The Pigeon Boy and Other Forgotten Fugitives from ISIS
Mohammed Hussein, a six-year-old Iraqi boy, was born with a condition known as glanular hypospadias, in which the opening for the urethra is not in its usual place at the tip of the penis. When his father, Saad Hussein, pulled the child’s trousers down to show me, his mother and five sisters seemed unsurprised. Need had […]Robin Wright reports for The New Yorker:
Mohammed Hussein, a six-year-old Iraqi boy, was born with a condition known as glanular hypospadias, in which the opening for the urethra is not in its usual place at the tip of the penis. When his father, Saad Hussein, pulled the child’s trousers down to show me, his mother and five sisters seemed unsurprised. Need had long ago superseded modesty. We were clustered together on the floor of a small tent in Baharka, a camp outside Erbil, in northern Iraq, for people who have fled ISIS but who haven’t left the country. The family has been quartered there for almost two years.
The Husseins left their home, in Hamdani, just after 3 A.M. in early August, 2014, after shouts from the street warned that ISIS had entered the village. Tales of what ISIS fighters were doing to women and girls—rape, forced marriage—preceded the invasion. Saad, a taxi-driver, wanted to get his family out as fast as possible. They departed with almost nothing.
