BBC World News foreign correspondent Yalda Hakin on reporting in Mosul
“First they shot my father dead, then as we tried to get away, the sniper shot my mother. I hate [ISIS], they are evil criminals,” 12 year old Mohamad tells me.
Covered in dust, his loose fitting trousers are rolled up and his flip-flops torn, all reminders of the horrors he has endured in the past few days as he fled his home in west Mosul. Mohammad recalls in graphic detail how he and his two younger brothers managed to get away, leaving the corpses of their parents behind and treading on other dead bodies.
The city of his birth is now destroyed. Reduced to rubble. For almost three years Mohamed had lived under the brutal rule of the Islamic-State and its so called Caliphate. His parents stopped sending him to school, like so many others because of the change in curriculum once ISIS came to town. The only thing the children were being taught at school was to kill, that all other religions and sects deserved to die and that it was for the greater-good of the caliphate and for the sake of Islam.
I met Mohamed when we visited the Hamam Al-Alil camp just South of Mosul, while reporting for BBC World News. He is now eager to learn again. Every day he comes to the camp’s makeshift UNICEF school. He grips tightly onto his new schoolbag given to him by the aid agency. Mohamad says he doesn’t think about the future, he just doesn’t want ISIS to return to his city…
MORE: BBC World News foreign correspondent Yalda Hakin on reporting in Mosul
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