Copyright
Note to reader: The names of many of the Yazidis and some of the private citizens who appear in this book have been changed for security reasons. The identities of people in public life, as well as the American military veterans who played key roles, are all real.
We have also chosen to use the common Western spelling of Yazidi, rather than the traditional Yezidi, so as not to confuse readers. However, we have elected to use the historic name of Shingal, rather than its more popular counterpart, Sinjar. The region of Shingal in northern Iraq is sacred to the Yazidi people, and as it is also the site of the genocide, we did not feel it should be altered for the telling of this story.
Copyright © 2020 by Shaker Jeffrey and Katharine Holstein
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Jacket image courtesy of the authors
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First Edition: February 2020
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019950503
ISBNs: 978-0-306-92283-1 (hardcover); 978-0-306-92282-4 (e-book)
E3-20200110-JV-NF-ORI
For the lost, taken, and every precious survivor. Whatever comes, may the Yazidi identity endure.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: The Invasion
1. The Spring Baghdad Fell
2. After the Torchlight
3. The Cruelest Month
4. Sergeant White
5. Mosul
6. A Farewell to Angels
7. Riding the Surge
8. The Fortress
9. General Petraeus
10. Left Behind
11. Dil-Mir
12. The Islamic State Comes Home
13. Blind Mice
14. The Invasion
15. Shadow on the Mountain
16. Taken
17. The Situation Rock
18. Exodus
19. The Smuggler’s Route
20. Nadia and the Warehouse of Souls
21. Infiltrating ISIS
22. The Slave Market
23. Saved by Mosquitos
24. Hunted
25. Through the Perilous Fight
26. All the Faithful
Epilogue: Überleben
Photos
Acknowledgments
Discover More
ISIS has made no secret of its intent to destroy the Yazidis of Sinjar, and that is one of the elements that allowed us to conclude that their actions amount to genocide.
UN COMMISSIONER CARLA DEL PONTE, UN COMMISSION OF INQUIRY ON SYRIA
Come in under the shadow of this red rock…
And I will show you fear in a handful of dust
THE WASTE LAND, T. S. ELIOT
Prologue
The Invasion
THEY CAME FOR US ON THE VERGE OF DAYBREAK IN A LONG LINE of beat-up trucks, dark scarves shrouding their faces. It was August 3, 2014, in the Nineveh Province of northern Iraq. The whole village was slumbering in small gray houses, roosters yet to crow. Sky and ground shared a murky oneness like the vast bottom of an ocean. Into that deep quiet, the air suddenly began to vibrate. I sat up, stared into nothing, and listened. Others were also waking, getting out of beds, moving to windows. It was a heavy sound, full of weight—of both metal and intention. You could feel it in your chest. Then, over the rising hum of those engines and through a wake of exploding dust, we heard the genocidal cries of their holy hatred.
In the just-rising sun, I could see them out there, approaching fast over the plains, shouting and firing off machine-gun rounds. Those crazed men closed in as though they’d poured right out of an apocalyptic gash in the earth. Black flags and a few mortar shells; it didn’t take much more than that—we knew exactly who they were and what they wanted. Some people stayed in their shuttered homes, cowering, did all they could to keep the children quiet. Others fled right into the hot morning haze without shoes, without anything whatsoever.
In the end, I was one of those who ran. Ran fast—straight out over the land that was ours long before time. The summer air was filthy; the new sun, blood-red. Suddenly, I didn’t know the day, or the hour. None of us did. We didn’t even know who we were anymore. But who we were was why we were running—running toward our hallowed mountain that rose in the searing distance like an ark.
As a boy I’d watched my father work that land, his white shirt billowing like a sail as he moved along the cucumber fields. My frail king was long dead and I was alone among the tens of thousands who were with me, a hailstorm of gunfire and the shrieks of women erupting in our stampede of terror. Reduced to a pack of wild animals, we clambered far up the rocky mountainside. Mount Shingal was our only possible refuge now, perched high over the endless wasteland of ISIS-infested desert. Our shrines had stood there for centuries, and we knew that steep terrain as well as we knew ourselves. Better, even. When you came across a bullet-riddled body, you just moved over it and kept going for the top.
Two months earlier, I was a senior in high school studying for final exams, and everyone expected me to be first in my class, as I’d always been in the past. Only I knew that I was in danger of failing—hadn’t so much as touched a textbook in years. People said in time it would get better—the nightmares, daymares, and the tremors—but a farmer’s son doesn’t peel off a whole war like a Band-Aid.
At barely seventeen, I’d run away to sign up as a combat interpreter in Mosul, the most terrorist-infested city in the nation. It was the post-9/11 age of occupation and insurgency, the West’s War on Terror in full swing. Now, I look back on that era as the cataract of a monstrous and unyielding storm.
Over the next four years, I went out in full fatigues, supporting American brigade teams as they hunted down terrorist networks across a massive web that spanned the country and stretched over its borders. I was shot at—more than once, I was hit; saw members of my team killed right in front of me. The huge entanglements of radicals we were after didn’t seem to have an end, and as far as I knew, didn’t have a beginning either. When you got rid of one viral cell, twenty more came back with a vengeance.
Through it all, I made lifelong friends: Texans and Californians, New Yorkers and Idaho boys who’d come there just like I had, straight out of a dust bowl. After the Western forces withdrew, I went back to my village fluent
in American slang, met the girl I wanted more than anything to marry. Believed the worst was over.
I was wrong.
The very beast the West had tried to Shock and Awe and annihilate was after me now, out of its cage and making chase across the rocky plains of Shingal. Under one name or another, they’d hunted my people for a thousand years.
I kept my eyes fixed to the mountain now, and the multitude moving toward it, their combined chaos stirring up massive clouds of earth that clogged the air. Several times, I had to stop and cough up mud.
Over 100,000 of us made it to the summit. Up there, on a vast and desolate shelf that seemed to hover in the colorless sky, all you could see was that helpless horde, pressed into a single form, moaning under a crush of baking heat. No trees for shade. No water. No food. People sagged and shivered from thirst in the dirt; the elderly wished out loud to die. It was 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Every infant lay silent in the arms that held it.
ON AN AFTERNOON after the first week, as I slumped over my bed of ground, a faint noise plucked at the stilled air. Slowly, the sound rose and the scores around me draped on the rocks stirred a little. So tired, I peered into the listless void; the world far below enveloped our high refuge like a brown sea. In the faraway haze, I caught a moving form and sat up.
Suddenly, people were on their feet, hoisting children to their shoulders and racing forward. The air above us began to rage and the ground seethed. Then, as though out of a dream, helicopter blades beat the gritty sunlight over me. Glinting things began to fall all around us—water. The pandemonium was immediate. You knew there were never going to be enough bottles, not for all of us. Even now, that splintering chorus of pleas, so weak against the tidal rush of air, haunts me.
As the helicopter moved in closer, people began to grab at the landing skids, their frantic weight pulling the flying machine off-kilter. Some clamored to force themselves in. Others pitched screaming children through the open doors. I saw the silhouette of a cameraman appear at the hatch, aim his lens as a journalist in a dress shirt and body armor next to him pointed at us.
The chopper banked sideways, began to lift away toward the boundless sky. At once in the violent wind, thousands of Yazidi hands went up through torrents of sand, reaching out for their departing hope together.
I stood in the melee half-mad and shouting, sand beating into my eyes. I looked around me at all of them, at that forest of wizened limbs. I couldn’t hear a thing anymore, not a single entreaty or the dissipating rotors. Suddenly I was seeing us all from above, saw my own wild and spattered face, parched mouth wide open. And I rose higher still, way up into the ether; what was left of me below diminished until I was nothing more than a shadow on the mountain.
All over the surrounding terrain, rabid soldiers of the Islamic State swarmed the plains and foothills, taking our women and girls as sex slaves—mine included—and massacring the rest. They sat in trucks, pointed their weapons, and waited for the rest of us to come down.
And I did go down, crossed enemy lines and even infiltrated their ranks in disguise to rescue the taken. Ever since, I’ve been on the run from ISIS. They’ve tried many times to kill me—but they’ll have to catch me first.
Chapter One
The Spring Baghdad Fell
IN THE LOW LIGHT OF LATE AFTERNOON, A BOY AND A MAN raced up a sloped field in the Shingal region of northern Iraq. Arms pumping, they dashed between tight rows of sprouting onions: soft new leaves ankle high, the ground hard and the gusting air cool. All around them, the cultivated land stretched on for acres and acres, planted rows like a multitude of rail tracks running into a wavering atmosphere of flickering sun and falling mist. The sky was as pale as an empty canvas, and crested larks cut across it, their birdsong loud and high. In the faraway distance, gentle foothills rippled out like great folds in the boundless blanket of earth spread before the blunt summit of Shingal, which rose like a vision right across it. It was past those soft peaks somewhere, my father had told me, that the first man was born.
Haji ran hard, towering like a dark-haired giant, shirt flashing. Only the big brown satchel strapped to his side held him back. I was the boy a pace or two ahead of him, mismatched sneakers, long-limbed and thin, laughing out loud as I sprinted. I could always feel Haji thudding just behind me like a heavy shadow; at twelve years old, I was a full seventeen years his junior. For all my youth and speed, I was always methodical in my stride—never took a step that wasn’t planned well in advance.
Reaching the crest of the field, we stopped and turned, and I leaned into the steady wind that spat bits of dry soil in my face. Even over the howling air, I thought I could hear the lambs baying in their pens. At the foot of the slope, in a small spooned-out dip in the endless plains, I saw all that we were. Our little house, a lonely thatched shoebox, front door wide open. Farm buildings scattered like crates between crippled wooden fences, a mess of dirt roads that seemed to lay strewn like dirty ropes. The farmstead stood as though it had sprouted from the very ground out of which we’d built it. And from that simple snapshot of tranquility that I can see even now in minute detail, I felt the full embrace of home—it didn’t really matter what was happening anywhere else.
OVER FOUR HUNDRED miles south of our heedless wasteland, a line of tanks, Humvees, and armored personnel carriers of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines pulled out of the gates of their base and thundered across the flat heart of ancient Mesopotamia. They were on a two-lane paved road and headed in a steady beeline for the battered capital. As the contingent roared over the floodplains, my fellow countrymen, watching from ditches and pockets of marshland along the way, gasped. Some in wonder. Others in terror.
Once the procession was out of view, those people rushed back to their state-owned concrete houses. By nightfall, the details would spread mouth to ear again and again, thousands of times over, in endangered whispers, from one impoverished town to the next. Not a single satellite television for a hundred square miles around my speck-of-dust village—that was how we got the news. Never before, in its long history of wrath, had our battle-seasoned country borne a military force of such capable and colossal ferocity. Entering the main drag of the city, the 3/4 Battalion moved slowly. It was April 9, 2003, and America with all her might was on the ground in Baghdad.
Exhalations from the Tigris river drifted along the jumbled streets, cooling the choked air mere moments before dissolving into a hot shroud of carbon and soot. Mighty twin of the slow Euphrates, the current had flowed over a thousand miles from the Taurus Mountains of Turkey to get there, winding down through the arid alluvial plains of Iraq, cutting gorges out of bedrock and rushing past forests of pistachio. It had snaked by sheep farms and mud-hut villages, great dams and military bunkers, flashed under the gaze of falcons and long-abandoned gods, before splitting into the river delta of Shatt al-Arab, whose tangled tributaries once cleaved whole tribes and set realms to war, even before they’d divided Iraq from Iran—all in a never-ending race for the blue sweep of the Persian Gulf. Those mythical waters once irrigated the first civilization of Sumerians and had witnessed the many invasions of Mongols and the six-hundred-year rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire; its rushing current carried vessels of the ancient Greeks and, well before then, had gently rocked the cradle of humanity.
The bombed-out capital now rose right from those muddy banks, buildings still smoldering and sending up furious columns of black smoke. Trapped in swirls of current, clumps of garbage accumulated and then floated lazily along like small ramshackle rafts. In that very place, human beings had lived and thrived for millennia, and the marble palace of fallen Arabian kings—and later our once indomitable dictator, Saddam Hussein, now in hiding—sat looted and empty.
WORLDS AWAY AND looking over the plain face of our house, I could see the window that always stood wide open like a small door into a dream. Past the sill and unseen, my old father was fast asleep, alone in his bed. Those days he slept far more than he did anything else. In the morning, I shav
ed his face as he lay back against the pillows. The skin of his face slackened, eyes set deep inside their caves, the lids half-open and flickering. Those noble blues that he said had witnessed a whole lifetime before I was born, just so he could teach me, were dimming under cataracts. I combed his hair, carefully changed his clothes. When he moved with my touch, I could feel those old bones slip and clack under his paper-thin skin. After that, I brought him spiced chai and a soft-boiled egg. Sometimes I’d feed the egg to him slowly, sometimes just wait there if he was strong enough that day to use the spoon himself. From time to time, he’d look over at me sitting against the wall, and shrug. I’d look back and give him a faint smile. We were exchanging a sure knowledge about the pointlessness of any sorrow and the brevity of all things. Then he’d drain the last of his cup and close his eyes awhile.
We also talked in that room, for small stretches through the day, like crossing a line of stepping-stones over his endless river of sleep. He had no sense of the time anymore, which seemed to stop and hold its breath between those walls. My mother said that in his dreams he spoke with the Seven Angels, one God-given to us for each day of the week.
Past the house, on a fifteen-mile concrete plate poured over the open moonscape, stood our village of Khanasor, meaning “the Red Bar,” some said for the Yazidis’ appreciation of watering holes and wine. It was but one of dozens of planned villages the central government constructed in the 1970s and built for the same purpose as all the others across the province: to contain and control the mountain-dwelling and nomadic people.
Not long after taking power, Saddam Hussein rounded up the Yazidi tribes and forced them down from their tiny huts on sacred Shingal and into soulless towns erected at its feet. Over thirty-five thousand people, including a handful of Sunni Muslims who taught at our government schools, all packed into cinderblock homes, each one exactly like the next: just enough to keep us warm, but not enough to fill our heads with bad ideas—like expecting free elections, for one. Still, in Saddam’s dream of a homogeneous Arabized nation, we were just a hangnail among cancers of Shia, Christians, and Kurds.
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