed her husband for owning a barbershop that practiced hair threading—a beauty routine they considered anti-Islamic.

It was five months after ISIS militants began forcing their way into her house, tapping their guns against her neck and calling her a spy because the Iraqi government paid her salary as a school principal.

It was after multiple visits by mysterious veiled women who would knock on her door under the premise of enrolling their children in her school, but then ask Alrawi whether her daughter was the right age for marrying and if her son was old enough to join in the Islamic State’s jihadist crusade.

Now, after smuggling herself across miles of ISIS-controlled territory and selling her last belongings to pay for a ticket to neighboring Jordan four months ago, Alrawi is out of moves.

Cars swerve in and out of loosely defined lanes in the steep streets of Amman, and Alrawi, clad in a scarf with delicate flowers creeping up the side of her head, issues stern directions to a driver. She rifles through her purse and pulls a packet of photos. It appears she always keeps them with her. The first are of her and her daughter, a 10-year-old named Shams, covered head to toe in blue niqabs, the ultra-conservative veil required by the Islamists. She explains that when ISIS arrived in her town, they had to don the identity-obscuring veil even at home, in case anyone came by to check. They stand in front of her house in Iraq, which, as the rest of the photos prove, had been reduced to a pile of rubble.

She points to this photo to justify her currently perilous existence as a refugee: “My daughter, give her to be married? No. My son, give him to daesh to kill people?” she asks, using the Arabic abbreviation for the Islamic State. “No.”

Jordan currently plays host to more than 800,000 refugees, the vast majority fleeing civil war in Syria. But since ISIS spread violently into Iraq, the population of Iraqis arriving in Jordan has nearly doubled, totaling around 60,000. Most of the country’s refugees live in cities, but as they are not legally allowed to work, they survive in the margins. Four years into the conflict in Syria, the flood of newcomers has strained Jordan’s hospitality. In the past few months, the government and the World Food Program have dramatically severed social services and food assistance to the already struggling population.

Source: www.thedailybeast.com