The Beekeeper

by Dunya Mikhail

  The next day Daesh came and took the villagers in their big cars. Sulayman’s mother asked them, “Where’s my son Sulayman? Bring him back so that he can come with us.” But no one paid any attention to what she said.

  Sulayman’s father didn’t know what to do. His wife had stopped responding to his calls. His anxiety increased when he heard that Daesh had captured the people in the area and had taken their cell phones. He was by the Beesh Khabur bridge over the Tigris, helping some of the people who were fleeing. He had hoped to find his family among them. After going back and forth several times, he saw his son Sulayman with the others. He rushed over to his son, asked him about the rest of the family, but Sulayman had been wondering about them as well.

  News spread that Daesh had killed all the men and taken the women as sex slaves. Sulayman was so upset by the news that he couldn’t calm down. He left at noon, telling his father that he was going to meet some friends. He came back in the evening with a gun. Sulayman announced to his father that he had volunteered to fight Daesh with a group of Yazidis. “You’re young, my son, and this gun is too heavy,” his father said. Sulayman explained that he was going to liberate Sinjar. The liberation of Sinjar was random in the beginning — people were going out to fight without any military guidance. But a year later the volunteers joined the Peshmerga army. Sulayman was younger than the legal age to join the army, so they refused to take him with them to the battlefield. Sulayman begged them, saying that he was even ready for suicide operations against Daesh, but they refused his request. In response, Sulayman killed himself. Ever since then, Sulayman’s father always carries that gun with him, and goes out as if he were headed off to war.

  For the people of Sinjar, you can’t call a place home unless you can plant on it. They don’t count age by the years, but by the seasons of harvest. They know locations not by address, but by traces of life. Places are known by their proximity to the mountain, to the valley, to the hill, or to the cattle farm. Their trees have roots that extend back to the time of the Sumerians, who invented the wheel so the earth could go around.

  “I wonder, Abdullah, now that Sinjar is liberated, do you ever think about returning to your home?” I asked.

  Abdullah answered: Nobody from Sinjar has gone home. They wrote the letter Y on our homes and on our stores, and built a barrier like the Berlin Wall — N for the Christians, and Y for the Yazidis. S for the Sunnis, and Sh for the Shi’ites. At least they allowed the Christians to leave, even if they had to go empty-handed. They didn’t extend such “privileges” to the Yazidis.

  Overall, it seems like the jihadis follow a certain pattern of invasion. First they refer to their prey with a particular letter, an X or a Y. Then they offer the victim peace in exchange for money and weapons, but later break the agreement, taking the money and the weapons without offering peace. Then they justify their actions by saying it’s God’s law. This is what their caliph says: O my brothers, what don’t you understand? If we prevail against the enemy infidels, it’s only natural that everything should become our property.

  Abu Sulayman in Qadia Camp

  The people should be our spoils, our captives. What else would we do with the female captives if not distribute them to the jihadis? In order to create this system, we need to open a market where we can sell the sabaya and their children. Each head has a price. If the share of each jihadi is five people, for example, and if he didn’t need all of them but needed some money, what would he do? It’s simple. He would sell some of them at auction. The law of God says that those who weren’t present at the invasion have no rights to the spoils. Isn’t that just?

  One of my friends on Facebook commented on this caliph: Brother, you’re killing me, displacing me, and raping my wife and my sister because you want to implement the law of your God. Please tell me where this God of yours is so that I can sue him for damages.

  Have you ever checked out the Daesh websites? They attract a lot of attention, despite how strange they are — but perhaps it’s because of their strangeness. Lately someone has been egging on the new jihadis, reminding them that there are seventy-two houris waiting for them in paradise. He told them: Hurry, hurry up and register your names, the houris are waiting for you in paradise, where you can eat and drink with the Prophet. And someone answered him: I am for jihad. I am for jihad. Then they kissed each other, exchanging congratulations.

  It seems to me that the promise of paradise is the golden idea Daesh uses to win over young guys — using both modern and older means of communication and propaganda, as well as to linking the past of the caliphate with the promised paradise. And their chanting, along with the verses, raises the adrenaline level of the fighters so much that they forget everything but the black flag fluttering in front of them.

  “They fight in the name of God and the houris,” according to Nadia Murad, the young woman who lost seven people in those mass graves — her mother and her six brothers. “In those exposed mass graves, the bones of my mother and my brothers and the rest of the dead are left to be swept away by the rain or eaten by animals. People ask me what I need — I need to bury my mother with dignity.”

  Nadia said: “The daily routine for Daesh is taking drugs, reciting religious songs, going to fight, and then coming home and raping women. I ran away several times but I didn’t get away. They punished me by continuously gang-raping me until I lost consciousness. I barely survived because a kind family from Mosul helped me. They were Sunni Muslims like Daesh — but they were not like Daesh at all. They took care of me, helped me return home. They even apologized, saying, We’re sorry for not feeding you well enough.”

  Nadia — as sad and transparent as a teardrop — said to her therapist, “I don’t want to talk about what happened to me here in this closed room. I want to talk to the whole world.” And she did. Nadia spoke with members of the UN Security Council, making them cry — her words spread from country to country: “They glued our pictures to the walls of the court building so that members of Daesh could pick from the pictures the ones they wanted to buy or sell. Like any Middle Eastern girl, I came from a conservative society. No man is allowed to touch us before marriage, but Daesh simply exploits us for sex and fun. They beat us, they force us to pray, and they force us to serve them food in porno outfits. While I was raped by more than a dozen men of various nationalities, I thought about my mother — how much I just wanted to hug her. I missed my siblings and their children. My mother raised us on her own after my father died in 2003. I was in the high school literature section. I loved my village. I had a simple and happy life with my extended family, which consisted of twenty-six people. When I was held in captivity for three months, I wished for the world to end. The problem isn’t that the world is going to end, but that it continues without any change.”

  Nadia has changed a lot since being with Daesh. It can be seen quite clearly in the before and after pictures. It’s as if she’d aged a decade in a single year: “Every part of my body has been transformed in their hands,” she said.

  Psychotherapist Dr. Nagham Nozad Hassan told me that she visited Nadia in the Khanki Camp after Nadia had a nervous breakdown. “I was struck by how smart, attentive, and brave Nadia is. By chance, I had received a proposal to transfer a number of Daesh victims to Germany, so I added Nadia’s name to the list.”

  “Dr. Nagham, you meet with survivors on an ongoing basis. What’s the most difficult situation you’ve ever confronted?” I asked.

  “The psychological turmoil of survivors who got pregnant when they were raped — their conflict of feelings between motherhood and the desire to get rid of Daesh embryos.”

  “You’re also a specialist in gynecology, right?”

  “Yes, but I closed my clinic after Daesh attacked. I decided to work with the United Nations instead — this disaster is far more important than any normal work.”

  “You already won the International Women of Courage Award from
the US State Department — how did you earn that?”

  “I would visit the camps on a regular basis to do what I could for the survivors in helping them return to normal life.”

  “Is it possible for them to return to normal life?”

  “Not really. Still, we’re trying to find a way to give them some sense of dignity, at least.”

  I followed up about Nadia when I spoke with her brother Sa’eed. He was one of those who was shot, but didn’t die.

  “What do you remember most about Nadia before Daesh?”

  “I remember the holidays. We used to wake up early to meet our friends. It was our custom to visit those who’d lost loved ones to offer them our condolences. I’m the eleventh child in the family, and Nadia is number twelve, the last one. She was still really close with our mother. She liked school — and she was doing so well there. We had a large farm and a big house, which was always filled with guests who came over for our parties, to eat and drink with us. They were the same people who killed us and captured our women later.”

  “How many of the twelve are still missing?”

  “There were eight of us who disappeared, but my brother Khalid and I got away after they shot and injured us. You’ve already spoken with Khalid, he mentioned.”

  “Oh, I didn’t realize that Khalid, Nazik’s father, was your brother, Nadia’s brother. Please send him my regards,” I said.

  “I was in the group before him. The person who shot me used to be my neighbor. He said, Come down from there, you dogs. He shot me six times in my left side, my neck, my back, and my foot. I heard the engines of their cars rev when they left. My friend Dilshad asked, Is anyone still alive? Four of us were still alive, but one person couldn’t move because his injuries were so serious. The other three of us crawled out of the mass grave. I was bleeding from my entire left side. I kept walking and falling, then trying to get up again. Near an electric generator I stopped and packed my wounds with dirt to slow the bleeding. There, I told Dilshad to leave me behind because his wounds weren’t as serious as mine. I stayed there for six hours, just a hundred and fifty yards from the mass grave. I watched the others bury the dead. It was maybe eight o’clock in the evening. Some low-flying planes passed overhead. Then I walked about four miles, arriving at the village of al-Qabusiyyah at around midnight. My body was swollen when I knocked on someone’s door. The people in that house welcomed me inside, and gave me some painkillers. It was a Muslim family — my feelings toward them were a mixture of gratitude and distrust. I stayed with them for six days, and then walked twenty miles east, toward Mount Sinjar. I was bleeding again, falling onto the ground, wavering between this life and the next. In the end, a group from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan found me and handed me over to the Kurdish government. They took me in an ambulance to a hospital in Zakho. I stayed there for twenty-two days. Then they took me to an American hospital in Erbil, where I stayed for ten days. That was when Nadia called me and told me she’d escaped from Daesh. My three other sisters were still captives. As soon as I was discharged from the hospital, my stitches still clasping my wounds, I signed up to fight Daesh. When Sinjar was liberated, I was among the first to enter the city. While I was there I saw my mother in the mass grave. Now I have the opportunity to go abroad, but I won’t leave this country before I have contributed to the total liberation of my people.”

  Sa’eed stood up and pointed to his village on a large map hanging on the wall of his tent.

  “Did you really see her? Your mother?”

  “I saw her identity card in the midst of bones and other remains.”

  With Sa’eed in his tent

  The Spring

  Twenty years after leaving Iraq on a one-way ticket, I returned to my country today, on May 27, 2016, not so much to visit the living as to visit the dead.

  We, the people of Baghdad, used to refer to the north as a “resort” — it was our only tourist destination when travel was forbidden during the 1980s on account of the Iran-Iraq War. But this isn’t tourism today. We came to visit the mass graves, perhaps to bury our feelings, too, and to get rid of their weight upon our souls — or perhaps because they needed us, they needed us so much and yet we didn’t go! Or because we’re alive, and we can, quite simply, visit the dead.

  But the one survivor I most wanted to see was Abdullah.

  “Peace be upon you,” he said formally, smiling. I had expected him to be dressed in white Yazidi clothes, not a modern outfit. We had agreed to visit the temple of Lalish together because, as the sacred Yazidi texts say, “the earth wasn’t satisfied with its condition until Lalish was revealed; only then did the plants grow, and did the earth become beautiful.”

  I asked him if he was busy that day with a rescue operation. He said that he was.

  “May I come with you?” I asked.

  “Are you sure you want to do that? You have a US passport. It would be risky.”

  “I’d like to witness the process firsthand.”

  “Okay, but memorize my phone number, in case you need to be rescued.”

  I laughed and said, “Okay, I’m ready.”

  “You actually believed me? Not today. Besides, I wouldn’t take you with me to Syria — let’s go to Lalish instead.”

  We drove almost forty miles, along winding roads to the east of Dohuk, toward Sheikhan. The temple looked small from the outside but as soon as we entered, it opened up to infinity. We walked in barefoot like the others did, because “there should be no barrier between the foot of the entrant and the temple’s floor.” Our feet touched stones that were over 4,000 years old; another world opened up right before our eyes, in the depths of the mountain, somewhere between myth and reality. The narrow pass, surrounded by three mountains, gradually opened wider, revealing all that it had, like the generosity of its people, but sometimes it also closed in on itself, like the Yazidi religion.

  As we entered a courtyard, there was a man sitting with a little sparrow in his hand. Abdullah introduced him as Luqman Sulayman, “public relations guy for the temple. If you have a question, he’s the best person to ask.”

  “Nice to meet you. Yes, I have a question. Who’s this bird in your hand?”

  “This bird fell from a nest. I put him back but he fell a second time. After the third time it happened, I took him home with me.

  Luqman Sulayman and his little sparrow

  Now I’ve become very accustomed to his companionship so I brought him here with me.”

  Abdullah asked Luqman to let me enter the sacred places that are typically forbidden to non-Yazidis. “She came all the way from America to visit Lalish,” Abdullah said. I didn’t understand Luqman’s reply because he spoke in Kurdish. It seemed to me that he wasn’t going to allow it, but he did kindly invite us to have tea.

  I would soon enter into those places without knowing they were “forbidden.” Abdullah didn’t seem to notice, or maybe he forgot, or simply didn’t follow the instructions. Whatever the case I was pleased to be given those additional secrets without even realizing it.

  “Careful, you can’t walk on the thresholds. You have to cross over them,” Abdullah reminded me.

  I didn’t count the number of entrances; it seemed to me that each of them told a story of the age. The entrances were so low that even a short person like me had to hunch down to get inside. To the right of one of those entrances was the snake of Noah, which is considered sacred by the Yazidis because it’s said to have saved mankind when it curled itself up and plugged the hole that had been punctured when Noah’s ark collided with a rock during the flood.

  You pass from one cave into another, as if history is sleeping and you are inside its eyelid. I noticed colorful pieces of cloth tied around columns in one of the caves. Abdullah nodded at me encouragingly as I untied one, making a wish as I retied it: wishes are supposed to come true when another visitor comes to untie it. I glanced at
Abdullah and saw that he was doing the same thing as me.