I got up fast, grabbed Babo’s picture, and left. So little sleep, and I was on the move all over again.
Chapter Twenty-Six
All the Faithful
IN THE MONTHS OF WAITING THAT FOLLOWED, MY BODY WITHERED down to a skeleton sheathed in wasted muscle, but I kept to the same unyielding pace. In my personal mission to thwart the enemy, I could not stop. I took to smoking shisha like a madman. Every now and again, I messaged my family on Facebook, sending out reassuring pictures of easy times, interesting landmarks, smiling people, and cultural events. Daki believed that the worst was over for our family; and as time carried us across 2017, we were scattered all over the earth, in camps or safe havens—but still alive.
Somehow, Bowers sensed that I was in a bad way, and without saying a word in advance, sent me money through Western Union. It wasn’t the first time, and he sent more to my family in the camps. He could not have known what that meant for us. The man had seven children to feed, and yet he’d thought of feeding me and my own. Because of him, I had my first taste of good meat in weeks; afterward I kneeled down over the ground of my dank room to whisper up a prayer to God, and a yaho all the way to Idaho.
Meanwhile, as ISIS continued to lose terrain, more Yazidi cases poured in, and I crisscrossed Germany, often forgoing food and sleep, to meet them, always with a smile. So many were small children, only revealed as they crawled from the craters of bombed-out blocks, or wandering the liberated streets of Mosul and other towns like wraiths. Dozens of half-grinning boys emerged from the wreckage as though from their own graves, coated in the grime of war and drugged for so long they no longer knew their own names. Those forsaken Yazidi strays were all ours and would not be left to the unwitting world, or we were finished as a people—as human beings. Girls discarded as their captors fled the smoldering cities sometimes sat stunned for days in abandoned homes, at last praying to their own god again until we found them.
Once cross-border rescues had taken place, I would travel to perimeter towns and train stations, or even to meet smugglers’ vans at the sides of roads, and ferry survivors in bundles to hospitals or sanctuary homes. Still in the dead of night, Salman and I met in the void to tally our growing list of captives. All the while, I kept in contact with Alex, and he with “the two Mikes,” as we worked through what was called “processing.”
As an added safety net, an American handler started checking on me most days. Sometimes she pinged more than once through an encrypted platform. She kept tabs on my well-being and the status of any forms or reports, ensured I was obtaining medical attention when warranted, and monitored my rescue work. We got to know each other well, but would never meet in person. Mainly, she was just a kind voice from the free world, and I was soon calling her Xweşko—Sister. Xweşko convinced me to take regular walks and seek out friends in their tiny asylum rooms. Sometimes, all we did was exchange YouTube videos, watch clips of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and tell jokes to pass the dark times. Or we simply sat hours on end in our hemispheres and said nothing much at all.
Hope was my stalker now, its long tendrils sweet-talking agonies like an opiate. Not far behind, ISIS operatives lurked, tracking my steps like a pack of hunting dogs loping through the urban brush, waiting for the moment to close in. Somehow, I always managed to stay one step ahead.
From the United States, I was assured that a coordinated team was still working on my SIV case while monitoring the ongoing situation in Turkey. Xweşko relayed the directive that I employ social media to put out disinformation, and she provided a clandestine email platform. Every few days as instructed, I posted pictures of myself standing along the Rhine, in verdant parks, dressed to the nines at weddings, or of the beaming children of friends. Meanwhile, I was scrambling all over Lower Saxony, waiting to hear from Alex or one of the Mikes that the rescue deal was in full motion.
“The thing is,” Alex said over the line, “there are so many moving parts. It’s taken this long just to convince the State Department that you’re in a lethal situation. Germany is considered a ‘safe’ country, so we had to rearrange their brains. There was a shit-ton of paperwork.”
“I’m not getting out, Alex—sorry to tell you. It’s OK. I’ll keep going.”
“Listen, one step at a time. You’ve cleared State with flying colors—and that was the big one. Now the ball’s in Homeland Security’s court. They’ve made you a top priority. The team is on this—they want you back, and back alive.”
“What about the rescue—in Turkey—the girls?”
Wherever he was, I heard him let out a breath—then: “All we can do is inform the people who decide whether to take the safeties off—and that much we have done. So now, we just have to wait. Believe me, we’re all as frustrated as you are.”
Right there and then, I didn’t believe him—or any of them.
SEVERAL TIMES I traveled to Berlin where agents interviewed me for hours; once they sent a “special American envoy” to conduct a full debrief. Everyone kept repeating the same mantra: it’s all going to be fine. How I’d grown to hate that word—fine—almost as much as the word team. Still, Alex kept up the mantra: the team is pushing hard; the team is there for you; the team won’t rest until you’re on safe soil.…
Often now, I spent successive days in solitude tethered to my Android. Saw doctors when it got too hard to breathe; they kept doling out more pills. Eventually, I stopped sleeping almost entirely and just kept working, no longer keeping track of days. Despite all the outside assertions, there seemed no end in sight to the struggle. At least that’s what I thought.
And maybe that’s why one night I finally broke right down—to the cold cement floor, limbs splayed. Unable to move any longer, not wanting to. Just then, Dil-Mir came back to me, stepping in her flowered dress and Shingal-perfumed skin through the door to my room, a lamb in her arms.
I brought you your Daki, she said.
I stood up and beheld her loveliness, dark hair all loose. “I forgot about this one,” I said and leaned over to caress the animal’s fur.
It’s my birthday, she said.
And I motioned to the small burning candle I’d lit for her in the corner.
Then I took a long veil that I’d kept secreted for months and ran the thin fabric over my hands. How many times had I thought of the moment she’d done the thing that had split our destiny in two forever? All night, I stayed up pacing the room, talking to her.
In between, my Babo came back, but only in a whisper:
You spend your packet at last, boy?
“Yes, Babo—I have.”
AS THE HOURS bled out into daybreak, I was ready. Then, in a well-practiced maneuver, I tied the veil into a tight loop, fixing it to the metal pipe running along the ceiling. The copper rung could take the weight of several men—let alone one Yazidi with nothing left in him. No more running—I’d done all I could. On my knees, I bent to extinguish the candle. As the smoke swirled, I asked all the faithful angels to save my soul.
And then, not a foot away, the Android buzzed. Empty veil hanging behind me, I looked over, reached, and glanced at the screen: Anne Norona with another case needing transport. And I could have let it all go, right then and there—they would have to find someone else now—but I’d already glimpsed the face of a boy hovering over the glass.
His name was Khiri.
IN AUGUST 2014, invading soldiers of the Islamic State had swarmed two-year-old Khiri’s village in Shingal, taking him and his young mother to Syria as slaves. Until his rescue, Khiri had been used as a torture dummy—beaten to subdue the homicidal tempers of his captors, or to compel his mother to submit to whatever new perversion they came up with.
I collected frail Khiri from the pick-up point to take him in a bundle of blankets to the hospital in Berlin. A team of doctors was waiting. On the trip that we made by train, I held the tiny malnourished boy, who was no more substantial than an empty grain sack. At first, he clung to me while he drifted off to the gentle rocking of the tr
ain. I’d never seen a child so tired—more tired than I’d ever been.
Looking down at the fragile form dressed in a new blue T-shirt and pants, I took in the serrated indentations along the blistered skin where his ear had been—teeth marks. And then I studied the arms—scars like nail holes, where soldiers of the Islamic State had put out their cigarettes. Tenderly, I moved my palms along his bird-wing limbs, thin bones all knotted and askew.
Then I read the report again: Militants had taken turns swinging Khiri from the wrists, smashing his legs into cinderblock walls and breaking both femurs, and never setting the bones. There was worse still: wearing lace-up leather army boots, grown men had repeatedly kicked the boy in the abdomen at full force. Even after that, they used implements to maim his genitals—it would take multiple plastic surgeries to make the boy right again. And yet, Khiri slept in my lap, warm and breathing.
Who am I to abandon him? I thought.
Just then a message on my Android came in—Xweşko. She had some new information and wanted to talk. The fact was, I didn’t want to talk to any of them—no food and no sleep and so little left of me. But she persisted, mentioning the word team like some magic Band-Aid someone had given her.
I was sick of the word team and told her so.
The screen stayed blank for a minute and I thought she was long gone, but then she started texting. One at a time, names emerged that I knew at a glance as brethren:
Sergeant Ronald Bowers
Captain Robert Brownsword
Lieutenant Colonel Jay Migone
Senator Marv Hagedorn
And by the last, I was on Mount Shingal again, thirsting among the multitudes left to die over the rocks—but those four men were right up there with me, listening, making frantic calls, mobilizing, keeping me strong even as I wailed for help. Now they were back, on a train in the middle of Germany as I delivered a broken Yazidi angel to safety. Their names lit my screen like lodestars.
As the air rushed from my lungs, I called Xweşko’s line and asked her to explain what made no sense.
“That’s your team—Team Shaker. There are many more of us, but they were the first. It started when they came to DC in August 2014, and no one even knew if you were going to make it out. Brownsword and Migone have gone back and forth to the Capitol pounding down doors. Bowers has been pulling in all kinds of help. Because of him and Hagedorn you now have senate and congressional offices joining in. Those guys aren’t giving up. Neither can you. Not now.”
It took several stunned minutes to contain all that was in me—for the moment, I could only answer: Yaho. OK. And the line cut out.
I couldn’t fathom it. What had I ever done for any of them?
WHEN THE TRAIN pulled into Berlin, Khiri stirred and then looked right up at me. I was weeping.
“I’ve seen airplanes,” he whispered.
“Me too,” I answered, so surprised to hear the shy song of his voice. “This is a train.”
“I know, you told me.”
“Yes.” I tried hard not to choke on my own breath.
“My name is Khiri.” Then he held out the thumb he’d been sucking and pointed it at himself.
“I’m Shaker,” I said, mirroring him.
“I hope to take lots of trains. Don’t you?”
“Yes, I hope it—”
But I could hardly hear myself.
Then, without any reason, the boy smiled wide, showing a mouthful of swollen gums. In his lit-up eyes, over which the scenery out the window was passing, I saw my own ashen face staring down—and then I saw all of them: Dil-Mir. Dapîra. Saïd. The lost. And then the freed, every shining face staring out like bewildered newborns at the moment of their rescue: from rafts, vans, trains, buses, under bridges, out of forests, squalid tents, rusted-out cars, and heaps of rubble. Between Anne and me, and the legions of volunteers scattered all across the continents, we’d rescued untold thousands.
Finally, I saw my brothers-in-arms, starting with Sergeant White, and I understood that those still-living men simply had to keep me alive, or it might all have been for nothing—the blood and souls spilled over the sands. They needed to save me, just as I needed to save little Khiri. Together we were all fighting the same war. Ours was a campaign against inexorable evil.
And we must win.
Khiri closed his eyes again, and let his head rest against my beating heart.
Epilogue
Überleben
ON THE THIRD WEDNESDAY IN APRIL 2019, WHEN MY PEOPLE celebrated the festival of Charshama Sari Sali, the birth of the universe, I was in Germany—and still waiting in peril. By now, a few precious family members had asylum papers, along with a handful of old friends from Shingal. In recent weeks, as the Coalition Forces squeezed ISIS fighters from Syria, more Yazidi captives emerged from the abyss. Still, tens of thousands remain missing, the dead in the mass graves unidentified and unconsecrated, their tyrants at large—for now.
Recently, Senator Hagedorn let me know that the coordinates and intel I’d provided during the genocide played a critical role to “open the road” and establish a safe corridor used to get trapped Yazidis off the mountain.
“Without you being there, willing to communicate with a stranger, those people would have all been slaughtered,” he said. “And don’t forget the five hundred girls in the warehouse.”
Whatever happens to me now, just for knowing that, my soul can rest in peace.
NOT LONG BEFORE the spring holiday, Alex called with news.
“You ever heard of a man named Colonel Jesse Johnson, Shaker? He’s one of the most highly decorated veterans in the United States military, and I happen to be working on a book about his life. So, I told him all about you—and then I happened to mention that you met General Petraeus once…”
It turns out Colonel Jesse Johnson was General Petraeus’s commanding officer with the 509th Airborne Battalion in Vicenza, Italy. Back then David Petraeus was a second lieutenant fresh out of West Point. Ever since, the two have stayed friends.
“The general won’t remember me,” I said. “No way.”
“Well, Colonel Johnson reached out to him with your story and he got back to him in about a nanosecond. You’re one of his vets—that’s how he sees it.”
Within hours, General Petraeus sent my case to a member of the board at an organization called No One Left Behind (NOLB) that has helped five thousand Afghan and Iraqi combat interpreters acquire visas to resettle in the United States. James Miervaldis served as an army reservist deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan, spent three years working to get his own terp out, and knew the system better than most anyone.
As it happens, I am but one of over ten thousand stranded terps who have simply fallen prey to a hidden cancer of red tape: the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program actually expired in 2014. Not to mention, the system is designed to work independently of outside influences: congressional and senate recommendations, as well as letters from high-ranking officers in the military and intelligence, are disregarded. All of my work to promote the interests of the United States while risking my own life, deemed irrelevant. No one had figured any of this out until now.
At the same time, Senator James Elroy Risch, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has taken a personal interest in my situation and contacted the ambassador in Berlin, while advising and coordinating with both the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Unfortunately, the Department of Homeland Security recently claimed that I appeared to have “settled” in Germany and sent back my application. Apparently, someone pushing papers at DHS did not “get the memo” that I fled to Germany for security reasons and remain under threat in Europe at large. Senator Risch and NOLB have ensured that my case will move forward, and at the same time Team Shaker is growing exponentially. Now, it’s not just about me: it’s about all those who served the United States with honor, and just want to come home.
LONG AGO, MY Babo taught me that hardships lighten if you anchor them to mo
ments of gratitude. I’ve had my share: the morning my sister Nadia gave birth against so many odds to a healthy baby boy in a refugee camp. When Anne Norona received the Woman of the Year award in Britain for her charitable work helping sick Yazidis; and then as she plucked my smiling cousin, Khairi Aezdeen, from his somber tent in the KRG and took him for a trip through England for a time. Khairi was also a combat terp, but gave up on the visa program years ago. These days he helps our people through Anne’s NGO Yezidi Emergency Support (YES) and teaches at a camp school for girls. And above all, I am grateful for the moment I watched Nadia Murad receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Sweden, and held it up for every Yazidi like a mighty sword against the beast of the Islamic State.
IN THE MIDST of my frantic endangered life, I went to see a Yazidi friend in a home for the aged in Oldenburg.
“There’s an old Jewish man down that corridor you need to see,” my friend had told me, and pointed.
Lying back in a hospital bed, Werner stared out, waiting—now I know he was waiting for me.
“Shaker,” he said, his hand making loops in the air. “Come, let me see you.” I went to the side of the bed and stood there looking down at the frail figure lying there attached to an IV. In a moment, he took up my palm. “The path you walk, I’ve walked long before you,” he said at last.
Then well into the eventide, we exchanged our histories. As a member of a rescue railroad, Werner and a fledgling army of resisters risked their lives to save an endangered generation of fellow Jews from certain extermination in the Nazi concentration camps.
Shadow on the Mountain Page 26