By Rhiona-Jade Armont

Yusuf Zahab was a Sydney schoolboy, taken to live in Syria under the Islamic State group when he was 12.

He has become emblematic of a generation of boys, adrift in the prisons of northeast Syria, locked up without charge from when they were children.

SBS Dateline documents the life of Yusuf Zahab, a boy sinking deeper into the quicksand of a system far from home.

By all accounts, Yusuf Zahab was a happy kid - an Australian schoolboy
who loved the outdoors.

But Yusuf’s story is not synonymous with bike rides around his local Bankstown.

In early 2015, Yusuf’s family went on holiday.

Toward the end of their trip they were in the southern Turkish city of Gazientep, and from there they travelled further south to the border with Syria.

They were no longer on holiday.

Yusuf’s family have conflicting accounts of how and why
they ended up in Islamic State (IS) group territory.

What is known is that two of his older siblings were already there. His eldest brother Muhammed had joined the IS group and his sister Sumaya had been there since 2014.

Yusuf’s father says they crossed into Syria to retrieve them.

His mother says they were coerced across the border by their other son Kaled.

Source: Conflict Monitor IHS Markit, 2015

Yusuf, who was just 12 at the time, says he didn’t understand what was going on.

“My brother Kaled was telling me to run and I was crying and I was scared and holding my mum’s hand and running.

“I didn’t understand until later on they told me what was going on. I didn’t even know what ISIS is. I didn’t even know Syria and Iraq exists in my life.”

From this point, Yusuf’s life would never be the same.

Throughout the years Yusuf lived in the so-called caliphate, the IS group’s territory continued to expand and reports of atrocities abounded.

The group became synonymous with violent extremism, brutality, and horrific violence against women.

Yazidi (a Kurdish-speaking religious minority) women were trafficked and held as sex slaves, journalists and aid workers were attacked and beheaded – their deaths publicised for the world to see – and cultural sites destroyed.

While the world erupted around him, Yusuf says he was mostly at home, playing PlayStation and watching movies on a laptop.

“There used to be hittings from planes and that. My mother was always afraid for me to go out and I was always afraid to go out because the noise of the planes is scary.”

Yusuf’s parents say he lived a protected existence for his first few years in Syria.

His brothers walked a different path.

Muhammad was now a senior IS group member and Kaled had begun training as a fighter.

Yusuf was told by his brothers to pick a new name while they lived under the Caliphate.

He chose Abu Osman.

“In my school Athletics Day … my team was called Osman."

Within a few months of arriving in Syria, Kaled was reportedly killed
in a strike on his training camp.

By 2018, Muhammad had also been killed.

Yusuf insists he never joined the IS group. When asked by SBS Dateline about his parents’ allegiance, he was unsure.

“I always say in my mind it’s because of my brothers,
not because of my mother and father.

“It was because of my brothers, because of Kaled, because of Muhammad.

“They got us into all this trouble.”

Yusuf describes these years as rife with trauma and trepidation.

“We literally spent the time going from place to place, scared of getting hit
until we got to Baghuz.”

Baghuz, a town in southeast Syria on the Iraq border, became infamous as the last outpost of the IS group. As coalition forces closed in, it became clear that these were the final days of a fast-collapsing caliphate.

Source: Conflict Monitor IHS Markit, 2015

As the IS group faced a crippling defeat, the people who lived under its rule were almost free. But Yusuf says the day they emerged from a liberated Baghuz was ike a “horror movie”.