Shadow on the Mountain

by Shaker Jeffrey

  “I feel badly that you drive all this way,” she said, as soon as her brother left the kitchen. Here and there, when chaperoning family members took breaks, we transformed moments alone into lifetimes.

  “Why would you feel badly, when seeing you is a gift?” I got up and stood behind her for a few quiet moments, heat swelling between us, but we never touched. In those days, sharing the same air inside the same four walls was enough.

  Dil-Mir turned around and looked at me. “Your face is like a dark moon, Shaker. Those dreams have come back, I can feel them rising from you.”

  Dil-Mir had a poetic way of speaking that often made me laugh, but not to mock her. She was nothing like anyone, male or female, I’d ever met. In our thoughts and wishes, we were of the same mind. And in her manner of speaking, movement, and dress, I believed Dil-Mir was the epitome of what it meant to be a Yazidi: she respected herself, considered all matters fairly, and never raised her voice against anyone. For the rest of my life, I needed to search no further for fulfillment than her face.

  I couldn’t share my dreams that day—to say more meant going into the darkness and having a look around. I was in Dil-Mir’s kitchen, she was there—it was all that mattered just then. I went back to cutting up the meat.

  Dil-Mir moved to the kettle and poured steaming water into a pot and then threw in a fistful of tea leaves. Water hitting the chai went instantly red, and I watched as she closed her kohl-rimmed eyes and inhaled the sweet tendrils of steam. I imagined that we were in a bright kitchen of our own, cooking meals, unwinding the long day like a ribbon while several children napped in their small beds.

  “All the news out there. Nothing good can come of watching television and the internet the way you do,” she said, always certain everything would be fine.

  But it was important to know. To know was to prepare. My friends in the Iraqi army didn’t seem too worried. We had tanks and Hellfire missiles—the militants had rusted trucks; ISIS was in Syria—this was Iraq. But then I talked to Brownsword, who was equal parts soldier and scholar—he could take you back in time a thousand years to tell you why things were the way they were. At the sound of his name, Dil-Mir rolled her big obsidian eyes and let out a laugh.

  “Oh no,” she said. “And what did the professor have to say this time?”

  I shrugged and turned to the window. Rain laced the atmosphere though there wasn’t a cloud in sight, and I thought of the long drive back around the mountain, alone.

  “He said just one word, and it made me think.”

  “And what word was that, Shaker dear?”

  I got up carrying the earthenware bowl and tossed the cleaned off bones into a stockpot. Then I turned around again and put down the empty dish.

  “Leave.”

  ON APRIL 23, 2013, a security team, including members of the ISF, led by the army’s 12th Division, all armed to the teeth, converged on a sit-in Sunni protest camp in the northern city of Hawija, in the Kirkuk Province—right next door to Nineveh. In retaliation for a recent attack on a nearby police checkpoint, and to subdue the violent protests that had taken place there, the officers were ordered to dismantle the camp. Without warning, they unleashed their machine guns like rain over the gathering of Sunnis.

  By the time the last round tore through its mark, the bodies of over fifty young men in their prime lay strewn in macabre poses over the ensanguined dirt. To this day, many of my fellow Iraqis, whatever their creed, look back on that lethal afternoon as the beginning of the end of our collective hope. From then on, tribal leaders heightened their anti-al-Maliki rhetoric and called for fierce reprisals. In the Middle East it wasn’t just an eye for an eye, it was a thousand lives for a life—whoever put more blood on the ground made the lasting impression.

  Iraq had finally reached a boiling point: al-Maliki’s democratically elected government and its security forces had proven themselves utterly corrupt, dysfunctional, and homicidal. Meanwhile, the Syrian war had emboldened those cells of insurgents, and their malignant hatreds were metastasizing right back over our border. Within a month, over seven hundred Iraqis were slaughtered in a noxious stew of collateral violence: roadside bombs, vehicle-borne IEDs, drive-by shootings, arbitrary murders, and torture sessions gone too far.

  Then the real threat hit home.

  In the cultivated fields around Rabia, where I’d picked the summer harvests as a young boy, several corpses were found decomposing along the empty furrows. All of them were laborers, each bearing a single bullet dead-center to the nape of the neck. Blindfolded and kicked in the teeth, their hands had been bound behind their backs—one of many ISIS trademarks. By the time their bodies were discovered half-buried in the baked earth, predatory birds had already picked out the eyes from their skulls, just as the insurgents had picked over their bodies for a few crumpled dinars. In the political storm of unbridled revenge tearing up the nation, those simple laborers were insignificant, except for one thing: they were all Yazidis.

  Week after week thereafter, similar kidnappings and killings ensued all over the northern region: people hauled out of their cars along the desert roads, girls plucked from the plains, men from buses, even their beds. Sometimes the kidnappers demanded a ransom and it was duly paid without incident; other times the maimed bodies showed up days later, dumped haphazardly into gutters. I’d seen them for myself lying along the road like bags of trash. Dil-Mir was only half right—the nightmares, daymares, and tremors had returned, but now they carried an unstoppable vengeance. My body knew it well before I did—we were all just prey.

  LONG DESTINATIONLESS RECONNAISSANCE drives around the province in my dirt-covered white car revealed little more than business as usual. At checkpoints, I watched as officers in loose fatigues strutted down the line of vehicles, new boots sending up puffs of dirt, sunburned lips sucking on cigarettes and sipping sodas from well-stocked coolers. More than a few had hard liquor on their breath, I was sure of it.

  Lately, I’d heard stories about hardcore drugs infiltrating the ranks. Heroin. Pharmaceuticals. Hashish from Iran. Those were often the fat-cat divisions, full of well-fed officers earning a good salary, while lazing in the sun counting up cars and sweaty rolls of cash, and taking their sweet time searching trunks. They roughed up suspects, hauled a few in for beatings; weapons were discharged, bones broken, but incidents of unwarranted violence and outright fraud were rarely investigated. For the lower-ranking soldiers, drugs were often the only available antidote to the unrelenting stress of living in a perpetual state of warfare. Meanwhile, the new battlefront churned bare miles away, closing in like a slow-moving hurricane.

  Division commanders at the army bases had little time for me other than small talk. Hard to tell if they were even conducting regular training exercises anymore. Still, their good-natured apathy was infectious, and I believed wholeheartedly that the conscience of the world would not neglect us. We fired up hookahs in the yard and talked about the good old days of buffet lines, burgers, and barbecues. We exchanged email addresses, cell phone numbers, and even connected on Facebook.

  “Keep in touch, Shaker, and remember that you have the Kurdish armies to protect you.”

  And I did—they were all I had between faith and outright panic.

  Iraqi Kurdistan, also known as the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), an autonomous region of disgruntled Kurds seeking independence from the rest of Iraq, straddled the eastern rim of Nineveh. It maintained its own government under a Kurdish president, Masoud Barzani, and was home to a legendary force of lethal fighters that had whipped whole empires, starting with the Persians and ending with the British. Just the name of their indomitable unit dripped fear into the veins of seasoned soldiers: Peshmerga—Those Who Confront Death.

  During the invasion of 2003, the Peshmerga had been instrumental in finding and capturing Saddam Hussein, and later pinpointed the messenger who led to the detection and killing of Osama bin Laden. The Kurdish warrior tradition of brutal fearlessness ran like venom through t
heir ice-cold DNA. There was nothing they wouldn’t do to secure victory—and under Article 114 of the Iraqi Constitution, they were lawfully bound to protect the Yazidi.

  HEAT POUNDED DOWN like an iron fist through the violent summer of 2013, and we slipped heedless into fall. When the spells of rain came in, and washed the desert into fleeting greens, I started my last year of high school. Most days, studies occupied all of my time; despite hours interred in textbooks, I’d never quite regained my former academic glory. Those old school ribbons dangled over my mother’s bedroom shelves like small frayed flags, there only to taunt me. Bowers was right, years of bomb-dodging in Mosul had left their scars.

  On days off when I was not with Dil-Mir, I kept to the roadways of Nineveh, radio tuned in to constant reports from Syria: sharia courts, burned-down churches, the exodus of terrified Christians, and the public crucifixions—headless bodies littered the sidewalks of Raqqa. Once, unable to breathe or listen any longer in the suffocating old car, I got out and just stared a longtime westward, thinking. Even the incoming breeze seemed to smell of carnage.

  The television sat sleeping in the corner as I crossed the threshold, but my family all sat around it on floor cushions, grim-faced and silent.

  “What are you guys doing?” I said, and put down my bag of books.

  “Watching the news,” Samir said, and motioned to the vacant screen. Then he let out a strange sound through his nostrils.

  “No, we are not,” Daki said, and slapped a hand on her thigh.

  “That’s right,” Dapîra said from her corner cushion. “We are not.”

  I reached for a piece of fruit, and a cloud of small flies swarmed the bowl. The air in the house felt dank; like the return of an outlaw season, times were hard again.

  Samir pleaded to turn the TV back on; the timbre of his voice fractured over the room, and the walls themselves seemed to shift. When I turned to look at my red-faced brother, I could see he was holding back a torrent. One finger pointing like a dagger to the empty black screen, he sat there waiting, his eyes right on me.

  “What’s really going on?” I said, coming in closer.

  “The Islamic State just bulldozed right through the Sykes-Picot Line,” Naïf told me.

  The air in the room pulsed and I took a deep breath.

  “They’re right here,” Samir said pointing out the window. “ISIS is invading.” He got up to turn on the news. A sinister black flag covered in white Arabic scrolls emerged across the screen.

  “They’re not invading,” I said, sitting down with my family to watch. “They’ve come home.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Blind Mice

  THEY RODE IN BATTERED TRUCKS AND ON HORSEBACK FROM AL-BAB, east of Aleppo, and then traversed through the lawless desert into their safe haven of Anbar. Behind their small contingent, the ransacked border checkpoint smoldered, and the butchered bodies of the patrolling officers lay scattered in the ditches. A veil of dust hung low in the pale aurora; the way ahead stood empty for miles in the windless heat. Sunnis residing across the governate, including the chieftains of powerful ancient tribes, welcomed the return of these warriors to their roused battleground, where they’d unite and begin where they’d left off after the infidels brokered the now long abandoned “Awakening.”

  Embittered men rushed out into the streets with arms held out praising Allah, and opened their war-ravaged homes to the incoming fighters. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s power-hungry regime continued to slumber under a cataract of hubris, sending in more forces to break the relentless wave of protests and annihilate his rivals, filling prisons with those who railed against him. One month before, government security forces had raided the family residence of Ahmed al-Alwani and arrested the prominent Sunni member of Parliament, who’d spoken out against al-Maliki’s parochial administration. The prime minister was now public enemy number one, and tribal militias—who’d once joined General Petraeus’s “Sons of Iraq” to root out al-Qaeda—sprung up across the galvanized region. The Islamic State had come to Anbar as their Salafist Sunni brothers and there was no going back.

  By January, Iraq’s beleaguered military forces retreated from Fallujah, and there was fierce fighting in Ramadi, which fell, as would the rest of the province, not long after. ISIS ranks only increased as they flooded more and more territory like a steadily climbing tide. Their battle-seasoned chiefs understood how to disrupt government systems through a tactical chaos of prison breaks, suicide bombs, and perimeter attacks on critical command centers and checkpoints—and they did so using lightning-fast strategic assaults, which exploited the fear their very name instilled in the weak hearts of incompetent men. Rabid insurgents clad head-to-toe in black cut the heads from the live bodies of their shrieking enemies and displayed them on their vehicles like hood ornaments. I’d seen it all for myself in the propaganda videos and instruction manuals they posted on the dark web to recruit fighters from the four corners of the globe.

  IA and Peshmerga officers, from colonels to captains, continued to offer me casual reassurances that the invading horde was nothing more than a mangy unit of homicidal madmen who’d yet to face the full brunt of the nation’s modern armies. Prime Minister al-Maliki himself said as much in regular television broadcasts delivered from his office in the Republican Palace in Baghdad.

  I kept up with my schoolwork, courted Dil-Mir, and ate dinner by kerosene lamps all through the grim winter, while following the news and checking in with my contacts. I plotted ISIS’s steady progression and tracked their trajectory. Anyone could see it clear as day: they were headed straight for the oil-rich capital of empires, chasing after the long-coveted jewel missing from the crowns of so many warring factions—Mosul.

  ALL THROUGH THE weeks of skirmishes and enemy advances, I’d kept in regular touch with Brownsword online and through intermittent calls, exchanging intel and analyzing the information we’d gathered.

  “How many army divisions are there left in the city?” he asked me.

  There were two: the 2nd with five full brigades, and the 6th, also a good size. Moreover, they had a huge arsenal of American equipment and weaponry in the bases: MRAPs, tanks, artillery. Then we talked about my conversations with the officers and commanders, who’d all said the military was ready. Nevertheless, the roads were bloody now, and I gave the details: no more ransoms, militants just pulled people from cars at random and killed them on the spot—including many Yazidis who’d worked for the security forces. Women went missing, too. And there were countless rapes.

  I thought the chances of ISIS taking Mosul were too small to worry about, but Brownsword reminded me that no one had even expected them to make it this far. And neither of us could forget Mosul had given the American military a run for her money. Mosul was a nest of sleepers: in the neighborhoods, on the bases, creeping all over the security apparatus. No one knew how many—it could be thousands. This was the chance they had been waiting for.

  “Reports are that insurgents are massing on the Syrian border,” I said. “Right now.”

  Brownsword’s intel was the same. Something large-scale was going on. Al-Maliki had been warned, but all he could think to do was kill more Sunnis and promote one of his Shiite henchmen, Mahdi al-Gharrawi, as the operational commander of Nineveh.

  “This is why I’m telling you to watch Mosul, Mikey—Mosul goes, you get the hell out of Dodge. Fast. We’ll send you money, me and Jay, whatever you need.”

  Still I could not bring myself to leave. I wanted to believe that we would be protected—it was in our Constitution, and I had faith in the laws of man back then. At the same time, black flags were flying from Raqqa, right across the now demolished border, and all over the former Sunni Triangle. The insurgency was back, but had mutated into an all-out revolution—and it was only getting bigger. I promised Brownsword that I’d prepare.

  “Good. You Yazidis are sitting ducks. If I had my way, you’d be out of there already. Get to Kurdistan, then cross into Turkey
if you can.”

  From down below the roofline of our small house, I heard Daki singing to the tambour, soft and melodious. Overhead, a crescent moon sat in the sky like the silvered tip of a giant scythe. I peered into the courtyard at the twinkling lights hanging from the gutters, and the barbecue starting to rust in the corner, next to a torn sack of charcoal. An empty bottle of ketchup sat on its side on the table. Brownsword’s voice was in my ear, but the man himself was standing on the other side of the world delivering prophecies that were no good to me just now. All I wanted was to keep going to school, get my degree at last, and one day marry my girl. Only then could I leave.

  “Mikey, you hearing me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Stop calling me that, brother. We’re past all that now. Listen: you remember al-Bilawi?”

  Abu Abdulrahman al-Bilawi was from the Dulaim tribe—and hard to forget. Our guys had put him into the prison at Camp Bucca in 2005. Every Iraqi knew who he was. A sinister set of brown eyes sawed through my mind, and I recalled a full down-turned mouth set hard in its appetite for wholesale slaughter—which the man himself had a singular ability to orchestrate. His formidable clan was the largest in Iraq, spanning huge swaths of Arabia going back to pre-Islamic times, and its leadership had formed the epicenter of the insurgency during the war. Their cold-blooded members ranked in the millions.

  ISIS had freed al-Bilawi from Abu Ghraib prison back in April, part of a campaign directed by al-Baghdadi that left scores of Shia slaughtered right in their cells, while freeing thousands of the terrorists we hadn’t managed to cull during the war. Al-Bilawi was now on the ISIS military council, planning some of their biggest operations.

  “He’s the guy blind mice like Gharrawi and Mosul are up against—you feel me now, brother?”