While we were on the frontline, there was a boy, small boy.
I saw his eyes.
You are not Iraqi.
You look at your eyes, it’s different.
I can speak their language, Yazidi.
I [said], “Can you speak that language with me.”
He said, “No, I forgot my language.
Four years I’m with ISIS.”
And he was a suicide bomber who [was] brainwashed by ISIS,
and then all of them died.
He was the only one who survived at that house.
[Developing News]
My name is Afshin Ismaeli.
I’m a journalist and photographer
covering war and conflict around the world.
Since I’m Kurdish, born in Iran,
most of my childhood was impacted by the war and conflicts
around the Middle East.
Kurds are the biggest ethnic groups
which is without a country.
They want to have their own country,
but they have been divided between Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey.
I have seen this close to my eyes.
I have been shot.
I have moved a lot.
That’s shaped my life and had impact on my work.
Here is the end of oppression of Baghuz.
We were trying to shoot some female fighters.
And when we went there,
it was thousands of fighters who are coming for military pride
and celebration of the end of ISIS.
Many of that women got killed during the fight against ISIS.
They have different motivations, like the first of everything,
that the women should not be suppressed by the men.
They are fighting for free woman.
Here we have a photo of a female sniper during the war against ISIS.
It’s well known that they are the best snipers in the area.
One of the ideologies of ISIS, if you got killed by a woman,
you don’t go to their paradise.
So you will go to their hell.
And that was challenging for ISIS
because they wanted not to be killed by a woman.
I feel after a while she was shooting at some ISIS fighters
on the other side.
She told us how her friend took her life
because she was surrounded.
She had to explode herself
because they’re going to be tortured,
they’re going to be raped, then they just got killed.
So she chose to kill herself.
Here we are in Baghuz with the Peshmerga female fighters.
It’s in the morning.
Before the operation starts,
we were on the hill, and we moved 100 meters.
They saw us, and it comes shootings from everywhere.
And suddenly a mortar landed just some meters away from us,
in the middle of those girls.
One of them died immediately.
These guys, which we were with them,
they bring back girls back to a safe place.
And here the snipers are coming, and he is shouting here for help.
She got injured. She got a splinter in her body.
The airstrike’s coming.
You see the smoke here.
See the faces. Describes a lot of their condition.
Here we are in Mosul.
It was the end of Mosul operation,
end of Islamic State at that city.
We were still at the city.
And while we were on the frontline, there was a boy, a small boy,
which comes out, and he says,
“I am Yazidi.”
The Yazidis are a minority group.
Most of the kids were kidnapped, woman being tortured,
and they killed all the men of that minority group.
I saw his eyes.
You are not Iraqi. You look at your eyes, it’s different.
I can speak the language, Yazidi.
And I [said], “Can you speak that language with me?”
He said, “No, I forgot my language.
Four years I’m with ISIS.”
He was one of the 24 kids who was in that house.
All of them were suicide bombers.
And he was a suicide bomber who [was] brainwashed by ISIS.
And then all of them died.
He was the only one who survived at that house.
He survived,
but unfortunately, his sister, she got killed.
We managed to locate his family some days after.
I have still contacts with him
and visit him every year when I am in Iraq.
Here we are in al-Hol camp
with 70,000 inhabitants.
Most of them are Islamic State fighters with their families.
They have something like al-Hisbah, which is a moral polity.
You should cover your face, otherwise you got punishment.
It's really difficult to get an eye shot.
I saw that scene when a lot of women gathering around one man
who are registering that woman inside the reception center.
You see a lot of blackness in that photo.
I saw that eyes there, staring at me in the middle of all blackness.
It represents the Islamic State because their flags was black,
and everybody should wear black.
Here we are in Hasakah, end of Islamic State.
It’s a big prison with 5,000 Islamic State fighters.
When they just opened the window that we could see inside,
was hundreds of people in a small room.
We couldn’t go inside back here because they were dangerous still.
They could kill you. Some of them had weapons.
Some of them joined ISIS because of the belief in Islamic State.
Some of them come for sex.
So, I met a German guy who, in Germany,
he hadn't had any woman in his life,
and he just came to Syria to get many wives.
Some of them got a lot of money, $5,000 monthly salary.
And some of them, they believe in it.
So different stories, different motivations.
It was really shocking.
I mean, like, they took people, they behead people,
they kill people, innocents.
And now the end of them is like that, in that prison, in that small room.
They’re going to be in prison for many years.