Shadow on the Mountain

by Shaker Jeffrey

  “Lately,” I said, cradling my wrecked fingers, and told him I had one more that day.

  “Good for you,” the driver said after a moment. Then he nodded many times and grabbed my shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  THE BOY WAS sixteen years old and I’d been warned that he’d lost his mind. We drove to a safe house in the mountains, where my contacts were keeping him. They’d smuggled the emaciated teen there to avoid the local refugee centers that would surely have detained him. The child would not have survived the camps, most of them harboring criminal detainees who loathed Yazidis. The group had already alerted a hospital in Athens, where a specialist team waited on standby. It was my job to get him there safe and sound. Later, we would try to find his family, and take him to them.

  He looked straight ahead, saying nothing—the innocence that should have come with that last layer of baby fat, all but obliterated. I caught the driver stealing glimpses in the rearview.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “They made him do things,” I said. “ISIS has training camps. Pump them full of drugs. Children are forced to do and see terrible things.”

  The driver nodded and glanced again at the boy in the rearview as though trying to decipher what existed behind that vacant stare; there were screams lurking just beneath the silence. You could feel it—those boys were all the same.

  When we reached the hospital, the driver held the door open as I guided my charge out of the back of the car. I thanked the man and we said our good-byes.

  Then the driver took my hand and squeezed it hard. He told me to keep doing what I was doing. Every person working on those rescue routes always said the same thing:

  “Save as many as you can.”

  OVER THE NEXT six months and into the New Year of 2016, I traveled in and out of refugee camps hunting down Yazidis, working in the filth so many lived in while trying to carve out a new life. When I volunteered as a UN translator, they offered lodging in nearby hotels; but I refused, staying instead among my own—eating what they ate, and sleeping where they slept.

  Many of the camps were no more than neglected ghettos where extremists coming in from Iraq and Syria were carving out their own turf. Yazidis were regularly abused; women and girls who’d escaped captivity found themselves face-to-face in the bread lines with their former rapists.

  In the camps along the coastline, I helped drag in the daily arrivals of migrant-crowded dinghies, constantly searching faces for one of my own. Those rubber boats were death traps: no life vests, and none of the refugees knew how to swim. Every day up to a half-dozen boats came in holding over one hundred desperate souls. And every day people perished, either out at sea or trampled in the inevitable panic as we struggled to haul the vessels in through a relentless onslaught of pounding waves. At sunrise, the tides delivered the bodies, so often of small children and infants, who lay as limp as discarded rags on the beach.

  But the day I found maggots creeping in my bowl of rice, something in me broke.

  “Please, please, send Nadia,” I said, calling up YAZDA, a Yazidi rights organization that had recently found international fame for its soft-spoken figurehead, Nadia Murad. “Our people are living like stray dogs. Something has to be done.”

  A survivor from Kocho, Nadia had been chosen as the global face of our people, her mission to convince the world what it should have already known—ISIS had committed genocide against us. And it wasn’t over.

  “Hello, dear brako”—my brother, Nadia said, when we met outside Idomeni Camp, her mournful eyes resting on mine. In them, I saw our shared and infinite sorrows as she held out her small hand.

  “Hello, dear xweşko”—my sister, I said, entwining her fingers in mine, and our friendship began. We’d meet and speak again many times in the coming months.

  Kocho was a village in Shingal, now famous as the site of the most brutal massacre of the invasion of August 2014. In a single day, ISIS militants slaughtered over six hundred men from Nadia’s village, beheading most of them, shooting or burning the others alive, including her six brothers. The young women and girls, including Nadia, were all taken into sex slavery. Nadia Murad had escaped what my Dil-Mir was living—in a word, she gave me and so many of us hope.

  For two weeks in April 2016, Nadia and I toured a succession of camps together; the media and mesmerized Yazidi refugees followed her every move as she pointed out the abysmal living conditions. What the press did not know was that dozens of brazen militants were nestled like barbs among the dense crowds—looking on, and seething.

  Nadia had addressed the United Nations, met with dignitaries and heads of state, made speeches all over the world—and ISIS sent her death threats on a daily basis. As we walked the camps through the hordes, I kept her close, scanning the faces among the crowd. Sometimes, the enemies were easy to pick out: lone wolves hanging back, stalking the periphery, or watching intently while murmuring into their phones. Most of the time, I knew they were blending right in—as they would when they received their asylum and moved freely across Europe with their benefits packages and travel papers.

  In the evening, when Nadia went back to her hotel exhausted and demoralized with a few other members of YAZDA, we all sat together as what we were—one Yazidi family.

  “Are we helping, dear brako?” she asked finally. “Do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” was all I could say. “It was so brave of you to come. We are all so grateful.”

  “They still haven’t investigated the mass graves all over Shingal. All of my brothers are there.”

  “So many,” I said, thinking of my own missing—grandmother, cousins, uncles, and aunts. Neighbors and friends from school. “We have to keep working and not just for the living.”

  As was inevitable, one after the other, we fell into the survival stories that bound us. While we were together, Nadia lost yet another friend from Kocho—that one to an IED. When the bad news came in, we all sat on the floor and wept together. Then we were quiet for a long time.

  “I met the prime minister of Greece, Alexis Tsipras,” Nadia said at last. “And do you know what he called the refugee camp?”

  “No.”

  “I will never forget it. He called it a warehouse,” she said. “A warehouse of souls.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And all of them are broken.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Infiltrating ISIS

  IN THE DAYS AFTER NADIA LEFT, I WORE OUT THE HOURS thinking. Long spells of howling rain cut the electricity, dimming the camps. Our border runs went to rivers of mud. The tents leaked like sweating skins and we huddled inside them, shivering in our sodden clothes. All the while, I imagined our dead left in silent heaps under the open sky back in Shingal, waiting for someone to deliver those souls to God—and the names to their families.

  At night, restless spirits stirred across the living realm that had abandoned their bodies to the naked dirt; hollow calls penetrated my dreams. In the morning, my limbs were leaden, and I wasn’t sure how long I could go on buried under the shame of doing nothing to redeem our dead. Then Brownsword called again and yanked my mind free.

  “I’m gonna be passing through the KRG on a contract,” he told me. “I have a satellite camera that can geotag—you know what that is?”

  “Sounds better than my Android,” I said, sitting straight up.

  “Damn right. This thing will upload every picture you take with precise coordinates, including compass bearings and elevation. If I leave it with someone, can you get it and use it?”

  “Yes, brother,” I said. “I can—and I will.”

  By now, I knew the migrant routes like the back of my hand; no one bothered anyone going back into the mouth of danger, while multitudes were pouring out.

  I CROSSED THE border from Turkey into Iraq and made contact with the man with the camera. I’d left all my identification behind and would be known by yet another alias, “Hader.” By the time dawn flared, several connections had provided safe pass
age into the liberated area of Shingal. Bearded and dressed like a simple shepherd, I traversed the rolling steppe plains toward home.

  In that late spring of 2016, many factions were still fighting all over the region, vying for terrain, with the front line between the Peshmerga and ISIS standing along the southeast. Survivors had provided the approximate sites of mass exterminations, and I’d already plotted out a track to document what was left of the evidence. Though a few villages had been freed, those graves stood all but ignored.

  Distant buildings still exhaled the smoke of war, likely from the IEDs left all over the liberated towns. Sporadic gunfire and distant shelling pounded away like thunder, hard to tell from where. As the vacant and crumbling forms of Yazidi villages finally came into view, I had to fight off an awakening of my memory that started up a vicious assault. Several times, I stopped to wipe down my eyes, which watered without abatement, and then I simply sat down in the sand awhile to still a raging pulse—telling myself again and again not to feel, not there, not until it was over.

  The first town I went to was my own, Khanasor—it would be the hardest by far to face. Several friends, neighbors, cousins, and extended family members remained unaccounted for, and they sustained my resolve: I was there to find out what had happened to them. A handful of defiant Yazidis were returning to the freed areas of Shingal, but Khanasor was still considered unsafe. The shelled-up ground appeared silent and deserted for miles. Still, I stayed low; if a roving militant or even the Assayish caught me there, I’d be shot on sight. Pictures of me with Nadia Murad in Greece had circulated, and ISIS commanders finally put two and two together. Moreover, the ruthless KRG secret police knew I had been vocal to international journalists about the Peshmerga withdrawal and President Barzani’s marginalization of my people, even as their public relations campaign actively worked to disprove that absolute truth. People like me stood in the way of rewriting history.

  Lying flat against the ground, I watched my forsaken village from a gully. No bright clothes flapping on the lines. Not a single note of tambour music riding the oblivious wind. Buildings in ruins; walls reduced to piles of rubble. Surveying the terrain, I remembered sitting high up with Haji in our onion field and looking down on our town that sat like a giant nickel over the golden plain—strange to see it now, reduced to a concrete skeleton.

  I came upon the shallow ditch over which I’d been told militants had made the captured kneel to rest their foreheads—each would have known what was coming. I climbed the low lip. Not a soul around for miles. I stared into the beating sun of the Angel’s eye, asking him to carry me through what I was about to witness. Finally, I offered my gaze to those who’d been waiting so long for me.

  Instantly, my legs gave way, and I slid down to the bottom. For a long time, I stayed on my knees, not moving, hands flat against the hard earth. Then I crawled the ground like an infant, weeping quietly so as not to be discovered, and all alone in that shallow pit of horrors. Right away, I knew I was too late to be of much use—forensics teams with DNA kits were needed there now. Not a refugee with a camera.

  What was left of those Yazidis lay scattered: Tibias and femurs. Rib cages. Portions of jaws. Cracked skulls piled up like broken bowls in a corner. Wasted pairs of jeans, so many of them. Eyeglasses. Shoes. A plastic doll. Clumps of hair. Relics of real people; remnants of my living home. And then, I glimpsed the washed-out blue shawl I knew so well, and my hands went right to it. I held the faded fabric to my chest, where it tore to pieces that fell through my shaking fingers. The rest of my Dapîra lay strewn like shattered crockery in the ditch. And I looked at her a long, long time—whispering so many things I don’t wish to remember just now.

  But my mother’s mother was more than a fractured shell, and I fought to see past that blinding desecration. At last, I found her smiling face—in the morning before school, when she reached up laughing to tousle my hair. Then her singing voice traveled out of my boyhood—we were kneading dough for our bread. Her floured hands so soft over mine. Finally, I forced myself against every impulse to turn away and let her go. Leaving my grandma, my Dapîra there—like that—was the hardest thing I’d ever done.

  And if that wasn’t enough, farther along the dugout I came upon the red Arsenal football club jersey I’d seen every long-ago school day. Images flashed: Saïd running wild down the street to school, his tattered satchel spilling its contents. Those wayward shoes and big brown eyes. He was always the first to offer up a joke, or one of his patchwork socks for our soccer ball.

  “Saïd,” I said. “I have found you.”

  I took a picture of his remains, bowed, and kept going, the sun arching across the sky. I saved that long sharp grief like a blade that would cut me to pieces later. I had to hurry now—there were so many time-devoured bones, thin and white as alabaster, thousands of Yazidis waiting to be counted.

  I went to as many mass graves as I could reach. Forty-five locations were on the list, scattered all over the foothills and near the crest, but there was no reaching each one. Farther south along a series of berms, I could see distant black shapes of militants and took what pictures I could.

  Shelling from the front lines intensified as ISIS fighters attacked, using heavy guns mounted to trucks. I took note on positions and activities, then doubled way back to a plateau, getting rides there from Yazidi contacts hunkered down in the foothills. Diehard fighters still protecting the mountain told me ISIS had suffered many losses and had been pushed out of Shingal; but rogue militants still roamed the hills, killing off any of my people they could. In the shadow of Shingal, I photographed the bones left along the slopes. Then I gathered intel from rebels and witnesses still left on the terraced farms farther down.

  On the way back, I slipped and dropped the camera into a crevasse. The lens smashed to pieces over the rocks. And I looked at it, all of me just as shattered—mind finally splintering. I’d done all I could.

  For now.

  BACK IN GERMANY again, I spent time at an isolated safe house in Stuttgart, helping freed women and children reach treatment centers. At night, I continued to work with a group called United Rescue Aid, tracking refugee boats crossing the perilous sea to Greece using a GPS monitoring system. Sometimes, I’d sit there checking on the journeys of several vessels at a time all night long, the dinghies sending out coordinates every ten minutes, until they reached safe harbor. If the rafts ran into trouble, it was my job to contact the nearest ships whose captains had joined the network, and mobilize a swift rescue at sea. Those pathetic overcrowded crafts held my people, and once ashore, I would help marshal teams to meet them. When you’re the member of a vanishing species, every life saved is the future entire—and I could not rest from that purpose.

  Then, while drinking a cold cup of coffee, watching the boats, I finally received the one message that I’d been frantic for.

  “This is Dil-Mir,” she began. “Have I found you?”

  Every nerve ending electrified—I filled and refilled my lungs with air like a man who’d just been pulled out from under the ice.

  “Yes. It’s me, Dil-Mir. I love you. Thank God you’re alive. I knew you would find your way here. Now, I will find my way to you. Tell me all you can.” How many times had I imagined that moment? It almost didn’t seem real.

  “I only have one minute. Must be careful.”

  “OK. I need your location. We are getting girls out all the time.”

  “Two brothers have me and another girl. They make us cook and dance.”

  “Where—do you know? We can get your GPS from your device.”

  “Syria. But they move us. We are being sold again, at a slave market outside of Aleppo.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. Come find me. We can’t live this way. The things they do to us.”

  “I will come. I promise you.”

  “I’ll be back again to tell more.”

  Then, like a gust of wind, she was gone.

  In that relentless season of co
ld rain and impenetrable fog, I thought the worst was almost over—my Dil-Mir was alive. I would not think about what they’d done to her—the time would come to deal with that. Between the loaded ships coming in, and the women and children pulled from under bridges, abandoned houses, carried across borders and out of fields, we’d saved hundreds so far. She was only one.

  Only one, but my everything.

  WHEN A FRIEND who’d been fighting in a Yazidi unit with the Kurds reached out, a brand-new plan fell into place. Three ISIS fighters had been killed. As he stood over the warm bodies on the outskirts of the Syrian desert, he called on WhatsApp to ask me what to do.

  “Did you check for identification? ISIS issues ID cards—I need those,” I said.

  “Yes, got it,” the Yazidi answered. I could hear him rummaging, the sounds of a zipper opening, as he ranted under his breath at the corpse.

  I instructed him to take whatever he found. One of the militants had a Motorola cell phone and I knew that ISIS issued them to their soldiers; like many terrorist groups, they had their own communications channel. More treasure than I’d expected was coming off the first body and I warned him not to mess around and just bag it.

  “Now take pictures of the ID cards,” I said. “Front and back. The fighters, too—their faces. Every angle.”

  The cards were basic, laminated. No photo—easy.

  “There should be a slave certificate,” I said. “Maybe it’s attached to the ID card.”

  He found it right away—good for one sabaya. A gift from the Islamic State.

  “Sick bastards,” he muttered, still rummaging. “They’re organized.”

  “Well, I’m angry and organized.”

  “This guy is fat. Why are they all so fat?” And I could hear him roughing up the body.

  Then I told him what I told everyone: “They are fat because they are pigs.” And then I added that I would have to chug German beer and eat bratwurst to get into shape for what I was about to do.