Forgotten Victims of War: The brutal rule of the Islamic State and the bloody battle to defeat the extremist group has left some 20,000 orphans in northern Iraq.

• Author: Coker, Margaret
• Position: Cover story

When he was 8 years old, Muhammad says, he watched as fighters from the Islamic State dragged his father from their house in the Iraqi city of Mosul and shot him dead in the street.

"I was crying and screaming to leave him alone, to leave my house," says Muhammad, * now 10. "But they didn't listen."

After the militants seized his mother, Muhammad and his two younger brothers and sister ended up at the city's orphanage. They're among the tens of thousands of Iraqi children who lost their parents under the brutality of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) and the battle to retake Iraqi territory from its rule. And they're at risk of becoming forgotten casualties of the war.

"These children, they have suffered the most," says Amal Abdullah, the deputy director of the Mosul orphanage. "It's our duty now to try to return some happiness and comfort to them."

Iraq has essentially been at war since the United States invaded in 2003. U.S. forces quickly ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, whom American officials had accused--in error, it turned out--of harboring weapons of mass destruction. But that did not bring peace or stability to the country, which had long suffered under Hussein's savage rule. The new, U.S.-backed Iraqi government was fragile, and before long, American troops were fighting a war against insurgents that dragged on until 2011, when most U.S. troops left. In the chaos, the Islamic State, a terrorist group, gained significant power and took control of a third of Iraqi territory, starting in the summer of 2014.

The Islamic State ruled the areas it controlled with incredible cruelty that included public executions, torture, and slavery. By the time Iraqi forces, with U.S. help, retook most of the Iraqi territory from extremists in late 2017, some 20,000 children had been orphaned in and around Mosul. And that's just a fraction of the 800,000 to 3 million children orphaned in the entire country since the Iraq war began. That includes children who have lost just one parent, who Iraqis also classify as orphans because a single parent in Iraqi culture can't simultaneously serve as breadwinner and caregiver.

Most of these children have been placed with their extended families. Some without any family live at the Mosul orphanage. The orphans there include children of victims of the Islamic State, like Muhammad, as well as children of dead Islamic State fighters.

"No child is responsible for his parents' actions," says Iman Salim, a...