by Nadia Murad
There are certain things all Yazidis are taught at a young age. I knew about the Yazidi holidays, although more about how we celebrate them than about the theology behind them. I knew that on Yazidi New Year, we color eggs, visit the graves of family, and light candles in our temples. I knew that October was the best month to go to Lalish, a holy valley in the Sheikhan district where the Baba Sheikh, our most important spiritual leader, and Baba Chawish, the custodian of the shrines there, greet pilgrims. In December we fast for three days to atone for our sins. Marriage outside the faith is not allowed; nor is conversion. We were taught about the seventy-three past firmans against Yazidis, and these stories of persecution were so intertwined with who we were that they might as well have been holy stories. I knew that the religion lived in the men and women who had been born to preserve it, and that I was one of them.
My mother taught us how to pray—toward the sun in the morning, Lalish during the day, and the moon at night. There are rules, but most are flexible. Prayer is meant to be a personal expression, not a chore or an empty ritual. You can pray silently by yourself or out loud, and you can pray alone or in a group, as long as everyone in that group is also Yazidi. Prayers are accompanied by a few gestures, like kissing the red and white bracelet that many Yazidi women and men wear around their wrist or, for a man, kissing the collar of his traditional white undershirt.
Most Yazidis I grew up with prayed three times a day, and prayers can be made anywhere. More often than I’ve prayed in temples, I’ve prayed in the fields, on our rooftop, even in the kitchen, helping my mother cook. After reciting a few standard lines in praise of God and Tawusi Melek, you can say anything you want. “Tell Tawusi Melek what is bothering you,” my mother told us, demonstrating the gestures. “If you are worried about someone you love, tell him that, or if you are scared of something. These are the things that Tawusi Melek can help you with.” I used to pray for my own future—to finish school and open my salon—and the futures of my siblings and my mother. Now I pray for the survival of my religion and my people.
Yazidis lived like this for a long time, proud of our religion and content to be removed from other communities. We had no ambition for more land or power, and nothing in the religion commands us to conquer non-Yazidis and spread our faith. No one can convert to Yazidism anyway. But during my childhood, our community was changing. Villagers bought televisions, first settling for state-run TV before satellite dishes allowed us to watch Turkish soap operas and Kurdish news. We bought our first electric clothes washer, which seemed almost like magic, although my mother still hand-washed her traditional white veils and dresses. Many Yazidis emigrated to the United States, Germany, or Canada, creating connections to the West. And of course, my generation was able to do something our parents hadn’t even dreamed of. We went to school.
Kocho’s first school was built in the 1970s, under Saddam. It went only through the fifth grade, and the lessons were in Arabic, not Kurdish, and were deeply nationalistic. State curriculum was clear about who was important in Iraq and what religion they followed. Yazidis didn’t exist in the Iraqi history books I read in school, and Kurds were depicted as threats against the state. I read the history of Iraq as it unfolded in a sequence of battles, pitting Arab Iraqi soldiers against people who would take their country away from them. It was a bloody history, meant to make us proud of our country and the strong leaders who had kicked out the British colonists and overthrown the king, but it had the opposite effect on me. I later thought that those books must be one reason why our neighbors joined ISIS or did nothing while the terrorists attacked Yazidis. No one who had been through an Iraqi school would think that we deserved to have our religion protected, or that there was anything bad or even strange about endless war. We had been taught about violence since our very first day of school.
As a child, my country bewildered me. It could seem like its own planet, made up of many different lands, where decades of sanctions, war, bad politics, and occupation pulled neighbors apart. In the far north of Iraq were Kurds, who longed for independence. The south was home mostly to Shiite Muslims, the country’s religious and now political majority. And lodged in the middle were Sunni Arabs, who, with Saddam Hussein as president, once dominated the state they now fight against.
That’s the simple map, one with three solid color-coded stripes painted more or less horizontally across the country. It leaves out Yazidis or labels them as “other.” The reality of Iraq is harder to illustrate and can be overwhelming even for people who were born here. When I was growing up, the villagers in Kocho didn’t talk a lot about politics. We were concerned with the cycle of the crops, who was getting married, whether a sheep was producing milk—the kind of things that anyone from a small rural town will understand. The central government, apart from campaigns to recruit Yazidis to fight in their wars and to join the Baath Party, seemed just as uninterested in us. But we did think a lot about what it meant to be a minority in Iraq, among all the other groups in that “other” category with Yazidis that, if included on the map, would swirl those three horizontal stripes into colorful marble.
To the northeast of Kocho, a line of dots near the southern edge of Iraqi Kurdistan shows the places where Turkmens, both Shiite and Sunni Muslim, live. Christians—among them Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Armenians—have many communities scattered throughout the country, especially in the Nineveh Plain. Elsewhere, flecks indicate the homes of small groups like Kaka’i, Shabak, Roma, and Mandaeans, not to mention Africans and Marsh Arabs. I have heard that somewhere near Baghdad there is still a tiny community of Iraqi Jews. Religion blends into ethnicity. Most Kurds, for instance, are Sunni Muslim, but for them, their Kurdish identity comes first. Many Yazidis consider Yazidism both an ethnic and a religious identity. Most Iraqi Arabs are Shiite or Sunni Muslims, and that division has caused a lot of fighting over the years. Few of these details appeared in our Iraqi history books.
To get from my house to the school, I had to walk along the dusty road that ringed the edge of the town, past Bashar’s house, whose father was killed by Al Qaeda; past the house I was born in, where my father and Sara still lived; and finally past my friend Walaa’s house. Walaa was beautiful, with a pale, round face, and her quiet demeanor balanced my rowdiness. Every morning she would run out to join me on my walk to the school. It was worse to walk alone. Many of the families kept sheepdogs in their yards, and the enormous animals would stand in the gardens, barking and snarling at whoever passed by. If the gate was open, the dogs lunged after us, snapping their jaws. They weren’t pets; they were big and dangerous, and Walaa and I would sprint away from them, arriving at school panting and sweating. Only my father’s dog, who knew me, left us alone.
Our school was a dull structure made of sand-colored concrete, decorated with faded posters and surrounded by a low wall and a small, dry schoolyard garden. No matter what it looked like, it felt like a miracle to be able to go and study and meet friends. In the school garden, Walaa, Kathrine, and I would play a game with a few of the other girls called bin akhy, which in Kurdish means “in the dirt.” All at once we would each hide something—a marble, a coin, even just a soda cap—in the ground, then we would run around like crazy people, digging holes in the garden until the teacher yelled at us, caking our fingernails with dirt that was sure to upset our mothers. You kept whatever you found, which almost always ended with tears. It was an old game; even my mother remembered playing it.
History, in spite of all the gaps and injustices in the lessons, was my favorite subject and the one I excelled at. English was my worst. I tried hard to be a good student, knowing that while I studied, my siblings worked on our farm. My mother was too poor to buy me a backpack like most of the other students carried, but I wouldn’t complain. I didn’t like to ask her for things. When she couldn’t pay the taxi fee to send me to a secondary school a few villages away while ours was being built, I started working on the farm again, and waited and prayed for the school to be finished soon. T
here was no point in complaining, the money wouldn’t just appear, and I was far from the only kid in Kocho whose parents couldn’t afford to send them away.
After Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1991, the United Nations put sanctions on Iraq, hoping that it would limit the president’s power. While I was growing up, I didn’t know why the sanctions existed. The only people who talked about Saddam in my house were my brothers Massoud and Hezni, and that was just to shush anyone who complained during televised speeches or rolled their eyes at the propaganda on state TV. Saddam had tried to get loyalty from Yazidis so that they would side with him against the Kurds and fight in his wars, but he did so by demanding that we join his Baath Party and call ourselves Arab, not Yazidi.
Sometimes all that was on TV was Saddam himself, seated behind a desk smoking and telling stories about Iran, with a mustached guard beside him, going on about battles and his own brilliance. “What is he talking about?” we would ask one another, and everyone shrugged. There was no mention of Yazidis in the constitution, and any sign of rebellion was quickly punished. Sometimes I felt like laughing at what I saw on TV—the dictator in his funny hat—but my brothers cautioned me not to. “They are watching us,” Massoud said. “Be careful what you say.” Saddam’s enormous intelligence ministry had eyes and ears everywhere.
All I knew during that time was that it was ordinary Iraqis, not the political elite and certainly not Saddam himself, who suffered the most under the sanctions. Our hospitals and markets collapsed. Medicine became more expensive, and flour was cut with gypsum, which is more often used to make cement. The deterioration was most clear to me in the schools. Once Iraq’s education system had attracted students from all over the Middle East, but under the sanctions it crumbled. Teachers’ salaries were reduced to nothing, and so teachers became hard to find, even though nearly 50 percent of Iraqi men were unemployed. The few teachers who came to Kocho when I started—Arab Muslims who lived in the school, joining the Yazidi teachers—were heroes as far as I was concerned, and I worked hard to impress them.
When Saddam was in power, school had one obvious purpose: by offering us a state education, he hoped to take away our identity as Yazidis. This was clear in every lesson and every textbook that made no mention of us, our families, our religion, or the firmans against us. Although most Yazidis grew up speaking Kurdish, our lessons were in Arabic. Kurdish was the language of rebellion, and Kurdish spoken by Yazidis could be seen as even more threatening to the State. Still, I eagerly went to school every day that I could, and I learned Arabic quickly. I didn’t feel like I was submitting to Saddam or betraying Yazidis by learning Arabic or studying the incomplete Iraqi history; I felt empowered and smart. I would still speak Kurdish at home and pray in Kurdish. When I wrote notes to Walaa or Kathrine, my two best friends, they would be in Kurdish, and I would never call myself anything other than Yazidi. I could tell that no matter what we were learning, going to school was important. With all the children in Kocho getting an education, our connections to our country and the outside world were already changing, and our society was opening up. Young Yazidis loved our religion but also wanted to be part of the world, and when we grew up into adults, I was sure we would become teachers ourselves, writing Yazidis into the history lessons or even running for parliament and fighting for Yazidi rights in Baghdad. I had a feeling back then that Saddam’s plan to make us disappear would backfire.
Chapter 4
In 2003, a few months after my father died, the Americans invaded Baghdad. We didn’t have a satellite television to watch the battle unfold, or cell phones connecting us to the rest of the country, and so we learned slowly, over time, how quickly Saddam fell. Coalition forces flew noisily over Kocho on the way to the capital, jerking us from sleep; it was the first time I had ever seen an airplane. We had no idea at the time just how long the war would go on and how much of an impact it would have on Iraq, but in the simplest terms, we hoped that after Saddam, it would be easier to buy cooking gas.
What I remember most from those early months after the invasion was the loss of my father and little else. In Yazidi culture, when someone dies—particularly if that death is sudden and comes too soon—mourning lasts for a long time and sweeps up the entire village. Neighbors retreat from normal life along with the family and friends of the dead. Grief takes over every house and shop and spreads through the streets, as though everyone has been made sick on the same batch of sour milk. Weddings are canceled, holiday celebrations are moved indoors, and women switch out their white clothes for black. We treat happiness like a thief we have to guard against, knowing how easily it could wipe away the memory of our lost loved ones or leave us exposed in a moment of joy when we should be sad, so we limit our distractions. Televisions and radios are kept off, no matter what might be happening in Baghdad.
A few years before he died, my father took Kathrine and me to Mount Sinjar to celebrate the Yazidi New Year. It was my last time with him at the mountain. Our New Year is in April, just as the hills in northern Iraq glow with a light green fuzz and the sharp cold eases into a pleasant cool, but before the summer heat sneaks up on you like a speeding bus. April is the month that holds the promise of a big profitable harvest and leads us into months spent outdoors, sleeping on rooftops, freed from our cold, overcrowded houses. Yazidis are connected to nature. It feeds us and shelters us, and when we die, our bodies become the earth. Our New Year reminds us of this.
On the New Year we visited whomever in the family had been working as shepherds that year, driving our sheep closer to the mountain and walking them from field to field in order to keep them fed. Parts of the job were fun. Shepherds slept outside underneath handwoven blankets and lived simply, with lots of time to think and little to worry about. But it was also grueling work, far from home and family, and while they grew homesick, we missed them back in Kocho. The year my mother left to take care of the sheep, I was in middle school, and I was so distraught that I failed every one of my classes. “I am blind without you,” I told her when she returned.
That last New Year with my father, Kathrine and I rode in the back of the truck while my father and Elias sat in front, watching us in the rearview mirror to make sure we didn’t do anything reckless. The landscape whipped by, a blur of wet spring grass and yellow wheat. We held hands and gossiped, concocting overblown versions of the day’s events that we would later use to taunt the kids who had to wait at home. As far as they were concerned, it would be the most fun we ever had, away from the fields and school and work. Kathrine and I would nearly bounce over the side of the truck as it raced down the road, and the lamb tied up in the back near us was the biggest lamb we had ever seen. “We ate so much candy,” we would tell them back home, watching for the envy in their faces. “We danced all night, it was light outside by the time we went to sleep. You should have seen it.”
The true story was only slightly less exciting. My father could hardly say no to the candy we longed for, and, at the base of the mountain, the reunion with the shepherds was always joyful. The lamb, which had in fact ridden in the back of the truck along with us and was then slaughtered by my father and cooked by the women, was tender and delicious, and we all danced Yazidi dances, holding hands and spinning in a wide circle. After the best parts of the lamb were eaten and the music turned off, we slept in tents surrounded by low fences made of reeds to keep out the wind. When the weather was mild, we took down those fences and slept in the open air. It was a simple, hidden life. All you had to worry about were the things and the people around you, and they were close enough to touch.
I don’t know how my father would have felt about the Americans invading Iraq and taking Saddam out of power, but I wished he had lived long enough to see Iraq change. Kurds welcomed the U.S. soldiers, helping them enter Iraq, and they were ecstatic at the idea of Saddam being deposed. The dictator had targeted Kurds for decades, and in the late 1980s his air force had tried to exterminate them with chemical weapons in what he called the Anfal campa
ign. That genocide shaped the Kurds, who wanted to protect themselves from the government in Baghdad in any way they could. Because of Anfal, the Americans, British, and French established a no-fly zone over the Kurdish north, as well as the Shia areas in the south, and Kurds had been their willing allies ever since. To this day, Kurds call the 2003 U.S. invasion a “liberation,” and they consider it the beginning of their transformation from small vulnerable villages into big modern towns full of hotels and the offices of oil companies.
In general, Yazidis welcomed the Americans but were less certain than Kurds about what our lives would be like after Saddam. Sanctions had made our life hard, as they had for other Iraqis, and we knew that Saddam was a dictator who ruled Iraq with fear. We were poor, cut off from education, and made to do the most difficult, dangerous, and lowest-paying jobs in Iraq. But at the same time, with the Baathists in power, we in Kocho had been able to practice our religion, farm our land, and start families. We had close ties with Sunni Arab families, particularly the kiriv, whom we considered bonded to our families, and our isolation taught us to treasure these connections while our poverty told us to be practical above all else. Baghdad and the Kurdish capital, Erbil, seemed worlds away from Kocho. The only decision the rich, connected Kurds and Arabs made that mattered to us was the decision to leave us alone.
Still, the promises Americans made—about work, freedom, and security—quickly brought Yazidis fully to their side. The Americans trusted us because we didn’t have any reason to be loyal to anyone they considered an enemy, and many of our men became translators or took jobs with the Iraqi or American armies. Saddam was pushed into hiding, then found and hanged, and his Baathist institutions dismantled. Sunni Arabs, including those close to Kocho, lost authority in the country, and in the Yazidi parts of Sinjar, Sunni Arab policemen and politicians were replaced with Kurdish ones.