Forced to deliver ‘cubs of the caliphate’ for the Islamic State, midwife shared moments tender, cruel and grotesque

Samira al-Nasr has delivered thousands of babies over four decades as a midwife in the city of Raqqa, but she says nothing was like the childbirth she attended two years ago as the handpicked doula of the Islamic State.

Moments after an infant was born to a Turkish couple – an Islamic State fighter and his young wife – they tried to dress their newborn son in a custom-tailored military uniform. The father proudly declared that the child would grow up to become an Islamist militant. Nasr was revolted. She said she persuaded the father not to use the uniform, telling him the material was too coarse for the baby’s delicate skin.

Nasr, 66, is among the millions who lived under the Islamic State’s violent and austere rule in Syria and Iraq, but she witnessed a side of the militancy that perhaps no other outsider did. She was coerced, she said, into delivering countless babies for Islamic State families, attending the most intimate moments of their secluded lives, which she described as alternately ordinary and grotesque.

Entrusted by the Islamic State with delivering the “cubs of the caliphate” shortly after it captured Raqqa in 2014 and made the city its capital, Nasr began making house calls at all hours. During the three years she was shuttled by taxis and gunmen to the homes of Islamic State families, most of them foreign, Nasr’s emotions ran from fear to anger to helplessness, she said. There was none of the joy or pride that had sustained a career of delivering babies for a generation of Raqqans.

“They had no respect for the profession,” she said of the militants and their wives. “I was like a prop, not a caregiver. I would attend the birth and they would toss me out.”

The children of the “caliphate” were themselves treated as props. They were central characters in Islamic State propaganda videos, which often showed children of diverse European, Asian and African backgrounds studying Islamic State teachings, or playing and training with weapons. Other videos purported to show adolescent boys executing people deemed apostates or enemies.