Sold by ISIS to strangers, child reunites with family

London: His name was Ayman, but the couple who brought the boy home to their Iraqi village after buying him for $500 called him Ahmed.

Islamic State militants had killed or enslaved Ayman’s parents in their purge of the Yazidi religious minority to which he belongs, then sold the four-year-old to Umm and Abu Ahmed, who are Muslims.

For the 18 months he lived with the couple, his relatives assumed he was dead, one of several thousand Yazidis who have been missing since the militants overran their homes in what the United Nations has called genocide.

When Iraqi forces retook east Mosul and the surrounding area last week, they found Ayman and returned him to what is left of his family. While their reunion was full of joy, breaking the bond between Ayman and his adoptive parents brought new sorrow.

Speaking to journalists brought by Iraqi forces to his home in Rashidiya, north of Mosul, Abu Ahmed swiped through photographs of the boy on his phone: “That’s him riding a bicycle here. That’s him standing in our hall. That’s an exercise machine he played on.”

The windows of the couple’s one-story home on the eastern bank of the Tigris river have been shattered by a blast that destroyed their neighbor’s house, evidence of the fierce fighting that will continue when the army attacks the western side, which is still controlled by Islamic State.

Abu Ahmed emptied the contents of a box onto the bed Ayman used to share with them: toy cars and building blocks, and a children’s book for learning Arabic script.

It was Umm Ahmed’s idea to adopt a child. The couple had no children, and she heard Islamic State was selling orphans in the town of Tel Afar, some 40 km (25 miles) to the west.

“My objective was to win favor (with God),” said Umm Ahmed, only her eyes showing in a gap in her black veil. “To be honest, I wanted to teach him my religion, Islam.”

Her husband, a government employee, was against the idea but could not dissuade his wife, who went alone to get the boy from an orphanage run by the militants, paying for him with her earnings. 

Although the boy cried and did not want to go with her, she coaxed him, saying, “Come, you will be my child. We will live together and I will buy you everything.”

Gradually he grew accustomed to his adoptive parents, who taught him Arabic instead of the Kurdish dialect spoken by Yazidis. 

They told people he was a nephew they had taken in and enrolled him at the local school under the name Ahmed Shareef, but mostly he was kept indoors. 

“He was really smart. I taught him to pray and perform ablutions. Do you know how much of the Koran he memorized?” Umm Ahmed said.

They did not want him to forget who he was. But she said: “I always warned him not to tell anyone (he was Yazidi).”