Shadow on the Mountain

by Shaker Jeffrey

  “Yes. I get it.” And a vein of ice-cold air slithered over my skin. “That’s not good.”

  WE STARTED COLLECTING weapons in the spring. Those who did not know how to shoot learned. Often in the afternoons, the ricochets of bullets cracked the great blue dome over Shingal. Most days now, the breeze carried the warm sulfur of a distant battlefield that electrified my senses. Former terps like myself offered lessons out on the plains: hitting makeshift targets and desert rodents that scurried for cover between the mottled rocks. My brothers gathered all of our ready cash and bought whole arsenals directly from the IA, whose grunts sold whatever they had to the highest bidders: Handguns. Machine guns. Rifles. Anything. By May 2014, most every village house had at least one firearm in it.

  At the end of the month, seven members of the Islamic State were arrested, and the security forces learned of an imminent attack against Mosul. Lieutenant General al-Gharrawi called on Prime Minister al-Maliki for reinforcements to secure the city, but his request was flat-out refused. Diplomats also traveled to Baghdad with similar warnings gleaned from recent intelligence reports, which also fell on the deaf ears of stubborn denial. The military forces were already stretched thin defending other parts of the country, and al-Maliki’s administration believed ISIS had no chance of taking a metropolis of two million, which housed the largest cache of modern weaponry in all of Iraq. Still, every day now, word came in of another enemy advance as ISIS amassed territory with seemingly little resistance. The scales of hope were tipping, and time was not on our side.

  During study breaks, I sat alone before my laptop, trolling the forbidden crevasses of the dark web, searching for clues of what was to come. Mosul was surrounded on three sides, and ISIS had choked off the major supply lines, but an ever-paranoid al-Maliki would not accept offers of help from the Peshmerga armies. If ISIS viewed Mosul as part of their burgeoning emirate, the Kurds saw the ancient capital as their historical right, and a paranoid al-Maliki would not dare let the Peshmerga near it.

  Christians and Kurds were fleeing Mosul in droves, clogging the main artery into the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan, which took them in without question. Suddenly, the centuries-old demographics of Mosul were shifting in favor of the long-subjugated Sunni population, who remained resolute in the rundown hotbed neighborhoods west of the river. Entrenched in their homes, many sat armed to the hilt and waited for the liberation from al-Maliki’s tyrannical regime that ISIS seemed to promise.

  LIKE SO MANY Yazidis, Dil-Mir didn’t want to believe barren Shingal stood in the crosshairs of the Islamic State, who were still targeting the oil fields to enrich their coffers, while looting banks, ransacking homes of the wealthy, and pilfering priceless artifacts from city museums. All we had were sheep and goats. But this was not a war about profit: it was a battle of ideologies, and to them, we were devil-worshipping infidels. I’d listened to the rhetoric—a cornerstone of their mandate was to rid us from the earth once and for all. Genocide after genocide filled our history like dark ages, yet each time we were caught blind.

  Then I told her about what I’d seen: the crucifixions, firing squads, and beheadings. Desecrated bodies of young men, swollen and rotting along the roads, their pants pulled down below the knees.

  As soon as the way was clear, why wouldn’t ISIS come for us?

  “This is insanity, Shaker. You’ve done what you can to prepare. We all have. Study, go to Dohuk, take your exams—think of university—think of us. Let the armies worry about protecting the country.”

  The phone close to my ear, I shut my eyes, pretending Dil-Mir was right next to me, wishing I’d taken the hot rambling drive around the mountain. I could hear her sigh and knew she had a strand of hair coiled like an inky vine about a lacquered finger. When she was worried, a single rut cleaved her even, pale brow.

  “I would like us to have three children, Shaker,” she said. “Two boys and a girl. I see them in my daydreams.” Whenever I talked of war, she changed our course, her kind voice leading me well away, talking of the future—hers and mine.

  Suddenly, through the wasted miles all my fears began to drift off like the dark remnants of a nightmare. Since the end of the war, a near constant terror stalked me; again, and again, the horrors returned in an all-consuming assault of living memories. Those waking dreams left me unable to envision any fate without full-scale horrors. Only Dil-Mir’s voice could tame the beast within; she was my beacon, and in moments like that one, raw instinct was powerless against the quicksand of my perceptions.

  “We should name them and make it real,” I whispered.

  “I have—Maya for our daughter.” And she laughed, a little shy.

  “A Western name—good. And what about the others?”

  “Why don’t you choose now?”

  As she said those words, I stood up and gazed from the rooftop, across the thirsty plateaus to the long crest of Mount Shingal, dimming to the color of a bruise in the dying light. I imagined Dil-Mir in her small house tucked away on the other side, way past our temples and the deep tombs of kin, and I pictured the breeze that rushed past me now on its way south, buffeting her hair. My wishful eyes roved the faraway horizon, and I blew a kiss to her from my palm.

  “We will be together all our lives,” I said. “All our lives.”

  “Yes. Go. Take your exams. And come home to me.”

  UP AND DOWN the freeway, there was traffic: hatchbacks, delivery trucks, and rusted-out sedans, most of it chugging into the undulating north and then east toward Zakho on the Little Khabur river, which flowed like an arm embracing the full perimeter of the small city burrowed within the safe borders of the KRG, and mere miles from the Turkish frontier. Whole families of Yazidis piled into the beds of pickups were coming back in the other direction, returning to Shingal; faces grim, tanks running low.

  “The border police won’t let them in. You have your permit?” the driver sputtered.

  Security was tighter than ever as I rode in the cab to the school, repeatedly feeling for my student papers. Barzani had closed the border gates, and the police wouldn’t let me in without my documents. When I told the driver I thought the Peshmerga would come to our defense, he spat out the window and glanced at me.

  “That what you think?”

  I reminded him that under Article 114 of the Constitution, the Kurds were bound by law to protect the Yazidis. I kept my eyes on the green valleys and the sweeping mountains beyond. Soon we’d cross the Tigris, and move south again toward Dohuk, and I’d breathe easier. I had three final exams to complete in the provincial capital: chemistry, math, and physics—and then I was free. University—I was well on my way.

  “That constitution is crap,” he said back to me as though I’d slapped him. “No one has time to read anything in a war—except maybe the Koran.”

  Well, I thought—right now, it’s all we have. By instinct I fingered the handgun in my waistband and thought of Brownsword, who always did the same with his weapon as we entered dangerous territory. No need to hide my piece, the drums of war were beating loud and clear over Mesopotamia; everyone in the region traveled armed and ready to kill. I had an extra magazine tucked into my vest next to a thin wad of cash. I was wearing my best collared shirt and dress pants, which were already covered in a film of summer dust.

  “You students are all the same, full of stupid hope.” Then he went on and on that it was good for nothing—people only used that word when they didn’t have anything else.

  Lately, I was hemorrhaging hope. I’d spoken to another army colonel commanding the brigades farther south in Nineveh—the news wasn’t good. Whole divisions were in a state of mounting disarray. Many of the soldiers had abandoned the will to fight before they even encountered the enemy—maybe they never had it in the first place. Meanwhile, ISIS was on the move, barreling in an unstoppable frenzy over towns, filling their war chests while amassing recruits. I ran my eyes over the craggy ridgeline and wondered how many of them were up there, surveying the naked
valleys.

  CROSSING THE THRESHOLD with my sack that morning, mouth full of naan, my mother had grabbed me by the shoulders just before I went out. Mists of sleep still all over her, in the gloom of daybreak her eyes were as colorless as ice. She was muttering in strange whispers and didn’t blink as she stared up at me.

  “Go to Dohuk and don’t come back,” she pleaded. “Don’t come back to Shingal.”

  “Daki, don’t talk that way,” I said to her. “What’s happened to you?” I’d never heard that hollowed-out timbre in her voice; she spoke to me as though she were calling out from a cave. Even now, sitting in the cab on my way to Kurdistan to finally earn my degree, the memory of that voice made me wince. All I saw in her careworn face was abject fear.

  Not knowing what else to do, and time running short, I touched her cheek, soft and warm as dough, though her hands were frigid. “Daki, I will come back, and we will be safe. I won’t leave you. We have to stay together. There is always hope—you must hold on to it.”

  Now, sitting in the cab, it pained me to think of what I’d said.

  THE LAND I gazed upon from the broken cab window, growing greener as we neared the deep rivers, had carried the weight and scars of thousands of sieges. But ISIS was different—a new breed of soldier, of jihad and of a merciless God. It would take more than modern cannons and Western rhetoric to defeat a dogma that ran thicker than lifeblood through vengeful tribal veins. I’d seen what was out there, decaying in the gutters along the 47, and in the furrows of Rabia; hanging from plank crosses in the city squares of Raqqa; scattered out in the wasteland desert under circling birds of prey; and now in the all-knowing domes of my mother’s terrified eyes. Crazed fighters were pouring in from all over the world, selling off their souls and every worldly possession to fight for Abu al-Baghdadi’s medieval Allah. And I’d witnessed the capriciousness of war—this one born from the womb of hell.

  The sun at its zenith beat down and my tongue was so dry it stuck to the roof my mouth. I sucked down the last tepid drops from my canteen. Flocks of blackbirds rushed in from the valley and swept over the freeway in a great arch like flak, wings beating shadows over the car. I held my breath a moment and then felt a rising thunder gallop through my chest as the ground beneath the wheels suddenly rattled and groaned.

  “Look,” the driver shouted, jutting out his chin. He squeezed the steering wheel in his fists and hollered. “Look!”

  They crossed the border into Shingal at midday, thousands of them: Peshmerga troops crowded into big transport trucks. Whole brigades, five to six battalions in each, passing by one after the other like a long freight train. Thousands of soldiers armed and ready to fight. Each one had an assault rifle strapped tight to his broad shoulders and was grinning ear to ear. They waved as cars stopped along the roadways and people got out and cheered. Behind those huge personnel carriers, an endless convoy snaked for miles all the way past the ridge like a mighty river. After the troops, even more armor flowed forth from the KRG: tanks and artillery, barreling down the freeway, gathering wind and pushing past us in a great gale of indomitable military power. Yazidis stood watching from the ditches, arms outstretched, some openly weeping—hope reborn.

  We were nestled under the wing of one of the great armies of the ages. Whatever came, we would survive.

  “The Peshmerga,” I shouted. “We are safe.” For the first time in weeks, I took a long clean breath.

  And I pulled out my phone to call my mother.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Invasion

  THE CITY OF MOSUL SLUMBERED UNDER A THIN MANTLE OF low-lying cloud, still far too early for the muezzin call. Silent and dark, minarets rose like daggers into the carbon night, citadels luring the contingent of jihadists rattling fast across the desert from strongholds in Anbar. Some of the militants had come all the way from Europe to join the crusade for a new caliphate; but most were die-hard tribal warriors and old Saddam loyalists, who’d sharpened their knives on the necks of unbelievers during the foreign occupation. They were headed for the sympathetic western reaches of the city they didn’t intend to capture—not yet. The plan was to take over several strategic Sunni neighborhoods—in which scores of sleeper cells waited—free the inmates from Badush Prison ten miles up the Tigris, and then take the nearby oil reserves.

  Bearded militants standing in the trucks shouted like madmen to the starry heavens, some doped up for a wild fight, each one prepared to die a martyr. When the phosphorescent limits came into view, glowing like faceted gemstones set into the wide river valley, the fighters went quiet and stared out in hungry awe. Then they hunkered down, uttering prayers to Allah, lowered the shamags covering their faces, and checked their weapons.

  Closing in on the perimeter checkpoints, commanders gave the signal and set off a swift riot of suicide bombs and bullets. Immediately, the Iraqi guards who hadn’t already abandoned their posts threw down their rifles and ran. Those who survived the initial onslaught were summarily shot or beheaded, and the convoy moved on, bloodied and galvanized.

  Four days later, towering columns of choking black soot rose from the smoldering city blocks, and over half a million inhabitants, one quarter of the population, had fled north into the KRG. Corrupt IA commanders and officers either never gave the order to fight the ISIS invaders, or else simply bolted into the dense urban grid, donning civilian clothes, never to be seen again. A few mortar shells and heavy bursts of machine-gun fire directed into tactical locations were all it took for those indigent fighters to provoke the terrified retreat of whole armed divisions, who left the largest arsenal of modern weaponry in the Middle East, aside from Israel’s, behind for the taking.

  When Lieutenant General al-Gharrawi requested immediate reinforcements, the prime minister again refused, forcing the general to pull back in a chaotic retreat, his units racing east over the bridges and fleeing to safety on the other side of the river. Ensconced in Baghdad, government officials watched in a stupor of disbelief as those frenzied scenes of defeat unfolded, and Prime Minister al-Maliki tried to reassure the country that the great fight was not yet over. But it was far too late—the capital of the Assyrians, and throne of the Ottomans, was lost. The black flags of the Islamic State were already flying high over every civic building in Mosul.

  Sitting together in the crowded front room, we watched news coverage of Iraqi army soldiers tearing off their uniforms and running scared into the wild miasma.

  “Mosul fell like a plane without an engine,” one man said into the camera.

  “This is insanity,” I hollered at the screen. “They have to fight them.”

  Behind me Daki made breathless sounds as she paced the back walls and then shuffled from the room. Covering her face with her blue shawl, my grandmother went after her. Outside the open window, all of Khanasor stood in an eerie afternoon stillness. A lamb bayed once from a nearby courtyard, but there was no other sound except for the same cataclysmic chatter coming in from neighboring TVs and radios.

  “You should have stayed in Dohuk, brako,” Naïf said to me, puffing at the hookah. “At least Haji and Samir are safe. They won’t come back from Kurdistan now.”

  “We still have the Peshmerga,” I said, thinking of the metal armada I’d seen cross the sea of desert into Shingal. “It’s going to take a crazy battle to get control of this thing.”

  “If it even comes to that,” he said. “Let’s wait and see. Wait and see.” And he filled his lungs with sweet shisha smoke.

  “Look at a map,” I told him. “ISIS is just about to trample into Tal Afar. After that, it’s just one short ride along the highway into our little villages—that’s all.”

  “It’s the oil and the banks they want. Not our empty dirt.” Naïf shook his head and blew out a fog of smoke. “Don’t panic just yet.”

  BY NIGHTFALL ON the tenth of June, gleeful jihadists commanding captured MRAPs and tanks paraded down the city freeways of Mosul, horns blaring and men shouting; others roamed the cleared-out stree
ts on foot, welcomed on all sides as liberators by the al-Maliki-weary residents. Charming and articulate, smiling commanders of the Islamic State subdued the few guarded denizens with promises to maintain all civil services, and encouraged people to go back to work—business as usual. At first, life for the long disenfranchised Sunnis living there seemed far better under ISIS command than it had been under the murderous scrutiny of al-Gharrawi’s disciples.

  The same day, another ISIS unit drove north along the Tigris to release hundreds of Sunni prisoners from Badush; they transported six hundred Shiite inmates three and a half miles out into the desert, forced each one to kneel over a ravine, and then mowed them down with machine guns. Soon after, they trampled Tikrit and kept going mile after easy mile, until the Islamic State had its boot on the throat of more than thirty-nine thousand square miles of territory in Iraq and Syria. The speed of the enemy’s conquest was spellbinding and sent shockwaves around the bewildered globe. The largest and most forbidding terrorist network in history now controlled vast expanses of two oil-rich nations, and was suddenly proficiently armed. Every Yazidi in Shingal sat dumbstruck in their concrete homes, eyes blinking at television screens, and held their collective breath. Overnight, latent fear mutated into raw all-consuming terror—you didn’t need a prophet to tell you that we were next.

  MERE DAYS AFTER the siege in Mosul, uniformed agents of the Assayish, the KRG’s secret police, entered the villages of Shingal. Going door to door, they were on a mission handed down from their headquarters to uncover and confiscate all personally held armaments. Crouched on our rooftop, I watched them approach Khanasor in their official fleet of dark cars and vans, racing along the single cement road into town like a cruel omen. Not long after, echoes of commotion boiled up from the adjacent streets: gloved fists pounding on doors, shouts, revving engines, and the incessant barking of dogs. Tensions among the Yazidis had reached a fevered pitch, and voices exploded from the blocks just outside our house. A few random shots were fired, children bawled, and then the streets went silent for a time. I ventured out alone, my handgun wrapped up in an old cloth and left behind in the rain gutter.