Ankara must have gotten wind of my foray into Syria with the PKK, but I didn’t say a word about it—not when so many were counting on me to find a way out.
“You know me, brother,” I said. “Tell them you know me.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Bowers said. “They think this could be some kind of ISIS trap.”
“Did you tell them I was a terp? I worked for those guys. I got shot!”
“I know Mikey, don’t worry—they are going to tether your cell signal directly to CENTCOM.”
“What’s that mean?”
“US Central Command—they have positions all over Iraq. So, every time you use your cell for anything, it will ping at the Pentagon and they will track you. Hagedorn and General Gary Sayler are setting things up for you to keep in communication.”
Right then, I knew I’d have to prove my bona fides and go back down many more times alone, to send out intel in real time. By now, I’d been lying under the full broil without end and my scorched limbs ached as though I had lived a thousand years. But I said I would do it, and I would—or we were all dead anyway.
At the first falls of twilight, I changed batteries in my phone, crawled out of my own wrecked skin, and slid down the gradient.
Out on a mission as Mikey the terp.
All over again.
GUNFIRE WANED IN the villages, and the farmlands seemed to slumber, their harvests over for all time. No sound issued from the narrow roads, but I could see the enemy traffic coming in and going out in steady lines. My screen set to Google Earth, I zeroed on Shingal and set to work, methodically marking the precise locations of armed units—those on the move and others stationed along the perimeters of the occupied villages. The procedure was simple: pinpoint the spot on the satellite image, call up the coordinates, and send each one up past the clouds, where they would pivot down into the waiting arms of US Central Command. For the next three weeks I would follow the procedure many times over, and retrieve more information from the “friendly” fighting groups maneuvering on the ground. Senator Hagedorn became a steady hand, keeping track of my activities while directing me to several of these contingents, which would provide protection and support when and if I needed it.
Running through the dead gorse along the rim, I flew over the terrain, my feet and legs freed from their cocoon of pain, as though a second being inside me had come to life. I scaled and crisscrossed Mount Shingal; several times hunkering PKK units guided me to various locations in their trucks until I had counted every Islamic State contingent within sight, getting in close enough to smell their sweat and count up their guns.
When I heard from Bowers again, he had another man on the line he referred to as “the Congressman,” though I never caught his name.
“You’re all good, Mikey,” Bowers said through crackling static. “Patching you through.”
And I collapsed, all the rushing blood dispersing from my veins as though it had turned to air.
“It’s great to talk to you, Mikey. I just want to tell you how much we appreciate your service to our country. We have some other people on the line who are very interested in hearing what you have to say.” Those others, all assembled into what was referred to as a “situation room,” included General Gary Sayler and several military and intelligence officials, who would come to my aid many times again. The Congressman said, “Mikey, we’re with you now and we’re listening, so you just go ahead and tell us everything you can. We’re going to be having a lot of calls from here on out.”
And so from my hallowed rock, I did.
Chapter Eighteen
Exodus
THE SKY RIGHT OVER ME TORE OPEN FROM END TO END AND rattled the stones—but when I looked up, there was nothing to see but the fullness of night. And yet the roaring wake continued, far past us now and dissipating as it pushed a deep trench of sound that seemed to rip the lid right off the earth. When it was gone, we were all left in an eerie void of silent wonder, and sat around gawking. It was Thursday, August 7, 2014, our fourth night on the mountain. Above, the half moon shone a dirty yellow, and the besieged wilderness of beyaban, the desert below, stood as still as time.
A few of the stronger ones, roused from their fitful slumber, started climbing up even higher, scrambling over the boulders. Then the boy next to me jumped in his bedraggled clothes and pointed to the murky east.
“What are those?” he hollered. “Angels?”
I sat up and squinted as he took my hand and pulled.
Crossing like a figment over the great dimmed vault, a floating cluster of huge white canopies drifted along, lazily spreading out by degrees as they shed altitude and descended toward our sacred perch. I was on my feet and moving forward carefully among the others. Our link to reality so tenuous now, we didn’t so much as trust our own eyes.
“Balloons!” I heard a girl cry out.
It was as though we were no longer where we were in the dead of night.
“Should we hide?” a woman shouted.
“Where—where can we go?” another one lamented.
I ascended the black ridge carefully with the others, and watched from another vantage. Still miles away, I could barely make out the long cables suspending massive crates to billowed parachutes—and knew at once that it hadn’t been a lie.
“Expect drops,” Brownsword had told me hours before. “Expect them soon, brother.”
And for the love of God, I had not believed him.
UP AND DOWN the mountain, those who could run ran fast, tumbling over uneven ground they could barely see—this way and that, zigzagging like startled sheep. Others, who could not withstand the exertion, hung back in the obscurity, muttering that it was just an ISIS trap. From where we were, I knew we could not get to a landing spot in time to avoid the certain mayhem; already you could hear the rising din of the awakened masses, on the move like a gathering wind. Then, out of nowhere, a great white hope sailed like a deflating moon through the air right over me, and I felt its soft shadow sweep by like a calming hand. It went down a hundred yards away or more, into the blunt jaws of a deep gully.
Now I was clamoring like the others, famished and desperate to get there, but in short order it was impossible to move—there were so many of us.
“Let the children in first,” a mother screamed to no avail.
Cascades of people stumbled half-blind into the ravine and tore into the crate, pulling off the cords and yanking out the contents of stacked boxes marked HALAL—and that’s when I heard the shrieking.
Farther down the gorge, where another parachute had dropped its load, people were swarming a crate, heaving at the sides and trying to lift it.
“It’s too heavy!” a man barked.
When I got there, a small girl next to them was on her knees, and I saw then what she was holding. She had a bare foot cradled in her lap, attached to a long twitching leg, and past it a male body lay pinned and moaning under the full weight of the container.
We shoved until the load shifted off the man, and someone dragged him out from under—alive, but badly injured. Several times, I called out for a doctor; my echoes traveled the gorges and came back with nothing. There were few medical professionals on the mountain, and they were hard to find as there was no shortage of those needing help; and as stranded as we were, their bare knowledge was often no more useful than a hose without water.
We gathered around the injured man, who flailed there wide-eyed like a hooked fish, and someone shone a light slowly along his trampled limbs. His bladder had let go, soaking his pants. The stench of fetid urine was as pungent as vinegar, and a few of the others gagged.
“I think something in me snapped,” he rasped. “I heard it.”
We all knew that his back was surely broken.
By now, a crowd was forming, and people with lanterns were going at the boxes and tearing them open like a hungry pack of dogs.
“Don’t move,” I told him. “When morning comes, we will get help.”
It was al
l I knew to say.
Then I made my way over to the ransacked boxes to see what was left to eat or drink.
THE SAME NIGHT, nearly 150 miles to the east, US fighter jets cut across the atmosphere miles over Nineveh, tracking two ISIS armored personnel carriers on the road to Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. One of the planes released a five-hundred-pound bomb that took a precision nosedive to the earth, reducing the target to a heap of burning metal. Soon after, air strikes demolished ISIS vehicles and artillery that were being used to support the enemy forces advancing on the KRG.
President Barack Obama had ordered the attacks to protect American civilians working in the US consulate in Erbil, as well as the more than two dozen military advisers stationed in the city. At the same time, he authorized immediate humanitarian aid drops over Mount Shingal. For many war-weary Americans listening to his televised announcement, it was the first time they’d even heard of the Yazidi.
The moment President Obama looked into the camera, described our dying plight, and said, “Today, help is here”—I was sitting in the dark on a mile-high shelf over burning Shingal, a brutal fate closing in on all sides. Every one of us up there who heard the president that night, on radios or huddled around phones, felt his resolute American voice infiltrate their withered skin. At last, it seemed the world was seeing us, and we were so grateful.
“Expect more,” Brownsword told me. “This is just the beginning.”
SOON THE SKY was howling again and flashes went up like struck matches stitching across the outlying plains. We knew those sounds for what they were—bombs crashed into the ground past the mountain, the earth beneath us shifted, and plumes of smoke went up over the leas. Many cried out in fear and held their children close. I stood on the cliffs scanning the beleaguered landscape below, as ISIS antiaircraft guns spat out streams of impotent shells.
Way down the gradient, a few ISIS contingents clustered in the folds of the lower slopes unleashed their machine guns, calling to Allah for strength, and then to their commanders for swift reinforcements. Meanwhile, PKK and YPG units had carved a foothold across the western side of the mountain. ISIS now faced unrelenting hostility from both above and within, and hunkered down.
Night after night, American fighters sliced through the skies, their ordnance smashing into targets as ISIS fought tooth and nail to hold their ground. I already knew what they were up against: probably F/A-18 Hornets from the Gulf, off the USS George H. W. Bush, and Reaper drones out of Kuwait and the UAE, remotely piloted from tiny climate-controlled tin huts thousands of miles away in the Nevada desert. By now, US Central Command had acquired enough intelligence on enemy positions to annihilate dozens of ISIS targets scattered all over Shingal.
By the second week of August, with so many still trapped on the mountain, I was sending steady streams of intel out through Senator Marv Hagedorn and General Gary Sayler. As “friendly connections” on the ground scouted exodus routes, I went deep into ISIS positions to pinpoint the precise locations of large groups of captives, before special armed groups embedded all over Shingal executed swift rescue missions. It would be years before I would learn that just one of those operations saved more than five hundred women from a warehouse in Shingal.
Still, there was a price to be paid. ISIS commanders had finally zeroed in on me and were actively calling for my capture. I knew from contacts that my name and picture were already circulating across the Islamic State’s vast network; Brownsword had long warned me that I would find myself at the top of their kill list. It didn’t matter much: if a jihadist didn’t kill me first, the desert sun certainly would. We waited out the battles and hoped for more crates to fall from the sky.
DAYS LATER AND still trapped on Shingal, so many of us would have perished were it not for those air drops. There were just enough provisions to eke out a feeble survival, but no way to know when and if we would ever get off the mountain. Finally, from the western edge of the range, PKK fighters started arriving in caravans of empty tractors and trucks that tore up the slopes. Convoys came for us over several days, straight from the pocket of Kurdish-controlled Syria, while ground fighters guarded rendezvous points. I determined to stay on that holy ground until the last Yazidi had been saved, and kept in close contact with the rescue groups. The infirm and the elderly went first, their heads held way down—ISIS militants scattered throughout the hills shot anything they saw to pieces.
From my position along the highest eastern peaks, messages about routes to safety came in continuously, and we set about mobilizing rescue teams. Once again, I plotted out safe paths all over Mount Shingal and was told that sooner or later the friendly forces would open a track. Meanwhile, I scanned ravines for the most vulnerable Yazidis. After so long up there, many were too frail to move, so we formed a human chain, carrying them down fast on our backs.
“Is this a good idea?” an old man said, lolling in my arms. A bullet had already grazed his hand, and the makeshift bandages were soiled and soaking through.
“It’s the only one we have,” I said, passing him like a bundled infant down into the tractor well, as YPG guerrillas roamed the perimeter. Then I rushed to collect groups of small children, who stood trembling and forlorn like rats along cave walls. We ferried them into another truck, between sniper bullets pinning us to the ground.
Day in and day out, we carried on under the hammering broil, until thousands were on their way to safe zones. Those of us who oversaw the evacuation had been the strongest ones; but all through the day, backbreaking work and heat pounded us down, and the aid drops became more precarious to reach. By then, I was long prepared to die—most of us had already forgotten what it meant to be alive. I couldn’t even tell you what day it was, or what time. Still, we continued, not knowing if our turn would ever come. Hope was becoming too heavy a thing for us to carry much longer.
MY BODY SEEMED weightless on the boulders; sleeping forms as still and lifeless as piles of bones scattered all around; empty cartons lay strewn like shoe boxes among us, not a scrap left to eat nor a drop to drink. And so I lingered awhile in a dream with Dil-Mir, walking the banks of the inky Tigris at night.
“I have to go back, now,” she said, and squeezed my hand.
“Just one more minute,” I said, but when I looked over she was already miles up the river, rafts of trash floating by on the current.
Somehow, when I sat up in the gunmetal light, I could still feel the pressure of her hand over my palm, and the air smelled of sewage. It took me a long time to get my bearings. A few children had started stirring; all of us had grown too tired to move in more than small increments. Wasting days had come and gone, and nothing more had happened. Then, out of the quiet, the windless air seemed to ripple like a sheet, and the sky thrummed. I stared out into the listless void, nothing more than the brown sea all around.
“Look at the bird,” a girl whispered.
And I was sure she was in a state of delirium.
Then, as a shadow emerged from the horizon, heads all around me pivoted like weathervanes—it was moving straight for us. Dry layers of soil lifted and began to seethe and simmer. In a moment, I was on my feet, beating blades overtaking the last gallops of my heart.
The rest of them were already running as luminous shapes dropped from the sky.
“Water!” the horde cried out, as plastic bottles crashed and broke open over rocks.
Suddenly, across the plateau, it was all-out pandemonium, and I darted forward to join the pack. I saw toddlers sitting dumbstruck in the melee lick up what they could from the ground, before someone hoisted them onto their shoulders.
As the Iraqi chopper descended, I saw a man hanging out from the hatch with a camera poised on his shoulder; next to him, another figure in body armor and a collared shirt stared out and pointed. You could see his full-blown horror, and I wondered then if we’d spoken to one another in one of the dozens of calls I’d taken from the media.
Immediately, the swarming crowd rushed the open h
atch, tossing in their flailing children—I saw an infant pitched like a sack right into the hold. In a panic, the journalist grabbed a few arms and hauled them up, but the flying machine banked sideways and tilted; a woman in a pink chador dangled off a landing skid, until she fell into a trough of dirt.
Left behind for nearly three weeks after the invasion, we just stood there staring into the gritty sunshine, our bony arms reaching out like crooked sticks to the sky. It had been my choice to stay among my own, and now there was no way out. In the distance, water was falling again, but we could not get to it in time. In that jungle of withered Yazidis, I looked around me as though seeing us all for the first time—not even human anymore—our last hope now a speck on the horizon. And then my mind floated, way up over Nineveh, far away from that shelf holding up the doomed. It was all over, I thought; we were never getting out of there—and I was ready.
And we might have all believed that was the end, if it hadn’t been for the echoes of gunfire and then the groan of trucks riding the ledge far below us. Not long after, a full contingent of PKK were rushing up the slope and out of the underbrush.
“We have little time,” was all they said, herding us as one down a serpentine path.
Soon, I crammed into the back of a flatbed with fifteen others, machine guns pointed out the back and firing haphazardly.
“Just keep shooting,” the fighter next to me hollered.
And so I steadied the barrel and fired, the metal in my hands growing hot, until we were near the bottom of Mount Shingal. Then, as the truck veered into the open desert, the sounds of war gave way and we headed west, racing borrowed time into the blazing sun.
Chapter Nineteen
The Smuggler’s Route
UNDER AN APOCALYPTIC SUN, THOUSANDS MARCHED ACROSS blinding sands toward the protected sector of Kurdish Syria one hundred miles away, forty hours or more on foot—and I was among them. The fighters had let us off just past the conflict zone, before racing back to ferry another load. My eyes strained against the searing light reflecting off ice-white ground, as I dovetailed into an endless crawl of the beleaguered in their stinking clothes. And yet, I did not feel forsaken out there among my people in this, our third cataclysm of August 2014—we’d all made it out of the villages and then off the mountain. If I’ve ever clung to our endangered faith, it was during that long journey of the living dead.
Shadow on the Mountain Page 20