Shadow on the Mountain

by Shaker Jeffrey

  Behind me and from their cruel beds of rubble, over which they’d placed pieces of cardboard or cloth like derelict rafts, people were sending up desperate prayers like smoke signals to God. Women clutched small wedding photographs of murdered husbands; others had nothing left to hold but themselves. Stunned children sat in a collective daze, leaning against each other, or sagging over their exhausted mothers, not even blinking and never daring to ask when they could go home. For hours into the eventide, fathers wandered the miles of cliffs and caves like shepherds, calling out the names of their lost daughters: Nasreen, Adeeba, Nadia, Kamila, Sabeen… Through the long night I heard those haunting echoes, and I can hear them now, as though their voices still circle the earth.

  I laid my beat-up bag of bones down over the gravel and thought of the small bodies we’d lowered into that hard, hallowed ground. Some still had their eyes wide open like tiny mirrors to the sky, lids already too stiff to close. The souls within were long gone, and we scraped the dirt so gently over them. I held a rock in my hand now and squeezed it hard, my whole body releasing a silent primordial scream.

  There was no voice for what I’d witnessed. Twenty-four hours before, I’d been in our family kitchen, music filtering in through the open door, sipping red wine. And one hour ago, I gave my last scrap of bread to a young boy with a soiled eye-patch, only to have many other children flock behind him, sitting together like wingless birds among the stones, their faces bloodied and heads all wrapped haphazardly in bandages.

  “What happened to you all?” I asked a girl among them, motioning. It looked as though someone had taken a serrated knife and scored her kneecaps and shins.

  “We fell down the mountain when the men in trucks started shooting at us,” a redheaded girl said, her face flush with freckles. “I gave the badly hurt ones most of my portion and now I’m so hungry.”

  “Where is your mother?”

  “I don’t know anymore. Please,” she said. “A little bread?”

  “I’m sorry,” was all I could say and held out my bare and filthy hand. “I have nothing.”

  How I hated myself then.

  AT FIRST LIGHT, we formed contingents and gathered in a narrow cave where we’d collected all the weapons we could find. A few men went to search for stragglers or to bury the spoiling dead, who littered the dirt in mounds of colorful clothes. I moved along the peaks to speak with the families, and they told me, in their turn, both what they needed most and what had happened.

  It was always the same—water, food, medicine. Then long gruesome tales of ISIS. I remembered the strengthening power of talking, and let each person go on until their speech gave out: the cars and trucks hauling their kinsmen away, how quietly the men all went—their eyes already halfway to where they were going. Soon after, the outbreak of gunfire, bodies piled in ditches. The pretty girls who slit their own throats before the militants could touch them. And I heard the voice of my beloved—

  Let the armies worry about protecting us.

  When my group reconvened again in the afternoon, I told them what I knew for a certainty: we had no choice—no one was prepared for those conditions. The sheer number of sick and injured—broken bones, bullet wounds, infections. We would have to go down into the farms at night and collect whatever we could.

  “Cucumbers and tomatoes are full of water,” I told them.

  “Insanity,” another man said. “ISIS is waiting for us to do just that. They have their guns pointed at us from every direction, shoot at anything that moves and laugh about it.”

  “There are wells at the temples if we can get all the people to them,” someone offered.

  “The wells are tiny and the lines are so long.”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Two days—that’s what I calculated.”

  “Two days for what?” I asked. “For each person to take a turn at the water?”

  “That’s right—that’s how long it will take for so many to get there.”

  Not believing him, I ascended to a higher ridge for a better vantage, and glimpsed down along the incline to the thirsting corporeal stream that snaked so slowly toward the first temple, along interminable corridors of rock. All those forms shivered in the broil, wilting over boulders as they waited to gain a single pace.

  “This mountain is a graveyard of the living,” I said, descending again, covered in a thick sheen of sweat. “We have to go down.”

  A few of the men nodded. Someone handed me a half-filled canteen, but I was too ashamed to take a full drink from it. The heat was as consummate as a sledgehammer; we might as well have climbed into the mouth of a volcano.

  “How long can a human survive without water?” a boy called out, his spindly limbs webbed among the naked branches of a barren tree.

  No one gave him the answer.

  ON THE CUSP of sunset, we made our way along the daggered rim toward the north side of the mountain, and then went our separate ways silently toward the outlying farmlands. The south side was still too dangerous, but I could see clashes lighting up the northerly hamlets like carnivals, and I knew from the others there were skirmishes in Khanasor.

  Sometimes, a cooling breeze wafted over and I had to stop and feel it cover me like a salve; then I’d sense the stink of death sneaking through and gag. Nothing in my gut, all I could do was spit up mouthfuls of bile and try to be quiet about it. There were too many dead to hope to bury, and it shamed our people to leave them without any dignity, but we had so few ways now to remain human—let alone Yazidi.

  There was no one way down, and I had to feel a path along the crooked spines of the gradient, always keeping low, sometimes crawling on my hands and knees as I’d been trained to do in the military. ISIS was no doubt equipped with night and thermal vision, and I did all I knew to avoid detection: hiding behind rocks or confused backgrounds, and keeping my skin concealed as I slipped from cover to cover. In the thermal crossover as the day transmuted into night, the changing temperature would make it easier to mask my roasting body, but I knew already the way back under a full night would be far more precarious.

  When I stopped to relieve myself, voices chattering in Arabic passed through me like a chill. One hundred feet below, I could see the spectral outlines of their forms. I held the AK out over a rock, scoping the two fighters who were passing a jug of water between them. The man who’d given me the weapon was a former Yazidi Peshmerga soldier—he’d shot five ISIS fighters with it as his own Kurdish unit fled, and wished me good luck. I told him I didn’t want to kill anyone, and I meant it.

  Now I slithered in, going from one boulder to another as the militants stood there chatting, gulping the water as though they hadn’t a care in the world. The paste in my mouth grew extreme and I swallowed it down like gravel, almost choking. Not far from a makeshift mountain road, when a car full of ISIS soldiers tore past, I cleared my throat and sprinted closer. Then I slid sideways to a projection of slate twenty feet above them, and listened.

  “Forget what anyone tells you, the ones in Kocho are the most beautiful. So many blue eyes there, you can make an ocean.”

  I heard the wet sounds of the other one parting his lips. So close, I could smell their rancid sweat.

  The other one explained they would not get those girls, because the sheikhs would want them for a prize. Still, their contingent would soon have the whole town to themselves, and they decided it didn’t hurt to go have a look before the captives were shipped off to Mosul—

  “Maybe take a little taste.”

  “Some of them rub shit on their faces. Send them to Syria with the used ones. Leave us the virgins.”

  And they both started laughing; their taunting sounds echoed up through the quiet night and thrashed me.

  My ruined hands grew hot, and I felt the AK’s metal slide down my palms. It took everything in me not to mow those men down right then, but I looked up at the crescent moon, the watchful eye of our God’s highest angel, and held it. I clutched my imperiled faith l
ike the edge of a precipice over which I was dangling. When the pair moved off and disappeared, they’d tossed the jug to the ground, and I took what was left of their water.

  TWO HOURS LATER I was on my knees between tall vines, filling my sacks with cucumbers, careful not to make a sound. In the distance, silver beams of searchlights brushed over the fields and I thought of the others out there picking. Every few minutes, I got up from the row and searched the terrain. Lamps flickered in outlying buildings, and I could see the shadows of doomed families inside. White flags were draped from so many rooftops. The warm smell of naan wandered by and I felt a fist clench inside my gut.

  ISIS soldiers patrolled the roads, sometimes going into homes and abusing the occupants. Ten yards from me, two militants dragged out an old man and made him kneel over a gutter, where he vomited, the barrel of a pistol held fast against his neck. I could see the creased outline of the man’s face and believed his old eyes were looking right at me—but I could not save him. They didn’t shoot him then, just kicked the back of his head and left him there whimpering. As I backed into the undergrowth, I heard a single gunshot and bit into the heel of my hand.

  At the far end of a crop of tomatoes, I came across live men I recognized from the mountain; and just past them, several teenage girls cowering among the creeping vines. Trembling like leaves, they spoke using wild hand gestures, pointing to the village.

  “There’s a man out there with a hatchet,” one of them breathed out. “He’s cutting the heads off the small children who try to run.”

  No one wanted to believe her, but we could see the truth seep in the full whites of her eyes. I placed two fingers softly against her lips and then just held her.

  We found more people hiding in the fields, tended to their wounds and terror, and then took them back up with us.

  ON THE MORNING of the second day, I ascended to the highest peak of Mount Shingal to hunt down a clear cellular signal. From their cavernous eye sockets and craggy perches, children watched me go, a few rambling in a strange delirium. They appeared snow-covered as they drooped there like fallen things under layers of dust.

  “Wait till the rains come,” a boy cried out. “Did you hear the thunder?”

  “Quiet,” another one said. “They’ll hear us.”

  The phone hummed in my hand as I powered it up, my pulse taking long pauses as I searched for more bars—so far, nothing. It was getting hard to think straight. I got up and clambered a few yards along the peak, so high now that the atmosphere stretched way out and simmered. Finally I heard the ping of an alert, and then another and another—suddenly a chorus of cyber-voices found mine like a multitude of hands reaching out into the dark. And I fell over the unforgiving dirt, eyes straining for tears.

  In minutes, I discovered that many of my family had made it just inside the safe zone of Syria, where a camp for Yazidi refugees had been set up. Many others had found the same open route. Heavily armed units of PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê), or the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, a controversial guerrilla organization from Turkey, had given them full protection and were guarding the camp.

  Then, huddled over my screen, I tried over and over again to reach Dil-Mir. Each time I met dead air, but would not abandon the hope I’d pledged to keep for her; by now many girls had made it into the foothills and were hiding along inclines and in caves, where there was no cellular reception. It could take weeks to find her, but I would.

  All around me, others were scrambling along the crest, their frantic voices rising up like flares. People wept dry tears into their palms as they listened to the first sounds of the lost, and several times I saw men fall to their knees as I had done.

  Somehow, Brownsword managed to reach me, and hearing him speak into my ear, the sky all around seemed to spin.

  “You’re alive,” he said, and I heard him swallow the air. “Some of the guys were sure you didn’t get out. But Jay and I told them—not Michael, not the Archangel of Shingal.” Then I heard him holler out to the others who were with him.

  The timbre of that voice on the line was so strong and clear and I grabbed hold of it like a rope at the bottom of an abyss. “Brother, we can’t go on up here. We need help.”

  “We know, brother. It’s just hitting the news. How many of you are up there? They’re saying a few thousand.”

  “No,” I hollered, and jumped to my feet, pointing wildly as though he could see me. From where I was standing, I could look straight down along vast rivers and pockets of people all massed over every open space. “Fifty thousand just here on this side, maybe a hundred. If I throw sand in the air, it will hit a thousand people when it comes down. We are dying every minute that goes by. And there are men with hatchets cutting off the heads of children—shooting the rest. It’s hell on earth, brother, I’m telling you. So many dead to bury, the air stinks of meat.” And I could say no more, I was wailing.

  “Christ…” And I heard Brownsword passing my information on to another person. “Brother, listen to me—Jay and I are on our way to DC. We want to arrange for air drops. The Obama administration needs to hear all this.”

  “You tell him we need help. Water, food, medical supplies,” I said. “Now. Right now.”

  “I got it.”

  “Immediately. We won’t make it out of here alive, I’m telling you.” I could not think of how to convey to a man in California the diabolical dungeon I was standing in with what was left of my people.

  “You don’t have to tell me how bad it is—I know. But we’re going to need your location and any enemy positions. Can you get that?”

  “OK, I believe you. Just the water even.”

  “Listen, is there any way you can get that info? On enemy locations, arsenal, you know the drill. If you can’t, you can’t.”

  “ISIS is everywhere, in every village, all over the desert. They’re surrounding the mountain. More of them are coming in from Syria.”

  “Have you been down the mountain, Mikey?”

  For several seconds, I struggled to breathe and nodded my head. Then my heart settled into a steady beat. “Yes. I’ve been down the mountain. And I’m going again tonight, and every night, to get food and smuggle people out. They’re taking the women as sex slaves and butchering the men. There are ditches full of rotting bodies.”

  “This is a genocide, Mikey. That’s what you’re in right now.”

  “Genocide,” I whispered.

  It was the first time I’d heard the word in English, and I felt it scrape down my throat as I said it.

  “I’m so sorry, brother.”

  “It’s not the first time,” I said. “But after this one, that’s it for us.”

  A murky beige sea seemed to surround the mountain on all sides, and I looked around at the forms crouched over the rocks, phones pressed to their ears, hoping for proof of life from their families. And I could talk no longer.

  THEN GIRLS STARTED calling—one after the other and without end. They had smuggled out phones, or stolen them from their captors, and were begging for rescue. ISIS was sending them on buses to other towns, like Tal Afar, where they holed them up in schools and warehouses. Once there, they were examined like livestock and their names, ages, and sexual status registered; virgins were separated from the married women.

  Others languished in homes all over Shingal. Those who resisted were beaten; the mothers who refused to convert saw their children tortured. Some had already been raped, others were considered too pretty to despoil right away—especially those with green or blue eyes and light hair. Those ones were saved as stolen treasure in remote locations for ISIS commanders.

  Already I was taking down lists of those we could reach, charting locations on Google Maps. For the rest, I sent out alerts on Facebook—right away an avalanche of the taken descended. Then those among the free Yazidis in the KRG and elsewhere in Iraq began to mobilize online, exchanging information.

  All around the mountain, fathers, uncles, and brothers cleaned the sand from th
e barrels of rifles, and I stared down from our perch at the scattering of towns below, galvanized. There were still Yazidi souls to save down there, and we would have to fight to free them.

  Meanwhile, Brownsword and Migone were on their way to Washington, to corral the Capitol and lobby for aid drops. Bowers was also calling on his contacts, some in the intelligence community—all of my brothers-in-arms were back with me now.

  Then, in my energized state, a number I didn’t recognize called and I held my phone close, hoping—knowing.

  “Shaker?”

  “Dil-Mir!” I shouted. “My God…” At last, the torturous heat left my body like a cloak of flames going out, and I could breathe again, as I hadn’t for days. “I love you.”

  There was a pause. Static on the line.

  “Dil-Mir?”

  Then I heard her voice.

  “Yes, it’s me,” she said. “I’ve been taken.”

  And everything in me broke into pieces.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Situation Rock

  IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS, A CARAVAN OF MODERN PASSENGER buses rumbled along the desert turnpike toward Shingal, sweeping into ISIS-occupied villages—and the dreaded thing began. From a sheltered berm folded into the foothills, I watched the scene play out, damned to stand alone and bear full witness. A couple of guns and a hunting knife held up against a large contingent of fanatical soldiers of the Islamic State, all of them carting Kalashnikovs—I was as powerless as a limbless man.

  Kneeling on the hot ground, I faced the sterile immensity of the badlands—no angel of mercy or savior in sight—and would not allow myself the reprieve of looking away. Then, from the dark mouths of dreary mud huts, women and girls as young as eight stumbled out into crooked rows, militants shoving them along like cattle. Most of the girls cowered, heads hanging low in their chadors; some fell to the ground again and again. The children looked about, blinking into the sunshine, and tore at the shawls of their young mothers, who staggered forward as though they were made of stone, arms wound about their petrified bodies.