'The Government is Constructing a New Generation of ISIS'

Curled into a ball in the corner of a basement in Mosul's Old City, Ahmad Shaker was trapped. When Iraqi forces began advancing on the historic district on the west side of the Tigris River in June of 2017, the remaining ISIS fighters took hundreds of civilians and locked them in basements and cellars, using them as human shields while fighting from the rooftops. Try to leave and we will shoot you directly, they said. In Ahmad's case, they locked the doors. As an international coalition of forces rained down mortars, the ceilings cracked and bits of roof fell in. As the 12-year-old sat next to his mother and father in the darkness, his shoulders shook, and the walls of the house swayed. The next thing he knew, he was beneath the rubble, covered in dust. An ISIS fighter pulled him out, and promptly ran away. Alone and wounded, Ahmad saw other families fleeing, and with his parents nowhere to be seen, he followed these neighbors past Iraqi military checkpoints to a mustering point outside the Old City.

"I went out of the Old City and the military took me to another checkpoint, then from there to a camp," Ahmad says, speaking in a flat tone beneath the fluorescent lights of the orphanage office where we're sitting, making the process sound straightforward. It was anything but.

At the height of Iraq's summer in 2017, temperatures reached over 125 degrees Fahrenheit, families fled through narrow alleyways, Iraqi soldiers ordered men to strip to their underwear to ensure they weren't wearing suicide belts, and ISIS wives routinely detonated well-hidden belts at checkpoints in a last-ditch effort to kill Iraqi soldiers. Unaccompanied youth like Ahmad, most of whom had been living on a diet of raw wheat for weeks, were passed around in chaos: from mustering point to front-line field hospitals to child protection officers who attempted to sort out their situation, and sent them to camps for the displaced. He waited there for four months.

[For more on this story by ALEX POTTER, go to https://psmag.com/social-justi...w-generation-of-isis]