The Girl Who Escaped ISIS

by Farida Khalaf

  “Or perhaps he means that one day his state’s going to be so big that it’ll encompass Germany and Australia,” I suggested.

  “That’s also a possibility.”

  “But surely that would mean that he’s going to expel all those who don’t believe in Islam from these countries?” I continued. Could this really be his plan? The notion that the man in the black robes could be so cruel as well as a megalomaniac gave me the creeps. But he had already driven out the Christians who’d been living in Mosul for centuries.

  My brother put a finger to his lips to shut me up. “Listen,” he said. “He’s explaining it now!” I pricked up my ears.

  “O Muslims everywhere!” Baghdadi called out theatrically to his supporters. “Hurry to your state, yes, your state! Hurry, for Syria does not belong to the Syrians and Iraq does not belong to the Iraqis. No, the earth belongs to God alone, who gives it to those of His servants on earth whom He chooses.”

  “By which he means himself, I suppose?”

  “Who else?” Delan replied sarcastically.

  “This state is the state of Muslims,” Baghdadi continued, working himself up as his audience kept calling out “Allahu Akbar” with ever increasing enthusiasm. These people seemed quite pleased with the idea that the world belonged to them. “O Muslims, wherever you may be, whosoever can emigrate to the Islamic State must do this, for emigration to the house of Islam is your duty.”

  “Do you really think that the Muslims will follow him?” I asked anxiously.

  “That clown? A self-appointed caliph?” Delan laughed. “With the best will in the world I can’t imagine that the muftis will accept a man like him.”

  “Maybe not those in Iraq,” I countered. “But perhaps he’ll find favor with Muslims from other places. I’ve heard there are many foreigners among his troops.”

  “Sure, there are a few loonies all over the world,” Delan said. He winked to cheer me up. Just like my father, he always tried to maintain a sense of humor, no matter how serious the subject we were discussing. I loved this about him. His good mood lent him a very particular charm and in my opinion his fiancée, Zevin, who had recently accepted his proposal, had made a good choice. He was bound to be an excellent husband. Any woman would surely be happy at his side.

  I felt sorry for the people of Mosul. It must be awful to have a band of thugs attack your city and force everyone living there to live by their rules. It was said that they treated the population with extreme brutality, driving out the Christians and shooting the Shia soldiers one after another. If they wished to avoid being arrested, women had to be fully veiled with a niqab. And anybody who protested was shot or beheaded with a sword. Or at least those were the rumors. What sort of life was that? How could the people tolerate it?

  Thank goodness we lived here in such seclusion, at the foot of Mount Sinjar, I thought. Surely nobody would come this far. Because there wasn’t anything worth conquering here, no banks, no oilfields, nothing at all. And if someone did try, then there was always the Peshmerga stationed in our village. Officially the Kurdish militia was part of the national army, though it operated independently from it, and it had a particularly good reputation in the north. The soldiers were said to be highly experienced, unswervingly brave and patriotic. They would protect us. Every day the men undertook their patrols of the area.

  It seemed as if Delan had read my mind. “Don’t worry, sis,” he said. “The Peshmerga would notice at once if something was not quite right. They’d warn us. And then everyone in the village would take to their weapons; don’t forget that every family here has got at least one Kalashnikov. So we’d be able to send those guys running. We’d chase them all the way back to Syria, or wherever they come from. The fact that it’s all gone belly-up in Mosul is because of those damn Sunnis; they opened the door to these bandits!”

  I RELIED ON the word of the two men I trusted most in my life. Both my big brother and my father assured me that I had no reason to worry. The men who had taken Mosul were not interested in us. They’d leave us in peace. In the mornings, when together with my family I turned to the sun, I prayed to Melek Taus that Dad and Delan would be proved right.

  But then something happened that really scared me. On August 1, 2014, ISIS soldiers attacked a military position in Zumar, a town forty kilometers to the northwest of Mosul, and thus on the edge of the Kurdish autonomous region guarded by the Peshmerga. The town was to the northeast of Kocho. The terrorists also attacked the Mosul Dam and tried to occupy a nearby oil production facility. Fierce battles raged the entire day.

  “Those fucking bastards,” cursed my father, who fortunately was not on duty at the time, but at home with us. “They want to seize the dam. That would allow them to blackmail Mosul and the whole of the south.”

  “And the oilfield,” Delan added. “They were really keen on the oilfields in Syria.”

  “What does it all mean?” I asked the two of them anxiously. They exchanged glances, but didn’t give me an answer. But I already knew: the attack meant that ISIS had no intention of stopping at Mosul. They wanted to snare the whole of northern Iraq. Only the Kurds could stop them now. “Will the Peshmerga be able to deal with them?”

  “Of course,” Father and Delan replied in unison—and far too quickly. Once more they exchanged glances that I didn’t find reassuring.

  All day long we tried to find out what we could about the fighting in the north. The television news bulletins reported very little and practically none of it was new. Each time the announcers repeated the line that the brave Peshmerga fighters were doing their best against the ISIS forces. My father phoned a number of his fellow soldiers stationed in the area. But they didn’t know any details either, and the rumors they picked up were contradictory: while some believed that the dam had already been lost, others claimed it was securely in Kurdish hands. Some even doubted that it had been attacked at all.

  The Peshmerga in our village couldn’t help us either. Being simple soldiers, they had no information about what was going on in the north. Or at least that’s what they said when Delan questioned them. At the end of the day the newsreader on Kurdish television announced that their troops had been victorious: “The illustrious Peshmerga killed a hundred terrorists,” he read out with satisfaction. But fourteen Kurds had died in the fighting too. “The patriotic sons of Kurdistan died for our fatherland,” he said.

  “That means they defeated them!” I cried out in triumph. “They sent them packing. That must be what happened!”

  “Precisely,” my brother agreed. My father, however, remained skeptical.

  “They won this battle,” he said. “A hundred fighters? Seems a very large number to me. It must have been a huge battle. I wonder how many of them there were to begin with.”

  I looked at him. My math brain went into a spin and suddenly it clicked. Dad was right. If a hundred ISIS soldiers had died today, then the number that had invaded Zumar must have been many, many times larger. After all, the Peshmerga could hardly have managed to kill all the ISIS fighters, even if that was our greatest wish. So where were the ones who had survived?

  I also thought it suspicious that the newsreader said nothing about the Kurdish war booty. Surely the Peshmerga must have confiscated their enemy’s weapons, munitions, and vehicles. Where was the footage of the Kurdish military proudly holding up their trophies to the cameras? The lack of such images could only mean one thing: a significant proportion of ISIS soldiers must have escaped in their military vehicles, together with their equipment. Had they driven back to Mosul? Or had they stayed in the north?

  That night I couldn’t sleep. A strange sense of unease lay over the village. Many people must have been as uneasy as me. It felt like just before a storm: you sensed that something was brewing, that the atmosphere was growing more and more oppressive. But you didn’t know exactly what to expect.

  At one point I thought I could hear footsteps outside. It was probably the Peshmerga, patrolling the streets, on a hig
h state of alert after the attacks. I wondered whether I ought to go up on the roof and check. I briefly considered taking one of the Kalashnikovs with me, but they were in the chest in my parents’ bedroom. So I just climbed up in my nightie.

  Then I saw that I wasn’t the only one to have had this idea. Among the sacks of cement, my father was dozing with his AK-47 in his arms. I tiptoed closer, sat down beside him, and nestled up to his shoulder, waking him in the process. “Farida! Has something happened?” he asked in shock.

  “No, Papa. It was just too hot downstairs. That’s why I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Come here,” he said, putting his strong arm around my shoulders. I could feel his heartbeat and breathed in the familiar scent of apple tobacco on his skin. Comforted, I nodded off.

  “THEY’VE GONE!” A voice echoed around the village before sunrise the following morning. Someone was running through the streets crying, “The Peshmerga have gone! They’ve abandoned us!”

  Sleepily I rubbed my eyes, not grasping at first what was happening. But my father sat up with a jolt. “Is this true?” he called down to the man. “Maybe they’re on patrol somewhere in the area.”

  “No, they’re miles away!” he called back in fury.

  Soon the whole village was astir. My father decided to forgo his morning prayer, hurrying instead to the village square to speak with the other men. Delan and Serhad accompanied him. My mother, my two small brothers, and I stayed at home, waiting impatiently for the news they’d bring back. In the meantime Mom switched on the television.

  The most important items of news were again about Zumar and the Mosul Dam, the two places where fighting had occurred the day before and where the Peshmerga had supposedly chased off the ISIS soldiers so illustriously. Overnight, however, they had returned. “Massoud Barzani now needs every one of his men up there,” my mother said bitterly. “That’s why he ordered the Peshmerga back, leaving us defenseless here.”

  When my father and brothers came back they told us that the villagers wanted to form small squads of volunteers to monitor the area. “It’s just a precautionary measure,” Dad emphasized. “If ISIS fighters are sighted anywhere nearby it means we can respond in time.”

  Mom nodded; it made sense. It was the same job that the Peshmerga ought to be doing. Now the inhabitants of the village were taking it into their own hands. We certainly had enough men and weapons. Dad wanted to set out at once with Serhad and Delan. But my mother objected to this. “Do me a favor and split up. If something happens I don’t want to lose all my men together!”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to us, Zakia,” my father laughed. “We’re just going on a little reconnaissance mission.”

  But she was insistent. “All right. Then Delan can accompany Uncle Adil later on,” my father said finally, giving in.

  Mom also insisted that everyone who went carried a weapon. We followed Dad into the bedroom, where he used a key to open the chest that housed the Kalashnikovs. There were still only three of them. He gave one of the AK-47s to Delan, while he and Serhad would share another. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea if you went up to the roof and kept an eye on the street, Farida,” he said. “Will you do that?” He handed me the third Kalashnikov.

  I looked at him, wide-eyed. Father was actually asking me to guard our house. “No problem,” I said, rather proud of the fact that he had entrusted me with this important task.

  The men set off and I went to my post. I weighed up the Kalashnikov in my hand. By now I had a pretty good idea how to use it; since my first attempt at shooting with my father, I’d been practicing assiduously in the garden. I could even hit the target in the right place: in the middle. But until now shooting had always been a bit of fun for me, like a hobby. Was this now the “emergency” that Father had talked of? Somehow it didn’t feel like it.

  I looked at the street, but couldn’t see anything unusual. The neighbors were wandering about as they normally would. Perhaps their movements were a little more frantic than on other days. Because obviously everyone was worried. The fact that the Peshmerga had simply disappeared overnight made us all nervous. But then I told myself, Of course they’ve gone! After all, they need to help with the defense of the north, which is in grave danger. Could we resent them for having hurried to help their comrades? Did we imagine here in the south of the Kurdish area that we were more important for the autonomous government than the Kurdish heartland? We had to look after ourselves. With such thoughts and ideas buzzing around my head, I dozed off among the cement sacks as the midday heat approached.

  I was woken by the noise of my brothers Keniwar and Shivan playing soccer around the garden. And by two women’s voices, which drifted up to me from the terrace below. Clearly we had visitors, but from my observation post I hadn’t noticed them coming. A fine guard I was turning out to be!

  I crawled to the edge of the roof and glanced down. I saw my aunt Hadia, the wife of my uncle Adil, with a baby on her hip and her two small sons. She was a very talented cook, and as a result rather plump in comparison to my petite mother. The two women were having an animated conversation.

  “People say that they’re in Sinjar,” I heard my aunt say.

  “Has Adil seen them?”

  “No. But the inhabitants of the neighboring villages have. There’s been fighting, apparently.”

  “Are you sure? Sometimes people exaggerate to make themselves sound important.”

  “Come on, Zakia! Get with it!” my aunt shrieked. “ISIS is twenty kilometers from Kocho. We’re in big danger!”

  Finally I understood what they were talking about. There had been an attack on our district capital. “What happened?” I called from above. The two women turned their heads in my direction and looked up at me.

  “Farida!” my mother said in surprise.

  “What happened in Sinjar?” I repeated.

  “We don’t know for sure,” my aunt replied. “But at any rate . . . they say ISIS soldiers are there.”

  My heart almost stopped as she uttered those words. ISIS fighting in Sinjar. That was the worst news that the day could have brought. I left my sentry post and hurried into the sitting room, where I saw my brother Delan, who’d arrived with my aunt.

  “They’re only rumors so far,” he said.

  I switched on the television. But there was only a quiz show. I couldn’t find any reliable information.

  My aunt’s voice, which we could hear outside, sounded more panicky, however. “For God’s sake, Zakia!” I heard her say. “Please listen to me. We’ve got to get away from here. Aziz will say the same when he’s back.”

  “I just wish he and Serhad would come soon,” my mother replied helplessly.

  “They will,” Hadia said, rocking her baby, who had caught the mood of anxiety and now started howling. “I suggest you get packing. I’m heading home now.”

  They left our property via the garden gate. Mother stood there as if paralyzed as she watched my aunt and her children go. She didn’t seem to know what to think or do. Wracked with indecision, she inspected our pantry. It contained rice, beans, eggs, a pail of yogurt, a sack of dried almonds, and a few tins of preserves. As if on autopilot, she started packing everything into a large travel bag.

  I was just about to return to my post on the roof when she called me: “Farida!”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell Delan to relieve you on the roof.” She handed me a shopping bag and a few notes, clearly all the cash we had in the house. “Go to the shop and buy some food: dried meat, nuts, rice . . . everything you can find. And hurry. Others may well have had the same idea.”

  “All right.”

  The small shop we usually frequented was one of three in Kocho. When I arrived it was sheer chaos outside. All of a sudden dozens of people had urgently gone shopping. Many of them had come by car. They were carrying entire sacks and crates of food out of the shop, stuffing the trunks of their cars with them. I stood at the very back in a line of about a dozen people.

/>   “That’s it. I’ve got nothing left,” the shop owner said when it was almost my turn. He half closed the shutters. The people outside voiced their protests. But the man had three strong sons who helped him throw out the customers who were still inside the shop and chase off all those still trying to get in. I’m not even sure if, in the heat of the moment, he managed to collect the money for all the purchases. All that seemed to matter to him was to close the shop and keep what was left of the food for himself.

  I hurried to the next shop, which was in another part of Kocho, a fair distance from our house. We would normally go by car. As every house in the village was surrounded by its own piece of land, Kocho was very long.

  I’d been striding for a while in the direction of the shop when I heard a pickup stop beside me. “Hey, Farida!” a very familiar voice cried. It was Nura with her entire family. She was sitting on the rear bed with her mother, grandparents, two aunts, and two younger sisters. The men were sitting in the front.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Away from here. Isn’t your family leaving too?”

  “Maybe later. I’ve got some shopping to do.”

  “Spare yourself the walk. The shop near us has closed already.”

  “Shall we bring you home?” Nura’s father offered.

  I shook my head. “I’ll try the Ramadis.” That was the third shop.

  “Okay,” he said. “But they might be closed too. Don’t waste any time!”

  Nura leapt down from the rear bed and embraced me. “Get out of here, Farida!” she urged me insistently. I held her tightly and heard her heart pounding—for the last time. It was unbearable to have to separate like this.

  “Look after yourself,” I whispered to her. She nodded.

  “And you look after yourself.”

  “I promise.”

  Then Nura climbed back into the pickup, and she and her family waved goodbye. I wanted to burst into tears. But I kept my self-control and waved back. “See you soon,” I called after them, barely believing my own words. When, I wondered, would I see Nura again? Would I ever see her again?