DUHOK, Iraq—When Nisreen searches her baby’s budding features she can sometimes see traces of his father: the Islamic State militant who raped her, as his cohorts did to thousands of women from the Yazidi minority to which she belongs.

He was the third militant to take possession of Nisreen after she was captured in Iraq along with several thousand fellow Yazidis whom Islamic State targeted in a genocidal campaign in the summer of 2014.

After three years in captivity, Nisreen was finally freed last year as Islamic State’s caliphate crumbled. But her community and her family refused to take her back with her child, the product of a forced, taboo marriage with a Muslim. She would have to give up the baby if she wanted to rejoin the Yazidis in Iraq.

Faced with that choice, Nisreen kept her baby. “I can’t live without my son,” she said, bouncing the eight-month-old on her lap. The 23-year-old mother didn’t want to be identified by her full name, citing concerns about her safety and that of her child.

Nisreen’s wrenching dilemma speaks to the challenges of reconciliation in Iraq—not only between communities but within them. Islamic State has been routed from nearly all the territory it once controlled, but it will take much longer to mend the social fabric it ripped apart.