Yazidi New Year should have been a happy time for Jovan - her first festive occasion with her family after four years apart. They went out shopping together for coloured paints to decorate boiled eggs - a Yazidi tradition.

But despite being reunited with the children she loved, Jovan felt desperate. A few days after leaving the orphanage she had resolved to accept the situation and concentrate on her three other children. Now she was finding it impossible.

“I think about him constantly,” she said at the time.

“Every night I dream about him. How can I forget him? I breastfed him and he’s my baby. I ask you: Are women like us wrong? Are we wrong for missing our children?”

After several weeks, Jovan couldn’t stand it any longer. She made a decision from which she must have suspected there was no way back. She told her children she was going to the city of Dohuk for trauma therapy.

In reality, she was heading back to the orphanage.

“It was such a terrible day when I left them,” she says. “But I felt that I had betrayed my child. My other three children had grown up [the eldest by now was in their late teens], and they had their father. But Adam had no-one. The poor kid had absolutely no-one, and I was missing him day and night.”

When Jovan arrived at the orphanage, she was told Adam was sick, and she couldn’t see him. But what Sakineh eventually confessed - after two or three days - was that the orphanage, overstretched by conflict, had put up some of the children for adoption, via a local judge.

Sakineh says she expressly told the judge that Adam, and four other children whose mothers were IS abduction survivors, should not be offered for adoption as their mothers might one day want to claim them.

Despite this, Adam had been given away.

Sakineh says Jovan cried and cried when she told her the news.

She couldn’t face going home and instead found refuge in a women’s shelter in northern Iraq. A few months later Khedr divorced her, and sent her a message that she could no longer see her other children.

Back in the village, Khedr is sad, but unrelenting.

“I know it wasn’t [Adam’s] fault. I’ve said it was God’s will that he was born. If I thought he was to blame, I would have left him in Syria to die. If I was a bad person I would have killed him, but I didn’t. I let him live and paid to bring him here with my wife.

“But when [IS] comes and kills your entire family, and takes your wife, and has a child with her, we can’t accept it. No one would accept it no matter what religion they believed.”

Jovan's children differ on how they view her disappearance from their lives. Her eldest child Haitham shares his father’s feelings, saying he cannot accept a child of IS as a brother.

“My mother left us for her other child,” he says. He adds that his younger brother Azad was still asking for her several months after she left, but has now stopped.

“I told him that our mum will not come back, so don’t wait. After that he stopped looking for her.”

But Hawa - the girl who rocked Adam to sleep in Raqqa - is more sympathetic.

“When our mother was home, everything was very good. I wish she could come back, but it was also her right to miss Adam.”

Jovan is not the only mother to face such a terrible dilemma. The BBC spoke to 20 Yazidi women with children born to IS fighters - none of them felt able to bring their children home. Many were forced to leave their children in northern Syria before returning to Iraq.

One of those, Laila, was just 16 when she was taken by IS to Syria. She had two children with her abductor, but a Kurdish commander told her they were children “from the devil”.

“I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to go back home and I wasn’t given a choice.”

She says her dream is to go to university and then get a job that will finance her search for her children.

“I just want to see them one more time and die. I don’t want anything else.”

She is furious that the Yazidi Spiritual Council refuses to relax its rules barring IS children from being accepted into the community.

“Sometimes I think that our life was better under IS... at least I had my children with me” Jovan

“Sometimes I feel Yazidi men have no heart. They are not women, they are not mothers, they can never understand what we are going through.”

Only one of the women the BBC spoke to was allowed to keep her IS child. Rojin was sold, along with her four-year-old daughter, to seven different IS men. She returned to Iraq almost two months pregnant. Her doctor advised her that as the pregnancy was still in the early stages, she should convince her husband to pretend the baby was his. He agreed, won over by the argument that a child would make it easier to get asylum abroad, should they apply for it.

But nevertheless Rojin lives in fear.

“If my family or any one in our Yazidi community find out the truth about my son, they will take him from me, or would force me to leave my home and my daughter.”

Over the past 18 months, Jovan has received counselling, but she is still very fragile. In her notebook she has drawn a sketch of their days in Raqqa - a fighter jet overhead, Jovan in a house with her four children.

“Sometimes I think that our life was better under IS. We were under siege, and life was difficult, but at least I had my children with me.

“I wasn’t wounded [physically] during those four years, but I felt wounded when I came back to Iraq. I am wounded because of what my family, my community, and the rules did to take my children from me.”

She is so angry with her husband and disappointed in her community that she has decided to remain a Muslim.

“I don’t want to remain a part of the Yazidi community… the truth is that it’s only because of religion that I am now separated from my family.”

But she is terrified that she will be estranged from her three oldest children for ever.

“My biggest fear is that my children forget me, or won’t forgive me because I left them. But I keep telling myself that they wouldn’t forget their mother.”

According to Sakineh, Jovan is eligible to withdraw Adam from adoption as long as she can prove via DNA test that she is his mother. However the fact that Jovan is Yazidi, and the child will have been registered as Muslim because registration takes the ethnicity of a child’s father, could complicate the process.

For the time being, Jovan says she has accepted Adam is better off where he is.

“I think about him every day. But I think for my son it’s better to live with the other person for now. It’s better for him.”

All she has left is the dream she and all her children can eventually be reunited.

“Hopefully, one day, if God has mercy on me, then we will see each other again.”

Some names have been changed to protect the contributors’ identities.