Caroline Irby

  • In 2002, shortly after Sierra Leone's decade-long civil war ended, I was commissioned by UNICEF to photograph their rehabilitation work with recently deweaponised child soldiers. This is lunch time at a care centre in Yengema, Koidu, for children who had been separated from their families during the conflict; most of them had spent time with the rebel army. The centre was run by the International Rescue Committee. A few days after I took this picture, I saw the three children on the right side of the picture (left to right: Bintu Kpakima, 12, Rebecca Fillie, 10, and Komba Kanessie, 14) reunited with their families.
  • Children forced to fight with the rebels during the civil war return to school following disarmament
  • A playground in Koidu, Sierra Leone; some of these children were starting school for the first time, after the decade-long civil war caused many of the country’s schools to close
  • Recently demobilised child soldiers training to become mechanics at a garage in Makeni. Children caught up in the fighting were taught new skills in rehabilitation programmes across the country following the peace accord, which many found it difficult to stick with.
  • Moussou Zannou and her mother being reunified after ten years apart. In October 2002, I travelled with Moussou as she was returned to the village that she had last seen ten years earlier when, as a ten-year old girl, she was kidnapped by rebel soldiers. Arriving back in her village in 2002, Moussou, by then twenty, had forgotten her mother tongue and now carried in her arms a baby boy, born from a forced relationship with a rebel soldier. At the moment of reunification - after a day-long minivan ride across Sierra Leone - Moussou’s mother danced, wept, prayed, smiled and kissed her daughter as she welcomed her home and held her baby grandson for the first time; Moussou remained utterly impassive. The contrast in their expressions has never left me.
  • Moussou Zannou’s mother meets her grandson for the first time. The baby was born to Moussou from a forced relationship with a rebel soldier, after she was kidnapped from her village.
  • Rebecca Fillie, right, then aged 10, and Komba Kanessie, then aged 14 (both also appear in the first photograph in this series) being reunified with family in 2002, following several years of separation during the war
  • Bintu Kpakima, left, and Rebecca Fillie, right, being reunified with family in 2002, following several years of separation during the war
  • Rebecca Fillie, centre, and Bintu Kpakima, right, moments after being reunified with family in 2002, following several years of separation during the war
  • After being separated from her parents during the war, then spending years living in refugee camps in Guinea, Rebecca Fillie, at the centre of this photograph, started school for the first time shortly after the war ended in 2002. She was 10, and was the only child in the classroom without a uniform, but she didn’t let the teasing stop her from attending school, as many other children did
  • Children playing football on a beach in Freetown
  • Break time at the Milton Margai School for the Blind in Freetown: the children played football by following the sound of a bell in the ball. Some of the pupils had been blinded by rebels during the civil war.
  • Sinnah Kamara, 10, was taken by her parents to the Milton Margai School for the Blind in Freetown when she was seven; three years on, in 2002, she hadn’t yet heard from them
  • Children at the Milton Margai School for the Blind in Freetown
  • Osman Kamara playing recorder in his dormitory at the Milton Margai School for the Blind in Freetown
  • Over the years, I often wondered what became of the children I met in Sierra Leone in 2002, and how their lives were affected by what they had endured
  • Twenty years on, I decided to go back to try to find them and hear their stories
  • The Sunday Times Magazine commissioned the return story, and in October 2022, I travelled back to Sierra Leone with friend and long-time collaborator Alex Renton
  • The International Rescue Committee agreed to help, and launched a radio and poster campaign to try to locate the children I had met two decades earlier. They managed to find three of these children (all appear in the first photograph in this series). I took this photograph above in 2022; it shows Rebecca Fillie, now 30, with her three-year old son, Moses. Rebecca works as a teaching assistant and is saving to study nursing.
  • This is Komba, who is head teacher in a remote community near the Guinea border, and lives with his wife and five children
  • From left to right: Rebecca, Bintu and Komba, who met as children fleeing the violence, looked out for each other during the war and have remained in touch since. They all appear in the first photograph of this series.
  • Moussou was the one child who I met in 2002 who we were unable to locate in 2022. I had really hoped that Moussou might be found, and that I could meet her again and perhaps discover what her life had become, but the public radio and poster campaigns that led to the three other children didn’t lead us to Moussou. The International Rescue Committee, who launched the search campaigns, thought that this most likely meant either Moussou was living in such a remote area of Sierra Leone that the radio broadcasts had not reached her, or that she had crossed into a neighbouring country for work, or fallen victim to Ebola or another illness; Sierra Leone also has the world’s highest mortality rate. There’s also the chance that she had chosen to lie low, fearing stigmatisation or not wanting to open up old wounds. I still hope that one day I’ll find her, even if not to share her story.
Sierra Leone’s children of war, 2002-2022