A story from the darkness of ISIS

Abeer Mohammad

“I lost my children during the war,” ” my family and I suffered of hunger and humiliation at the hands of ISIS. Two sentences were said by umm Duha, a woman in the fifth decade of her life while telling us the story of her family.

She has the courage and desire “in front of us” for the first time to unleash from inside and talk about the pain and ache she lived daily with her waiting on the ruins for the return of her children , who were absent because of ISIS to this day.

Umm Duha, from Al Qoriya area in the countryside of Deir al Zour, talked while she was unable to stop her eyes from tearing because of losing her children, and how they lived a life same as a prison under ISIS control,
“I am not aware of where my children are now. They were abducted by ISIS and I do not know if they are alive or not, I lost contact with them.” Said Umm Duha, |Since 2014, ISIS controlled the rural areas of Deir al-Zour and between the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015 ISIS started to blockade the city.”

Umm Duha said that the desire to live in this reality did not satisfy ISIS and therefore they didn’t leave them alone(she with her husband and daughter).
The organization did not leave their daughter alone. She was forced to marry an element of ISIS (Afghan), who said that he will kill her father if she did not marry him, she agreed unpleasantly, and stayed for two months with him , then he left her pregnant.

She adds that her husband came several months later to their home and gave money to her husband to help him escape. “But Abu Duha(her husband) took the money and fled and left us a bite to eat by ISIS, where we have lived black days”.

The family did not oppose the organization, even when the ISIS husband left their pregnant daughter. The family did not dare to do anything. In her interview with the Aso news network, she added that the family was isolated from the outside world. “We were prevented from leaving the house, The organization did not leave a way of torture to try it on us even to the denial of eating and drinking.”

It is not easy to remember the difficult moments that one lived. Here, Umm Duha stops a little and goes back to a very difficult reality and go on , “Sometimes we cooked with water only, because of the cost of everything, the oil and the obese we no longer knew them, and we were deprived of tea because one kilogram of sugar became 3 thousand Syrian pounds at the time, and a kilogram of potatoes and tomatoes was a dream to us, except that it is forbidden to reject this fact, too.

And ISIS imposed his own laws on Deir al-Zour, and the hardest were imposed on the region of Qoriya. They worked on winding the constraints around the necks of the people and made their lives dark, to not let the region to rebel against them, according to Umm Duha, that they imposed the rules regarding to the clothes(the black clothes) which was the legal cloth in ISIS law, the cloth included al Burqaa , al abaiya, al draa and al jafat. this dress must be worn by women and girls so as not to show anything from their bodies. “Women were treated in an inferior way. Women were punished for the simplest mistakes. None of the elements would hear anyone or confirm on the accusation in issues such as prostitution or breaking the rules ,The members of the organization dug a hole and placed the woman in it and stoned their head until death.”

Every class in the society had a special method of torture by the organization. In cases of youth, all were forced to come and watch the punishment “to become the punished person a lesson for the others.” “The worst among ISIS were al Muhajreen, “They used to tie the hands of young people and cover their heads and then kill them without pity, so they didn’t let them to say the death testimony.”

Even the endeavor to escape from the organization had a punishment as Umm Duha said .”Who was arrested while trying to escape out of their territories were being punished to death for being a traitor and infidel according to ISIS” According to Umm-Duha, the smugglers were working with ISIS, who considered smuggling a living and finance resource.

Finally, the mother and her daughter, after suffering of hunger and torture, miraculously managed to reach Ein Issa camp in the rural Raqqa, where she lives today and says, “We live so that the black time will not come back again

*Umm Duha is a fake name with the desire of the speaker
*The picture is from the internet