Umm Al'aa has made a vow: She will never tell her son
who his father is.
Axar.az reports referring to CNN.
Instead, Mohammed will grow up surrounded by the love of his
mother and half-brothers and sisters.
He will never be told that his mother became pregnant with him
when she was raped by an ISIS militant while being held captive by
the terrorist group.
"He's my son, he's not the son of ISIS," she insists adding that
he is just as much a part of the family as her other sons and
daughters.
Umm Al'aa is a pseudonym; CNN is not identifying her to protect
the family. Now 40 years old, she was already a mother and
grandmother when ISIS took control of her hometown in 2014.
She says that while her neighbors supported the fighters, she
and her family refused to pledge allegiance to the group, making
them a target.
ISIS fighters regularly came to their home to threaten them into
submission. On one occasion, they attacked her daughter.
"They came and beat [her]," she says. "They tore off her
headscarf, they ripped her clothes.
"They said: 'Let's rape her.' But one of them, the top guy, the
big one, he did not allow them to. He said: 'We want the
mother.'"
A few days later, they cornered Umm Al'aa at the market.
"They told me to get in the car, and when I got in I thought
they would slaughter me," she recalls.
But they had other plans.
"You will be our slave," she was told.
For a year and a half, she lived as a prisoner, "like a dead
person, but they had not killed me yet."
Towards the end of her time in captivity, one of the militants
beat and raped her.
"I tried to fight, I cried a lot," she told CNN. "There was a
lot of pain, I was beaten a lot, but I couldn't do anything."
By the time she was released she was pregnant with a son.
Determined to move on, and to forget the horrors she had
experienced, she named the baby Mohammed, after her husband.
But the reunited family's happiness was short lived: Her husband
was killed Tuesday amid battles on Mosul's eastern outskirts, where
Iraqi and coalition forces are battling ISIS fighters.
"He loved me a lot. My best memory of him was how much he loved
and respected me," she said. "Yes we are poor people, but we were
happy."