Marching onward, I discovered that the third shop had its shutters down too, so I returned home empty-handed. Mom’s face was etched with disappointment when I entered the house without any goods. But she was even less pleased when I told her what I’d heard in the village. “People are driving themselves crazy, even though none of them has ever set eyes on an ISIS fighter.”
When my father finally came through the garden gate with Serhad he was stony-faced: a bad sign. He trudged into the sitting room, the whole family following him uneasily. “Is it true what the people in the village are saying?” my mother asked, even before he’d taken off his boots. “Is it true that they’ve occupied Sinjar?”
My father nodded. “I fear the rumors are true.”
“We met a man who fled from there,” Serhad said excitedly. “He says he saw a convoy of armored vehicles approaching with black flags.”
My mother put her head into her hands.
“The Peshmerga are no better than the Iraqi army. They’ve left us at the mercy of the enemy,” my father said angrily. “Two hundred and fifty men were stationed in the Sinjar area. But every single one of them cleared off overnight, making room for the terrorists. Entire villages in the south of the Kurdish area are now encircled by ISIS.”
“That’s what the people in the Arab villages are saying,” Serhad added.
“So what are we going to do now?” Mom asked. She pointed to the bag she’d packed with food. “Hadia and Adil reckon it would be better if we got out of here.”
“Nura and her family have gone too,” I said.
“And where do you suppose we should flee to?” my father asked.
“To the north, Kurdistan,” I said. I expected that Nura and her family had gone there.
“How do you imagine we are going to get there?”
I pondered this question. Only one road went through Kocho. Either you could go north, or south to the Arab area, which ISIS had advanced into. That was inadvisable. “Well, we’ll take the road to Sinjar and the mountains,” I said, already realizing as I uttered these words that it made no sense because there was fighting in Sinjar as well.
This is exactly what my father was getting at: “They’ve got us in a pincer grip. No matter which road we took we’d run straight into the arms of ISIS. It’s too dangerous!”
“We met refugees from Sinjar too, who didn’t manage to make it to the mountains,” Serhad confirmed. “They thought they’d be safer here.”
Dad was at a loss. All of us were. What could we do now? All of a sudden ISIS seemed to be everywhere. We were trapped.
“We have to wait and see how the situation in Sinjar develops,” Dad decided. “At the moment, at least, it would be suicide to head in that direction.”
SUICIDE. I COULDN’T get the word out of my head all that evening and night. My father managed to persuade most of our relatives to refrain from taking the dangerous route for the time being. But no one had warned Nura and her family. They had driven straight into the fighting in Sinjar. I was worried to death about my friend. I kept begging Delan to call her father’s phone, as Nura herself didn’t have a cell phone. But he couldn’t get through. “That doesn’t mean anything. ISIS often deactivates the local network when they attack somewhere,” my father said to comfort me. As a soldier he had experience in these things. “Or he’s out of battery.”
My mother too tried to reassure me. She was permanently worried that I would get one of my attacks. I’d suffered from epilepsy since I was a small child. Thanks to medical treatment we’d managed to keep the illness under control. But as soon as my emotional balance was unsettled, I developed problems that could manifest themselves as attacks. “Don’t get worked up, Farida. It’ll be all right. I’m sure she’ll call you in a few days,” my mother said. “Have you taken your medicine?”
“Yes, don’t worry, Mom.”
I went to bed early and fell into a fitful sleep, accompanied by bizarre dreams. I saw the man with the black turban and beard, whom Delan had shown me on the video clip. The “caliph” pointed his finger at my friend. “Nura!” I screamed. Then I heard the rattling sound of machine gun fire. I sat up with a start. Was I awake or still dreaming? The rattling continued.
I also heard my father’s voice, talking animatedly with my mother. The two of them went up to the roof. The night was full of gunfire and shouting. My father was peering through binoculars. “What’s going on?” I asked, still half asleep and yet just as worried as they were.
“Farida, my child.” His voice sounded tender. “They’re attacking Siba.” He passed me the binoculars. “Look, can you see?”
I could make out rocket fire and explosions in the direction where our neighboring village lay. Two of my aunts lived there: Rhada and Huda, my mother’s sisters. Both of them had small children. My mother tried desperately to get through to them on the cell phone. But the network was paralyzed.
“I’ll drive over to Siba,” my father said. “We have to help them.”
But Mom wouldn’t let him go. “It’s too dangerous,” she protested. “Their people must be everywhere. At least wait until the sun’s up. I don’t want to stay here alone with the children.”
He put his arms around my mother to comfort her. And he did wait until dawn. By then the cell phone network was working again, and my aunts called. They had run away from the fighting, fleeing to the hills with the children. “They’ve destroyed everything; we’ve got nothing left,” Huda said in tears. “They’re shooting at everything: men, women, and children.”
“My entire family is dead,” Huda sobbed.
“Where are you now?” Dad asked.
They told him their precise location; it was only a few kilometers from Kocho. “Come to us right away,” he said. But they were too scared that Kocho would be ISIS’s next target.
“Then I’ll come. I’ll drive to Siba with a few men.”
“Siba is lost,” they replied. “You should flee now while you still have the chance. Run for your lives!”
After the phone call my father got through to another relative from Siba, who had also fled. But he only confirmed what my aunts had just said. “Whatever you do, don’t come here,” he implored. “It’s full of ISIS soldiers. The battle is lost. Pack up your things and flee to the mountains, or they’ll kill you too.”
My father had heard enough. He informed Uncle Adil and other heads of families in Kocho. All were of the same mind: flight was now the only chance left open to us.
We hectically began packing our things. In the trunk of our Opel Omega we stowed food, warm blankets, a camping stove, two pots, our three Kalashnikovs, and several canisters of drinking water. We also gathered up our valuables: cards, papers, Mom’s jewelry, our cell phones. Then we were ready to go and the seven of us squeezed into the car. All the inhabitants of Kocho had done the same as we and were now sitting in their cars. We’d leave Kocho in a convoy heading north and hope we could make it to the mountains. Somehow. “If you see ISIS soldiers, wave the white flag out of the window,” my father urged us.
Then the convoy got moving. The first cars were already on their way out of the village when the mayor, who was leaving with us, got a phone call. It was from Muhammad Salam, a powerful man in the area. As “Emir,” he was in charge of a number of villages in our region, including the Yazidi villages of Til Banat, Til Ghazeb, Hatemiyah, and Kocho. I’d seen him a few times before on his sporadic visits. He was a tall, gaunt man with a black goatee who always wore traditional Arabic robes. He had a pronounced limp, as his left leg was lame. He frightened me.
“Turn around at once!” Salam ordered our mayor. “You must on no account drive away or you’ll pay with your lives. We’ve come to an agreement with ISIS: if you stay where you are they won’t do you any harm.”
“Are there any guarantees for this?”
“You have my word that you’ll be safe in Kocho,” Salam said. “Now, tell all the villagers to turn back. You won’t get very far anyway; ISIS sol
diers have set up checkpoints on all roads. If you leave, your convoy will come under fire.”
The mayor made a sign for the cars to stop. Some had already driven off, including Uncle Adil and Auntie Hadia’s. But most were still in the village. My father and the other men got out and listened to what the mayor had to say. We waited in the car while they discussed the matter with him. Not all the men agreed that you could rely on the Emir’s word; many considered him untrustworthy. One made a call to the Yazidi village of Hatemiyah to find out what the situation was there. The villagers said that Salam had also promised them they’d be safe if they stayed.
“All I can do is relay his words to you,” the mayor said. “Each family must make their own decision.”
From the direction of the main road we could hear gunfire. Clearly the cars that had set off first were being shot at. Some of them turned around to take refuge back in the village. On one, there were bullet holes.
My father returned to us looking gloomy. “Get out. We’re staying here,” he said.
ISIS SOLDIERS HAD formed a ring besieging Kocho. Together with our Arab neighbors they were making sure that no one left the village. Some of the inhabitants tried to slip past the checkpoints at night. Most of them were forced to haul themselves back to the village with bullet wounds. It was impossible to get past the blockades with a large group of people, or even a family.
When we got back home we converted our house into a fortress. My father, mother, the two elder of my brothers, and I took turns keeping watch on the roof. We always had our Kalashnikovs at hand. And we rearranged the sacks of cement so that they would give us protection should it come to a battle. Now we were expecting an onslaught at any moment. Why else would they bother to encircle Kocho? What did they want from us?
Two days after our abortive attempt to flee, a delegation of Arabs came to the village. These weren’t ISIS fighters, but Muslims from the neighboring villages of Gheravan, Bikatsh, and Pisik, around a dozen men in total, including Salam. They drove pickup trucks and instructed all the men to assemble in the village square.
“We’ve come to an agreement with the soldiers of Islamic State,” Salam explained. “They won’t attack your village. But you have to give up your weapons. That is their condition.”
A murmur of discontent spread through the rows of men. “Why should we give up our weapons?” the mayor asked. “We are peaceful people. We only need our weapons to defend our homes and property.”
But Salam was not allowing any dissent. “We’re now going to go from house to house and collect up all the guns,” he announced. “I advise you strongly to surrender all your weapons. Otherwise our peace settlement is null and void—and Kocho will be attacked in the next twenty-four hours. If anybody hides weapons in his house or refuses to give them up, he’ll be endangering the lives of everyone else. The entire village will pay for it.”
Shortly afterward a couple of Salam’s men drove up in their truck. Dad handed over our Kalashnikovs, all three of them. He didn’t want to take any risks. “There’s no need to be worried,” the men emphasized as they put them in the rear bed. “We are Muslims and people of honor; we will keep to our word. You can rely on us.”
“A peace agreement is always better than an attack,” Dad said, probably trying his best to believe it himself. As a soldier, it was a particularly big shock for him now to be standing there without any weapons. It was like a surrender. All the same, we tried to convince ourselves that perhaps this step would ensure the peaceful existence we were so longing for.
Only my mother remained skeptical. “We have no guarantees. These people are capable of anything. Haven’t you seen what they’re doing to the poor people in Sinjar?”
We had just heard by phone that a relative of ours had lost his life during the fighting in the city. As for the many others, like Nura, who had fled to Mount Sinjar, Iraqi television was reporting that they were stranded up there because ISIS forces surrounded them. I imagined their situation to be terrible. For I knew from my driving trips there with Delan that the upper plateau was like a moonscape—no trees to offer shade, no animals to eat or water to drink. No one could survive up there for long. The people would starve if ISIS didn’t let them down at some point. By comparison we had it pretty good here in the village, I thought.
As long as the food lasted, at any rate. No traders had come into the village since ISIS had surrounded us, the shops remained closed, and my mother had already started rationing what we had. But luckily there was the garden. In summer it provided us with so much fruit that we could have sold some. But of course we didn’t; we gave it away to our relatives and neighbors who had stayed behind with us in the village. Evin helped me harvest the zucchinis and we gave her two in return. As we sat in the garden we thought of Nura. Neither of us had heard from her.
“Do you think they made it?” I asked Evin. “Do you think Nura’s all right?”
“I wish she’d get in touch.”
We were worried about Auntie Hadia and Uncle Adil too. Had their car been one of those shot at by ISIS just outside our village? They hadn’t turned around and come back, at any rate. We didn’t know whether we should interpret this as a good or bad sign. Were they and their children now up in the mountains too?
After days of uncertainty my mother finally received a call from Hadia. Her face beamed when she heard her voice. “We’ve been so worried,” she said. “Where are you?”
Hadia said that she, Adil, and the children were part of a large group of refugees who’d taken refuge near the Solar Springs. It was a place where in good times families used to meet for picnics. Hundreds of cars belonging to Yazidi refugees were already there, she told my mother. For Solar was a dead end; you couldn’t get any further by car. Only on foot could you make it up to the plateau, a stony desert without food or water. When they heard that ISIS was hot on their heels, people kept climbing higher. “Tell Aziz to notify the army,” Hadia said. “They’ve got to fetch us from up here.”
“Yes,” Mom replied feebly. She didn’t want to discourage Hadia. But this request was asking for far too much. Anybody still able to watch the television news was well aware that neither the Peshmerga nor the Iraqi army had been able to keep up with the ISIS advance. By now the terrorists had even taken the strategically important city of Makhmur between Mosul and Kirkuk, and were twenty kilometers outside of Erbil. It was likely that soon they would have conquered the whole of Kurdistan. Given this situation, who was going to be thinking about us or the people in the Sinjar Mountains? “I’ll let Aziz know,” she promised Hadia all the same. “Hang on in there for a bit longer, won’t you?”
After the conversation my mother was convinced that our relatives had made a mistake with their hasty escape. “Look what a terrible situation they’re in up there, Farida,” she said. “We’re much better off here at home.”
I thought so too. Until the day when the Arabs came back to Kocho. Just as on their first “visit,” they drove into the village in two pickups and summoned all the men to an assembly. “What do they want from us now?” my father asked as, obeying the order, he made his way to the village square with Delan and Serhad. Things didn’t look good: in contrast to the villagers, who had surrendered all their weapons, every one of the Arabs was armed to the teeth.
Salam’s minions helped him up onto the rear bed of one of the pickups so everyone could see him. Then he addressed the men of the village. This time he assumed the almost conciliatory tone of a preacher: “Today we’ve come here to invite you to believe in the one true God,” he said, and waited for the Yazidis to react. Some shook their heads and whispered to each other. But no one dared protest out loud, as Salam’s men were pointing their rifles at them.
“We know that you are devil worshippers,” the Arab continued. “That is a heinous crime. No one on this earth may pay homage to Satan, or Melek Taus, as you call him. You must renounce this false belief and acknowledge Islam instead. Only thus can your souls be saved.”
He spoke a while longer and praised the magnificence of his own faith. “In our Islamic State we will not tolerate any infidels,” he said finally. “We will give you three days to make your decision. Otherwise . . .” He gave a menacing pause. “Otherwise we will deal with you in the way that infidels deserve.”
Salam did not expand on what he meant precisely by this threat. But the men in our village feared the worst. We were well aware of the terrible things that ISIS had done to the Christians in Mosul and the Yazidis from neighboring villages. People of different faiths had no place in the “state” of the fanatics.
My father came home utterly crestfallen. He called Mom and me into the sitting room and told us what had happened. “Salam is demanding that we all become Muslims,” he said. “Every man and every woman in the village must publicly declare their allegiance to Islam. In three days they will come back to hear our decision.”
“In three days!” my mother repeated, as if Dad had just let her know the day on which the world would end. She looked at me and started to cry. “Only three more days.”
“Yes,” my father said. Then he told us that he and the other men in the village agreed that we had to find a way to leave Kocho. Some had already phoned Yazidis in Hatemiyah; ISIS had put the same choice to them, and they were also planning to flee to avoid having to betray their faith.
For one thing was certain: “We will never deny Our Lord, Melek Taus!” my father said. “Never! How could we disavow His divine splendor? We are His people, the sons of Adam. So were we born. Better to die and accept exile.”
“There are things more important than this earthly life,” my mother said, reinforcing his words.
“Our faith is the most important thing of all,” my father reiterated. “Never forget that. No matter what they do to us. Never forget our fundamental moral laws: respect your elders; never let your heart be consumed by feelings of envy or jealousy; never seek revenge.”
The Girl Who Escaped ISIS Page 5