Shadow on the Mountain

by Shaker Jeffrey

  I was close enough to see the gapped teeth of the leering ISIS ringleader, who stalked the wavering line of the seized, slipping his hands under fabric to grope at flesh, tongue probing his cheek—and I pressed a thumb over the blade of my knife until it sliced the skin. How I wanted to carve that wet thing right from the gash of his curled-up mouth. And yet I was trapped inside my own blistered skin, unable to move or else be discovered, and the raw truth forever lost.

  Over one hundred women were driven out before me that day—I watched them go. Soldiers had already dragged many more screaming from the isolated region on the south side of the mountain, my Dil-Mir among them; thousands more would soon join transports from other towns, where ISIS would sell them while passing many out to fighters as sabaya—sex slaves.

  When the women stepped onto the buses to a group of men already waiting inside, the sudden eruption of their high-pitched wails sheared the heavens. Through the tall windows as the engines roared to life, I glimpsed frantic movements. Bare shoulders and legs. Hands pressed against the glass. And I just knelt there in the shallow refuge of the berm as those moving dungeons slowly departed. In the coming days, it was a scene I would have to watch play out again and again. Arms held way up, I let out a muted cry.

  Right there in the dirt, I understood what I should have always known: we were just grains of sand, scattered over a great map of pipelines and oil fields. First, we’d watch our women stripped of their final dignity; and in another blink we’d be long gone.

  “IT’S A QUESTION of logistics,” Migone said.

  Leaning over a wall of rock, I cradled the cell phone, lifeline to the free and able hemisphere, against the sunken hollow of my cheek. Below, a flood of people were slowly filling the narrow berth of a ravine, staying low to keep out of sight of the marksmen while making their way to try another temple. One of the wells had already run dry. Scores had died in the wasted effort, either from sniper bullets or the ravaging elements. Before they collapsed themselves, a number of mothers had dropped the corpses of their babies along the scabrous pass—nothing more to be done.

  I listened to the surreal sounds of modern America in the background: honking horns and blaring sirens. Two pallid Yazidi boys in threadbare army pants shuffled by, sharing a single pair of boots between them. I watched them pass, my fingers traveling over the rough skin of the face that had become a stranger to me. Making the monumental effort to focus on the task at hand and chisel a way out—all the calls and messages coming in and going out—seemed pointless.

  Migone was holed up in a hotel room in Washington, DC, within view of the White House. He and Brownsword and a crew of veterans had spent several days straight knocking on every door in the Capitol. Congress was in summer recess, but the Senate committees—Intelligence and Armed Services—asked for reports and made recommendations up the linked chains of command. Right now, Migone was waiting to hear back from “Leanne” at the Department of State.

  “We need enough assets to move that many people off the mountain,” Migone went on. “We’re talking about inserting security teams by air, but then you need troops to hold the terrain.”

  “Get a corridor open,” Brownsword said. “And install some kind of ground element to secure it.”

  The talk was of arranging convoys of trucks. Trapped on the mountain for so long, it was unlikely that my people could even stand, let alone walk. Convoys needed fuel, and a destination capable of supporting so many; the evacuation would need to be done in stages: the terrain posed many challenges, as did obvious requirements for basic medical care, rehydration. The operation could take days, or maybe even weeks. Time we didn’t have.

  Brownsword and Migone’s strategy to speed things up relied on the media, and I was crucial to that plan. They had waited right outside the White House, stopping every single camera crew. I had to be ready for calls from all of the major news outlets—never use my real name, keep my batteries charged, practice every word I would say, keeping it as concise as possible. ISIS would be tracking cell phones; I’d have to keep moving and scatter my signals.

  “It’s not hard to explain,” I said. “We’re dying up here.”

  I don’t remember which one of them told me that I wasn’t going to die on Shingal, but I was sure it was the kind of lie I’d heard combat medics tell stunned soldiers, whose shredded arteries were hemorrhaging over the sand.

  “What’s the latest in the villages?” Migone asked, steering us away from the abyss we were falling into, but hurling me inadvertently toward another.

  “I told you they are moving the women. Who knows where. I sent the details on numbers and locations I have so far.”

  “Right,” Brownsword said. “Tal Afar for one. Some of them. We have unconfirmed reports.”

  “Yes, I heard that too,” I said. “But it doesn’t make sense. Raqqa, Mosul, I get—that’s where ISIS’s commanders are.”

  “FOB Sykes in Tal Afar has that big airfield,” Brownsword said. “They can keep the women in the bunkers and sell them off to the Saudis. Private planes. As I said, unconfirmed—but that’s what we’re hearing, anyway.”

  A part of me wanted to pack it in, like the old women languishing in the gullies, waiting for the end to find them. Then Dil-Mir slipped into my mind—and with her, lurid images of what the grimy hands of ISIS were doing came at me like the cracks of a whip. If I couldn’t rescue her, I didn’t think any of this would be worth surviving.

  “We need weapons,” I said finally, clearing my throat. I turned away and spat out a glob of blood-streaked phlegm. “A lot more. It’s the only way to get things done right.”

  “Yeah. We can’t do that right now. Believe me, we’ve been looking into it,” Brownsword said. “Listen, there are teams getting dropped, but you won’t see them. More of them are going into Erbil.”

  “Then I can get what we need from here,” I said and offered no more.

  “All right,” Migone said, and paused. “You know what you’re doing. I know you do.”

  “I do, brother.”

  And we closed the long bridge between our worlds once more.

  AT DUSK, THREE of us maneuvered like shadows down the ragged slopes and fanned out into the plains—myself, Hassan, and Imad. Hassan and I were former terps; the last one would have started university in the fall, if ISIS hadn’t splayed our very existence under a guillotine. Hassan was also a friend from Khanasor, and we’d played games of tag and football together over that very ground. All of us had lost women to ISIS—mother, sister, sweetheart—and were as resolute as would-be martyrs in our mission.

  A hot steady wind cut in from the west, and we could hear the thudding sounds of artillery fire. In the east, the air looked like it had ignited. The curvature of the moon going full rose slowly against the blackening ridge behind us, and the coming night was as clear as glass when we stepped into it.

  Three hours of trudging over the sands that swallowed every weary step, we followed Imad’s compass over the boundless desert. Finally, we lay flat against the dunes and waited until we spotted the signal: patterned clicks from a narrow beam of light. We returned our flashes and then snaked our way toward the grouping of several dingy vehicles.

  Part of me feared a setup, and I checked the chamber of my handgun before traversing the hollow pitch. Connections in the Kurdish militia groups operating out of Turkey and Syria had made contact on the mountain, and the meeting in the desert was choreographed down to the minute. The men inside had already provided their bona fides—fighting in Syria, some had already killed large numbers of militants. Exhausted, I shambled headlong into the truck behind the others and offered a breathless Kurdish greeting.

  It had been two days since I had had anything to eat or drink. A Yazidi wearing a gold necklace of the Peacock Angel handed me a bottle and just stared, taking in my wrecked body as I chugged the water; the gulping sounds I made were savage. Watching through the rearview, the driver warned me to slow down, just before I lunged forward and bel
ched out a waterfall. Then I crumpled against the seat, feeling hands wipe down my face as voices told me to just sleep awhile—though we didn’t have a long way to go. Then, in the blue light of the moon, we tore fast and all-dark toward the border.

  OVER THIRTY MILLION Kurds still live spread out over the vast territory of ancient Kurdistan, a region spanning parts of Syria, Armenia, western Iran, southeastern Turkey, and northern Iraq—making it the largest stateless ethnic group in the Middle East. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, short-sighted European civil servants carved the realm into pieces according to their narrow national interests, and sowed the seeds of hatreds that flourish to this day.

  Washington, DC, has long considered the PKK militia group—now operating against ISIS while protecting Yazidi refugees—to be a full-blown terrorist organization. During the 1980s, in a quest for their own Kurdish state within Turkey, the PKK was responsible for a violent series of guerrilla attacks against diplomatic offices, kidnappings, and suicide bombings throughout the country. After the Turkish government cracked down hard on their factions and arrested their leader, the PKK retreated into northern Iraq, eschewing ferocity in an effort to gain some semblance of political autonomy. While I dozed in the caravan crossing into the Syrian safe zone under the protection of hardboiled PKK fighters, their decades-old history and current agenda mattered little to me, a half-starved Yazidi who’d just crawled out of the quarry of hell.

  While the Peshmerga had fled into the sanctuary of their own borders, the PKK and their protection units, known as the YPG, had stepped in to fill the lethal breech. They escorted fleeing masses into the harbor of organized camps, where there was plentiful food, medical care, and shelter. And now they were about to give us the weapons we needed to fight off the militants and free our women, while also organizing heavily armed units to go up against the Islamic State in Shingal and rescue Yazidis trapped on the mountain. In August 2014, the PKK and YPG were our only bridge from certain extermination to survival. There is no doubt that without them, whole generations of Yazidis, including me, would all be dead.

  By the next night, I was back in the same truck with Imad and Hassan, this time wide-eyed, well fed—and reenergized. A stack of oiled AK-47s, boxes of ammunition, and loaded magazines sat in the trunk; and we had full canteens of water and as many rations as our group could carry.

  In a remote corner, tucked along an empty edge of Shingal, the truck came to a halt. Several Yazidi men had been waiting—we shook hands as brothers, and then watched as the fleet sneaked back into the night toward the foothills, where they’d meet up with rogue Kurdish units already embedded along the cliffs and caves. The night before, when I asked a militia commander why they would bother wasting resources to help my people, he said something I will never forget:

  “Since the ancients, we have shared this land as brethren. In all that time, what have the Yazidi ever done to us—or anyone?”

  Across the fields, I could see the silhouettes of houses rise like shadows of themselves, and heard Hassan’s stomach moan. We scanned the open dirt roads before moving forward in tight formation. Several families, including young girls destined for the slave market, were holed up within rooms of farmhouses, and we could see the dull flicker of kerosene lamps turned to low in the target dwellings—as planned.

  Then a pair of militants limped out of one of the houses, holding their protruding bellies and belching. They crossed the yard and clambered into a vehicle, started the engine, and then just sat there idling. Moments later, the headlights flicked on and beamed right at us over the length of grass. Pressed flat against the terrain, I could feel my chest heave against the coarse earth as I labored to breathe; and I thought of the petrified animals that we’d hunted with slingshots when I was a boy—their black, unblinking eyes. I felt like one of them now—insignificant and ensnared. Minutes passed, not one of us moving a muscle, and then at last we heard the wheels churn gravel, and the car sped off.

  When I stood up, a female face as pale as a moon slid into the frame of a glassless window. Her spectral sockets showed like caverns, and I stopped in my tracks. Then her right hand went up, and she slowly made a signal, indicating there was no one else inside. We moved forward in unison, crouched low, eyes roving.

  Before the night was over, and for several afterward, we plucked dozens of girls the same way from their oblivious captors. For those holed up in numbers far too large to effect immediate rescues, I retrieved the coordinates and passed them along to the armed groups working the terrain. Once in the embrace of the mountain, I shone a light into each pristine face, looking for the one that was mine—though I knew full well she was miles away by now, in Mosul.

  ISIS didn’t have enough manpower to watch every nook and cranny of Shingal, and the girls kept in constant contact, concealing phones and risking instant execution. They waited for us to come find them in the fields and elsewhere. Some had small children in tow, none of whom had to be told to stay quiet. You could tell from those glazed eyes that they’d already seen far too much.

  The Islamic State had decreed that sabaya and their prepubescent children could not be separated, but in the occupied cities that rule was routinely broken. They removed the youngsters to indoctrination camps, forced them to watch live beheadings, and pummeled their minds so they would forget the basic human decencies that existed before the Islamic State.

  Over a period of days, armed groups like ours continued their perilous missions with no casualties on my end at first; but once, on our way back, a sudden blast of machine-gun fire tore right across the field we were traversing. Returning fire, we broke apart and fled. Bullets shaved the heads off stalks, tailing our retreat like a detonating line as we ran the switchback passes. In the wild scattering of our live souls, Hassan called out once into the starless firmament and was never seen again.

  WEAVING ALONG THE summit, I sidestepped boulders, stumbling to chase and hold down a solid signal. I was waiting for Bowers. We’d been exchanging messages and he’d relayed my constantly incoming material to his state senator, Marv Hagedorn of Idaho, while working to mobilize other connections. The bars on my screen fluctuated, and I felt the rise of that abysmal hunger stir all over again. My body had had the benefit of two full meals from the PKK, while those left to waste away on the mountain chewed on dead leaves and dug around for insects.

  For a moment, I thought of simple rain: its soft perfume and the gentle pattering sounds it made against our roof back home. The yearning for the simple luxuries of a vanished past came at me in pounding waves that overtook all else. When the phone started to buzz against my thigh, at first I thought it was just the pulsing of the atmosphere and didn’t answer. Traveling the deep of my mind, I’m sure I was floating in Haji’s well listening to water lap at the sides and then gush over the rim.

  “… CNN, is this Mikey Hassan?” a male voice said on the line. “Did you hear me? We have a crew embedded with the Peshmerga.”

  Suddenly, I was on my feet, a roaring sound flooding my ears, and I had to take a full breath to steady myself and draw out the words I was supposed to say.

  “Yes. Hello. This is Mikey—I am a former combat interpreter and a Yazidi. We need help now. Tens of thousands of us are trapped and waiting to die up on Mount Shingal. The decomposing bodies of our children are scattered all over the slope—”

  And then I fell apart for a moment.

  “OK, Mikey—apparently there’s a plan in motion for helicopter aid drops. Water. Food. We heard you’ve been sending out possible positions—are you still on the mountain?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Stay away from the south side. It’s crawling with ISIS.” Later in the week, I would send safe coordinates to Senator Hagedorn, who would direct CNN to move to a more protected location in Sinjar City. The senator became a steady and able lifeline, mobilizing in real time as I provided critical intel. While the crisis unfolded, it was well known to the senator that President Obama was following reports on CNN
, and he was using that to our advantage. “How many can you fit in the choppers?”

  The man on the line went quiet for a moment, and I could hear him breathing for an eternity.

  When he spoke again, his voice was monotone: no one knew any details about evacuations yet—they were just tag-alongs and didn’t have any say over those kinds of logistics. And then he said what others would say after that: just hang in there; they needed to hear what was happening and tell the world—so I kept on talking.

  I wanted to tell him the world could find out later, after they rescued every last Yazidi—but even in my deteriorating state, I knew better.

  I spoke to journalists several times that day; and soon after, other members of the international media reached out like an army of beacons. Most of them had never heard of Yazidis before, and used the same list of buzzwords—“devil worshippers,” “Zoroastrianism,” or mistook us for full-blooded Kurds. When my parched mouth opened, it let out all I knew in a methodical rush of harrowing details, and each listener grew dead quiet.

  More and more calls came in: journalists from the Daily Mail, the Washington Times, the Times of London; BBC, ABC, NBC, Headline News, and the Associated Press; and so many others from across the globe. A few remarked on my good English and took recordings—I caught myself wondering if those testaments, lasting a minute or two each, would be the last my family would know of me.

  AND I WAS up there roasting—people all around me moaning in their sleep, wasting away half-comatose into the earth—when Bowers sent out another message. In his last dispatch, he let me know that he and Hagedorn had a two-star general working to connect the dots on my intel, and that they were running my identification through the system.

  “The minute you got plugged in, Mikey,” Bowers said, “Turkish intelligence lit you right up.”