Source: The Washington Post
ZAKHU, Iraq — Hiyam never expected to love her daughter.
The father was an Islamic State fighter, who bought Hiyam as a slave after the militants swept through the homeland of Iraq’s Yazidi minority. News of the pregnancy filled her with dread.
She told doctors she didn’t want the baby. She tried to induce a miscarriage, straining to carry the heaviest objects she could find. A gas canister, a carpet. At night, she cried herself to sleep.
But when a midwife placed the baby in her arms — the tiny girl scrunching her face up and yawning — Hiyam knew that she had to protect her. “I could feel it. She was a piece of my soul,” she said. “I loved her from that first moment.”
Categories: Iraq, ISIS, Middle East, The Muslim Times