The Last Girl

by Nadia Murad

  Most village disputes were solved by Ahmed Jasso, our practical and diplomatic mukhtar, and he sided with Hezni. “Our relationship with our Sunni neighbors is already strained,” he said. “Who knows what they will do if we try to fight with them.” Besides, he warned, the situation outside Kocho was far worse and more complicated than we imagined. A group calling itself the Islamic State, or ISIS, which had largely been born here in Iraq, then grown in Syria over the past few years, had taken over villages so close to us, we could count the black-clad figures in their trucks when they drove by. They were holding our shepherd, our mukhtar told us. “You’ll only make things worse,” Ahmed Jasso said to Dishan’s uncle, and barely half a day after the Sunni shepherds had been kidnapped, they were set free. Dishan, however, remained a captive.

  Ahmed Jasso was a smart man, and the Jasso family had decades of experience negotiating with the Sunni Arab tribes. Everyone in the village turned to them with their problems, and outside Kocho they were known for being skilled diplomats. Still, some of us wondered if this time he was being too cooperative, sending the message to the terrorists that Yazidis would not protect themselves. As it was, all that stood between us and ISIS were Iraqi Kurdish fighters, called peshmerga, who had been sent from the Kurdish autonomous region to guard Kocho when Mosul fell almost two months earlier. We treated the peshmerga like honored guests. They slept on pallets in our school, and each week a different family slaughtered a lamb to feed them, a huge sacrifice for the poor villagers. I also looked up to the fighters. I had heard about female Kurds from Syria and Turkey who fought against terrorists and carried weapons, and the thought made me feel brave.

  Some people, including a few of my brothers, thought we should be allowed to protect ourselves. They wanted to man the checkpoints, and Ahmed Jasso’s brother Naif tried to convince Kurdish authorities to let him form a Yazidi peshmerga unit, but he was ignored. No one offered to train the Yazidi men or encourage them to join the fight against the terrorists. The peshmerga assured us that as long as they were there, we had nothing to worry about, and that they were as determined to protect Yazidis as they were the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. “We will sooner let Erbil fall than Sinjar,” they said. We were told to trust them, and so we did.

  Still, most families in Kocho kept weapons at home—clunky Kalashnikov rifles, a big knife or two usually used to slaughter animals on holidays. Many Yazidi men, including those of my brothers who were old enough, had taken jobs in the border patrol or police force after 2003, when those jobs became available, and we felt sure that as long as the professionals watched Kocho’s borders, our men could protect their families. After all, it was those men, not the peshmerga, who built a dirt barrier with their own hands around the village after the 2007 attacks, and it was Kocho’s men who patrolled that barrier day and night for a full year, stopping cars at makeshift checkpoints and watching for strangers, until we felt safe enough to go back to a normal life.

  Dishan’s kidnapping made us all panic. But the peshmerga didn’t do anything to help. Maybe they thought it was just a petty squabble between villages, not the reason Masoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, had sent them out of the safety of Kurdistan and into the unprotected areas of Iraq. Maybe they were frightened like we were. A few of the soldiers looked like they couldn’t be that much older than Saeed, my mother’s youngest son. But war changed people, especially men. It wasn’t that long ago that Saeed would play with me and our niece, Kathrine, in our courtyard, not yet old enough to know that boys were not supposed to like dolls. Lately, though, Saeed had become obsessed with the violence sweeping through Iraq and Syria. The other day I had caught him watching videos of Islamic State beheadings on his cell phone, the images shaking in his hand, and was surprised that he held up the phone so I could watch, too. When our older brother Massoud walked into the room, he was furious. “How could you let Nadia watch!” he yelled at Saeed, who cowered. He was sorry, but I understood. It was hard to turn away from the gruesome scenes unfolding so close to our home.

  The image from the video popped back into my head when I thought about our poor shepherd being held captive. If the peshmerga won’t help us get Dishan back, I will have to do something, I thought, and ran into our house. I was the baby of the family, the youngest of eleven, and a girl. Still, I was outspoken and used to being heard, and I felt giant in my anger.

  Our house was close to the northern edge of the village, a one-story row of mud brick rooms lined up like beads on a necklace and connected by doorways with no doors, all leading out to a large courtyard with a vegetable garden, a bread oven called a tandoor, and, often, sheep and chickens. I lived there with my mother, six of my eight brothers and my two sisters, plus two sisters-in-law and the children they had between them, and within walking distance of my other brothers, half brothers, and half sisters and most of my aunts, uncles, and cousins. The roof leaked in the winter when it rained, and the inside could feel like an oven in the Iraqi summertime, pushing us up a staircase onto the roof to sleep. When one part of the roof caved in, we patched it with pieces of metal we scavenged from Massoud’s mechanic shop, and when we needed more space, we built it. We were saving money for a new home, a more permanent one made of cement blocks, and we were getting closer every day.

  I entered our house through the front door and ran to a room I shared with the other girls, where there was a mirror. Wrapping a pale scarf around my head, one I normally wore to keep my hair from getting in my eyes when bending over rows of vegetables, I tried to imagine what a fighter might do to prepare for battle. Years of labor on the farm made me stronger than my appearance let on. Still, I had no idea what I would do if I saw the kidnappers or people from their village drive through Kocho. What would I say to them? “Terrorists took our shepherd and went to your village,” I practiced in the mirror, scowling. “You could have stopped them. At least you can tell us where he was taken.” From the corner of our courtyard, I grabbed a wooden stick, like the ones used by a shepherd, and made for the front door again, where a few of my brothers stood with my mother, deep in conversation. They barely noticed when I joined them.

  A few minutes later a white pickup truck from the kidnappers’ village came down the main road, two men in the front and two in the back. They were Arabs I vaguely recognized from the Sunni tribe that had taken Dishan. We watched as their truck crept down the main dirt road that snaked through the village, slowly, as though totally without fear. They had no reason to drive through Kocho—roads around the village connected cities like Sinjar and Mosul—and their presence seemed like a taunt. Breaking away from my family, I ran into the middle of the road and stood in the path of the truck. “Stop!” I shouted, waving the stick over my head, trying to make myself look bigger. “Tell us where Dishan is!”

  It took half my family to restrain me. “What did you think you were going to do?” Elias scolded. “Attack them? Break their windshield?” He and a few of my other siblings had just come from the fields and were exhausted and stinking from the onions they were harvesting. To them, my attempt to avenge Dishan seemed like nothing more than a child’s outburst. My mother was also furious with me for running into the road. Under normal circumstances she tolerated my temper and was even amused by it, but in those days everyone was on edge. It seemed dangerous to draw attention to yourself, particularly if you were a young, unmarried woman. “Come here and sit,” she said sternly. “It’s shameful for you to do that, Nadia, it’s not your business. The men will take care of it.”

  Life went on. Iraqis, particularly Yazidis and other minorities, are good at adjusting to new threats. You have to be if you want to try to live something close to a normal life in a country that seemed to be coming apart. Sometimes the adjustments were relatively small. We scaled down our dreams—of finishing school, of giving up farmwork for something less backbreaking, of a wedding taking place on time—and it wasn’t hard to convince ourselves that those dreams had been unreachable in the
first place. Sometimes the adjustments would happen gradually, without anyone noticing. We would stop talking to the Muslim students at school, or be drawn inside in fear if a stranger came through the village. We watched news of attacks on TV and started to worry more about politics. Or we shut out politics completely, feeling it was safest to stay silent. After each attack, men added to the dirt barrier outside Kocho, beginning on the western side, facing Syria, until one day we woke up to see that it surrounded us completely. Then, because we still felt unsafe, the men dug a ditch around the village as well.

  We would, over generations, get used to a small pain or injustice until it became normal enough to ignore. I imagine this must be why we had come to accept certain insults, like our food being refused, that probably felt like a crime to whoever first noticed it. Even the threat of another firman was something Yazidis had gotten used to, although that adjustment was more like a contortion. It hurt.

  With Dishan still captive, I returned with my siblings to the onion fields. There nothing had changed. The vegetables we planted months before were now grown; if we didn’t pick them, no one would. If we didn’t sell them, we wouldn’t have money. So we all knelt in a line beside the tangles of green sprouts, tugging bulbs out of the soil a few at a time, collecting them in woven plastic bags where they would be left to ripen until it was time to take them to market. Will we take them to the Muslim villages this year? we wondered but could not answer. When one of us pulled up the black, poisonous-smelling sludge of a rotten onion, we groaned, plugged our noses, and kept going.

  Because it was what we normally did, we gossiped and teased one another, telling stories each had heard a million times before. Adkee, my sister and the joker of the family, recalled the image of me that day trying to chase the car, a skinny farm girl, my scarf falling in front of my eyes, waving the stick over my head, and we all nearly tipped over into the dirt laughing. We made a game of the work, racing to see who could pick the most onions just as, months before, we had raced to see who could plant the most seeds. When the sun started to go down, we joined my mother at home for dinner in our courtyard and then slept shoulder to shoulder on mattresses on the roof of our house, watching the moon and whispering until exhaustion brought the whole family to complete silence.

  We wouldn’t find out why the kidnappers stole the animals—the hen, the chicks, and our two sheep—until almost two weeks later, after ISIS had taken over Kocho and most of Sinjar. A militant, who had helped round up all of Kocho’s residents into the village’s secondary school, later explained the kidnappings to a few of the village’s women. “You say we came out of nowhere, but we sent you messages,” he said, his rifle swinging at his side. “When we took the hen and the chicks, it was to tell you we were going to take your women and children. When we took the ram, it was like taking your tribal leaders, and when we killed the ram, it meant we planned on killing those leaders. And the young lamb, she was your girls.”

  Chapter 2

  My mother loved me, but she didn’t want to have me. For months before I was conceived, she saved money whenever she could—a spare dinar here and there, change from a trip to the market or a pound of tomatoes sold on the sly—to spend on the birth control she didn’t dare ask my father for. Yazidis don’t marry outside the religion or allow conversion into Yazidism, and large families were the best way to guarantee that we didn’t die out completely. Plus, the more children you had, the more help you had on the farm. My mother managed to buy the pills for three months until she ran out of money, and then, almost immediately, she was pregnant with me, her eleventh and last child.

  She was my father’s second wife. His first had died young, leaving him with four children who needed a woman to help raise them. My mother was beautiful, born to a poor and deeply religious family in Kocho, and her father happily gave her to my father as a wife. He already had some land and animals and, compared to the rest of Kocho, was well-off. So before her twentieth birthday, before she had even learned how to cook, my mother became a wife and stepmother to four children, and then quickly she became pregnant herself. She never went to school and didn’t know how to read or write. Like many Yazidis, whose mother tongue is Kurdish, she didn’t speak much Arabic and could barely communicate with Arab villagers who came to town for weddings or as merchants. Even our religious stories were a mystery to her. But she worked hard, taking on the many tasks that came with being a farmer’s wife. It wasn’t enough to give birth eleven times—each time, except for the dangerous labor with my twin brothers, Saoud and Massoud, at home—a pregnant Yazidi woman was also expected to lug firewood, plant crops, and drive tractors until the moment she went into labor and afterward to carry the baby with her while she worked.

  My father was known around Kocho for being a very traditional, devout Yazidi man. He wore his hair in long braids and covered his head with a white cloth. When the qawwals, traveling religious teachers who play the flute and drums and recite hymns, visited Kocho, my father was among the men who would greet them. He was a prominent voice in the jevat, or meeting house, where male villagers could gather to discuss issues facing the community with our mukhtar.

  Injustice hurt my father more than any physical injury, and his pride fed his strength. The villagers who were close to him loved to tell stories of his heroism, like the time he rescued Ahmed Jasso from a neighboring tribe who were determined to kill our mukhtar, or the time the expensive Arabian horses belonging to a Sunni Arab tribal leader escaped from their stables and my father used his pistol to defend Khalaf, a poor farmer from Kocho, when he was discovered riding one in nearby fields.

  “Your father always wanted to do what was right,” his friends would tell us after he passed away. “Once he let a Kurdish rebel who was running away from the Iraqi Army sleep in his house, even though the rebel led the police right to his doorstep.” The story goes, when the rebel was discovered, the police wanted to imprison both men, but my father talked his way out of it. “I didn’t help him because of politics,” he told the police. “I helped him because he is a man and I am a man,” and they let him go. “And that rebel turned out to be a friend of Masoud Barzani!” his friends recall, still amazed all these years later.

  My father wasn’t a bully, but he fought if he had to. He had lost an eye in a farm accident, and what was left in the socket—a small milky ball that looked like the marbles I played with as a kid—could make him look menacing. I’ve often thought since then that if my father had been alive when ISIS came to Kocho, he would have led an armed uprising against the terrorists.

  By 1993, the year I was born, my parents’ relationship was falling apart, and my mother was suffering. The eldest son born to my father’s first wife had died a few years earlier in the Iran-Iraq War, and after that, my mother told me, nothing was ever good again. My father had also brought home another woman, Sara, whom he married and who now lived with their children on one end of the house my mother had long considered her own. Polygamy isn’t outlawed in Yazidism, but not everyone in Kocho would have gotten away with it. No one questioned my father, though. By the time he married Sara, he owned a great deal of land and sheep and, in a time when sanctions and war with Iran made it hard for anyone to survive in Iraq, he needed a big family to help him, bigger than my mother could provide.

  I still find it hard to criticize my father for marrying Sara. Anyone whose survival is directly linked to the number of tomatoes grown in one year or the amount of time spent walking their sheep to better grass can understand why he wanted another wife and more children. These things weren’t personal. Later on, though, when he officially left my mother and sent us all to live in a small building behind our house with barely any money and land, I understood that his taking a second wife hadn’t been completely practical. He loved Sara more than he loved my mother. I accepted that, just as I accepted that my mother’s heart must have been broken when he first brought home a new wife. After he left us, she would say to me and my two sisters, Dimal and Adkee, �
�God willing, what happened to me won’t happen to you.” I wanted to be like her in every way, except I didn’t want to be abandoned.

  My brothers weren’t all as understanding. “God will make you pay for this!” Massoud shouted at our father once, in a rage. But even they admitted that life got a little easier when my mother and Sara weren’t living together and competing for my father’s attention, and after a few years we learned how to coexist. Kocho was small, and we often saw him and Sara. I passed by their house, the house I was born in, every day on my way to elementary school; theirs was the only dog along that walk that knew me well enough not to bark. We spent holidays together, and my father would sometimes drive us to Sinjar City or to the mountain. In 2003 he had a heart attack, and we all watched as my strong father instantly became an ill, elderly man, confined to a wheelchair in the hospital. When he died a few days later, it seemed just as likely that it was out of shame over his frailty as it was because of his bad heart. Massoud regretted having yelled at him. He had assumed his father was strong enough to take anything.

  My mother was a deeply religious woman, believing in the signs and dreams that many Yazidis use to interpret the present or predict the future. When the moon first appeared in the sky as a crescent, I would find her in the courtyard, lighting candles. “This is the time when children are most vulnerable to illness and accidents,” she explained. “I am praying that nothing happens to any of you.”

  I often got sick to my stomach, and when I did, my mother took me to Yazidi healers who gave me herbs and teas, which she urged me to drink even though I hated the taste, and when someone died, she visited a kochek, a Yazidi mystic, who would help confirm that the deceased had made it into the afterlife. Many Yazidi pilgrims take a bit of soil before they leave Lalish, a valley in northern Iraq where our holiest temples are, and wrap it up in a small cloth folded into a triangle, which they keep in their pocket or wallet as a talisman. My mother was never without some of that holy soil, particularly after my brothers started leaving home to work with the army. “They need all the protection they can get, Nadia,” she would say. “It’s dangerous, what they are doing.”