Some children have forgotten that they are Yezidis.
Mr. Hussein knows from his son, who is not being identified for his own safety, that he is being forced to do construction work for about $1 a day.
But without the $9,000 detainees are demanding for each of their six relatives, Mr. Hussain doesn’t know how to bring his loved ones home.
Since he first re-established contact with the child in the summer of 2020, Mr. Hussain said he paid the captor $600 for one and $1,200 for the other. But that was not enough to set the boy free, and it was not enough for his son to keep sending him messages.
Recently, Mr. Hussain said, the kidnapper contacted him again.
“A week ago, I was talking to the guy via Facebook, and he said to me, ‘If you want to talk to the kids, you have to pay me $300 each time,'” Mr. Hussain said. . “I told him I couldn’t stand it, but let’s get in touch.”
Mr. Hussein now relies on aid organizations to survive in a camp on Mount Sinjar, where he relocated his family after a fire broke out at a larger camp in the Kurdistan region.
“I didn’t want what’s left of my family to burn,” he said.
He said his three sons were captured by ISIS in 2014. A year later, he managed to borrow money to buy his youngest son’s freedom when he was a child with five other relatives, who were taken to Syria and then captured. to neighboring Turkey. Mr Hussein said his family paid $30,000 for all six of them and picked up their loved ones at the Iraqi-Turkish border.
From 2015 to 2020, he did not know the fate of his other two sons. In the summer of 2020, he learned it from other relatives who are still in captivity.