DOHUK, Iraq: Eight-year-old Ayham Azad loves America, insists on speaking only in English and says he wants to be an American when he grows up. But this Iraqi child’s love for the US comes from one of the darkest places on earth: Raqqa, the former capital of the Islamic State (IS).
Ayham was raised in captivity by an IS fighter and his American wife. “I like America. I want to go next, this family, I want to go next to her,” he says of the woman who helped raise him. “I was next to her, when I am in Raqqa. Her name was Um Yousuf.”
Um Yousuf is Sam, an American woman and member of IS. Ayham says he loves her. But she was also his captor. IS captured Ayham Azad when he was four years old. He was put in the home of an American ISIS woman, who he says he loves.
In August 2014, IS overran Ayham’s town in Iraq’s Sinjar province and targeted its Yazidi population, members of a religious minority the group considers ‘devil’ worshippers. Families were separated, women and girls taken as slaves, men of fighting age shot and killed, and boys abducted to be turned into soldiers.
Nearly 10,000 Yazidis were killed or kidnapped. As the horrors unfolded, Ayham was by his mother’s side while she was delivering a baby. By the time his brother was born, the three of them were trapped behind enemy lines, separated from the rest of their family. Ayham was four years old when IS captured him.
He was sold three times, passed from one household to another until he was taken by Sam and her husband, a fighter of Moroccan descent. They lived in Raqqa, Syria. Ayham quickly learned English and became friends with Sam’s biological children, particularly 10-year-old Yousef, whom he described as his best friend.
Ayham’s story of the person who cared for him portrays Sam as a woman torn between her extreme indoctrination and her humanity. The American woman would repeatedly tell Ayham to recite the names of his parents and siblings in hopes that he would one day find them.
“She tell me don’t forget name your family,” he said. “They can take me then I find my family.” That day came a few months ago, as the group crumbled under a US-backed coalition assault on Raqqa. “Everybody was scared there,” Ayham says, “Not just our house is bombing. They bombing everybody’s house.”
Sam’s husband was killed in the bombardment. She tried to escape with four of her children as well as Ayham. But Syrian Kurdish forces captured her family, and returned Ayham to Iraq where he was reunited with his uncle. “They say you have to go to your family and she has to go to her family,” he says, recalling the moment he was separated from Sam’s family.
Sam and her children are believed to still be detained. An American woman who matches the physical description Ayham provided and goes by the name Sam was seen in the custody of the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the Syrian Kurdish city of Hassakah just three weeks ago, according to a source who cannot be named for security reasons.
Ayham is struggling to accept his new reality. It is a hard one to come to grips with: IS kidnapped his mother and her fate remains unknown. His father has remarried and moved on from the family. His baby brother, who was born during IS’ assault in Sinjar, was also kidnapped and recently rescued by a Kurdish activist. His uncle Tahsin Elias, who already has nine children in his care, is his only guardian.
Twice a week, Ayham sees a counselor in a nearby refugee camp. He struggles to grasp who his true family is – his biological family, or the family who raised him for half his life. Ayham is generally outgoing, enjoys teasing his siblings and constantly speaks in English, although few in the Iraqi Kurdish region understand him.
Ayham is obsessed with the idea of going to America, a near magical world in his mind where he can return to the only constant figure in his life, Sam, and the warped world she created for him. “I want to see if Sam if she went to America or if she don’t went because America is better from here,” he says when asked why he wants to go to the US.
