by Nadia Murad
Hezni sent cousins or brothers to Jilan’s house, where tradition obligated her family to offer visitors tea and food, and while they were distracted, Jilan would leave and meet Hezni. She loved him as much as he loved her and told her parents that she wanted to marry him, but still they objected. I fumed over their rejection—Jilan would be lucky to have Hezni, who was so loving—but my mother, as always, laughed it off. “At least the only reason they don’t like us is because we are poor,” she said. “And there is nothing wrong with being poor.”
Hezni knew that Jilan’s parents would never approve of the marriage unless he made some money, and back then he was having no luck getting a job in Iraq. He grew depressed. Other than Jilan, he felt like there was nothing for him at home, and since he couldn’t have her, he didn’t see the point of staying. When a few other men in the village decided they would try to make their way to Germany, where a small number of Yazidis already lived, Hezni decided to join them. We all cried while he packed his bag. I felt terrible about him leaving; I couldn’t imagine home without any of my brothers.
Before he left, Hezni invited Jilan to a wedding outside Kocho, where they could talk without the locals whispering. She arrived and separated herself from the crowd, finding him. He still remembers that she wore white. “I’ll be back in two or three years,” he told her. “We’ll have enough money to start a life.” Then, a few days before we were to start one of our two yearly fasts, Hezni and the other men left Kocho.
First, they crossed the northern Iraqi border on foot into Turkey, where they slowly made their way to Istanbul. Once there, they paid a smuggler to take them in the back of a tractor trailer into Greece. The smuggler told them to tell the border guards that they were Palestinian. “If they know you’re Iraqi, they will arrest you,” he said, and then he closed the doors to the truck and drove across the border.
When Hezni called us a few days later, it was from prison. We had just sat down to break our fast when my mother’s cell phone rang. One of the Iraqis with Hezni had been too scared to lie about where he was from, and so they had all been discovered. The prison was horrible, Hezni said, cramped and with only concrete slabs covered with thin mattresses to sleep on. No one would tell them when they would be released or whether they would be charged with a crime. Once, to get the guard’s attention, some prisoners set fire to their mattresses, and Hezni worried they would all suffocate from the smoke. He asked us how our fasts were going. “I’m also hungry,” he said, and from then on whenever Hezni called, my mother cried so hard that my brothers rushed to pick up the phone before she could answer.
Three and a half months later Hezni was back in Kocho. He was gaunt and embarrassed, and I thought, seeing him, that I was glad I didn’t have any desire to go to Germany. I still think that being forced to leave your home out of fear is one of the worst injustices a human being can face. Everything you love is stolen, and you risk your life to live in a place that means nothing to you and where, because you come from a country now known for war and terrorism, you are not really wanted. So you spend the rest of your years longing for what you left behind while praying not to be deported. Hezni’s story made me think that the path of the Iraqi refugee always leads backward, to prison or to where you came from.
There was an upside to Hezni’s failure. He came home more determined than ever to marry Jilan, and during their time apart, she had made up her mind as well. Her family still disapproved, but the couple had Yazidi custom on their side. According to our culture, if two people are in love and want to marry, they can elope no matter what their families think. This proves that they value each other more than anything, and after that it’s up to the families to reconcile themselves to the match. It can sound old-fashioned, even backward, the way the custom is sometimes described—a woman “running away”—but it is actually liberating, taking power away from the parents and giving it to the young couple and specifically to the girl, who has to agree to the plan.
So one evening, without whispering a word to anyone, Jilan sneaked out her back door and met Hezni, who was waiting in Jalo’s car. They left for a nearby village, taking Al Qaeda–controlled roads to avoid running into Jilan’s father on the main highway. (Hezni joked that he was more scared of him than any terrorist.) A few days later they were married, and some months after that, following negotiations, mostly over money, between our families that were sometimes happy and sometimes tense, they had a real wedding in Kocho. Ever since then Hezni would look back on his failed attempt to emigrate and laugh, saying, “Thank God I got arrested in Greece!” and pulling his wife close.
After that, we all resigned ourselves to staying in Kocho, even as the threats outside continued to grow. When the Americans left a few months after the 2010 parliamentary elections, groups all over the country began a chaotic struggle for power. Every day bombs exploded across Iraq, killing Shiite pilgrims or children in Baghdad and tearing apart whatever hope we had for peace in a post-America Iraq. Yazidis who owned liquor stores in Baghdad were targeted by extremists, and we retreated further into the relative safety of our Yazidi towns and villages.
Shortly afterward antigovernment protests that started in Tunisia spread into Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad quickly and brutally suppressed them. By 2012, Syria had dissolved into civil war, and in 2013, a new extremist group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, which had previously gained traction in postwar Iraq, began to flourish in the chaos of Syria. Soon it took over large parts of Syria and set its sights on crossing the border back into Iraq, where sympathizers waited for it in Sunni areas. Two years later, ISIS completely overwhelmed the Iraqi Army in the north, which abandoned its posts to an enemy they had expected to be much weaker than they turned out to be. In June 2014, before we knew it, ISIS took over Mosul, Iraq’s second-biggest city, about eighty miles east of Kocho.
After Mosul fell, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) sent additional peshmerga into Sinjar to guard Yazidi towns. The soldiers arrived by the truckload, assuring us they would keep us safe. Some of us, scared by ISIS and feeling that Iraqi Kurdistan was far more secure, wanted to leave Sinjar for the Kurdish camps that were already filling with displaced Christian, Shiite, and Sunni as well as Syrian refugees. But the Kurdish authorities urged us not to. Yazidis trying to leave Sinjar for Iraqi Kurdistan were turned back by Kurds stationed at checkpoints around their villages and told not to worry.
Some families thought it was suicide to stay in Kocho. “We are surrounded on three sides by Daesh!” they protested, using the Arabic term for ISIS, and they were right: only one road connecting us to Syria didn’t lead directly to the enemy. But Kocho was a proud village. We didn’t want to abandon everything we had worked for—the concrete homes families had spent their entire lives saving for, the schools, the massive flocks of sheep, the rooms where our babies were born. Other Iraqis questioned the Yazidis’ claim to Sinjar, and we thought that if we left, we would be proving them right; if we weren’t willing to stay in Sinjar, maybe we didn’t love it as much as we said we did. Ahmed Jasso called a meeting at the jevat and it was decided. “We stay as a village,” he said, believing until the end that our relationships with the Sunni Arab villages were strong enough to keep us safe. And so we stayed.
My mother tried to keep life at home as normal as she could, but still we were on alert for strange visitors or threatening noises. One night in July, around eleven, Adkee, Kathrine, Khairy, Hezni, and I walked the short distance to our farm to grind hay for the animals. In the summertime it was far too hot to spend the day on the farm, so we usually went after dinner, when the moon was big enough to help illuminate our chores and the air was a little cooler. We walked slowly. Grinding hay was strenuous and messy, and none of us were looking forward to the job. No matter how careful we were, we always went home with hay dust in our hair and under our clothes, itching and stinging our skin, and our arms sore from heaving the hay into the grinder.
We worked for a while, K
athrine and I in the trailer stacking the hay that the others tossed up to us from the ground. We talked and joked, but the conversation was more strained than usual. In the open field, we had a view of the land beyond Kocho, and we couldn’t help but wonder and worry about what was going on out there in the dark. Suddenly the road connecting us to the south lit up with cars, and we stopped what we were doing to watch as the headlights grew brighter and the silhouettes of the vehicles came into focus. It was a line of big armored trucks, the kind the military might use.
“We should leave,” Kathrine muttered. She and I were the most frightened. But Adkee refused to run. “We need to keep working,” she said, heaving armfuls of hay into the baler. “We can’t be so scared all the time.”
Khairy was home on leave from his job as a border patrolman, which he had held for nine years, and he knew better than all of us what was happening outside Kocho. He had an investigative eye for these kinds of things. Looking toward the headlights, he put down his armful of hay and used his hand like a visor to protect his eyes from the headlights. “Those are Islamic State convoys,” he said. “They look like they are heading toward the border into Syria.” It was unusual, he told us, for them to be this close.
Chapter 6
ISIS arrived on the outskirts of Kocho early in the morning of August 3, 2014, before the sun came up. I was lying on a mattress between Adkee and Dimal on our roof when the first trucks came. The Iraqi summer air is hot and glutted with dust, but I always preferred to sleep outside, just as I preferred to ride in the back of a truck rather than being trapped inside. We sectioned off parts of the roof to give privacy to the married couples and their small families, but we could whisper through the dividers and talk across rooftops. Normally I fell asleep easily to the sound of my neighbors discussing their days or praying quietly, and lately, as violence swept through Iraq, staying on the rooftops where we could see who was coming made us feel less vulnerable.
No one had slept that night. A few hours before, ISIS had launched surprise attacks on several nearby villages, driving thousands of Yazidis out of their homes and toward Mount Sinjar in a dizzying, panicked mass that soon thinned to a frail march. Behind them, the militants killed anyone who refused to convert to Islam or who was too stubborn or confused to flee, and they chased down those who were slow on their feet, shooting them or cutting their throats. The trucks, when they got close to Kocho, sounded like grenades in the quiet rural air. We flinched in fear and moved closer to one another.
ISIS conquered Sinjar easily, encountering resistance only from the hundreds of Yazidi men who fought to defend their villages with their own weapons but quickly ran out of ammunition. We soon learned that many of our Sunni Arab neighbors welcomed the militants and even joined them, blocking roads to stop Yazidis from reaching safety, allowing the terrorists to capture all non-Sunnis who failed to escape from the villages closest to Kocho, then looting the vacant Yazidi villages alongside the terrorists. We were even more shocked, though, by the Kurds who had sworn to protect us. Late at night, without any warning and after months of assuring us that they would fight for us until the end, the peshmerga had fled Sinjar, piling into their trucks and driving back to safety before the Islamic State militants could reach them.
It was, the Kurdish government later said, a “tactical withdrawal.” There were not enough of the soldiers to hold the region, they told us, and their commanders thought that to stay would be suicide; their fight would be more useful in other parts of Iraq, where they stood a chance. We tried to focus our anger on the leaders in Kurdistan making the decision rather than on the individual soldiers. What we couldn’t understand, though, was why they left without warning us or taking us with them or helping us to get to safety. Had we known they were leaving, we would have gone to Kurdistan. I am almost certain that Kocho would have been empty by the time ISIS arrived.
Villagers called it treason. Those with houses near their posts saw the peshmerga leave and begged them, with no success, to at least leave their weapons behind for the villagers to use. The news quickly spread to the rest of the village, but it took a while for reality to sink in. The peshmerga had been so revered, and many of us were so certain that they would come back and fulfill their duty, that the first time we heard the rounds of Islamic State gunfire in Kocho, some of the women whispered to one another, “Maybe the peshmerga have come to save us.”
With the peshmerga gone, militants swiftly filled the abandoned military posts and checkpoints, trapping us in our village. We had no escape plan, and ISIS quickly blocked the road connecting southern Sinjar villages, like Kocho, to the mountain, which was already filling up with families trying to hide. The few families who tried to escape were captured as they fled and were killed or kidnapped. My mother’s nephew tried to leave with his family, and when ISIS stopped them in their car, they killed the men on the spot. “I don’t know what happened to the women,” my mother told us after she got the phone call, and so we were left to imagine the worst. Stories like this began to fill our homes with fear.
Hezni and Saoud were both outside Kocho for work when ISIS came—Hezni in Sinjar City and Saoud in Kurdistan—and they called all night, in agony because they were so far away and because they were safe. They told us all they could about what was happening in Sinjar. Fleeing Yazidis, tens of thousands, walked with their livestock along the single-lane road to the mountain. The lucky had packed into cars or hung off the sides of trucks, traveling as quickly as they could through the crowds. Some pushed the elderly in wheelbarrows or carried them on their backs, hunched over with the weight. The midday sun was dangerously hot, and a few of the very old or sick died on the side of the road, their thin bodies collapsed into the sand like fallen branches. People who passed them were so intent on making it to the mountain, and so scared of being caught by terrorists, that they barely seemed to notice.
As the Yazidis walked toward the mountain, they dropped much of what they carried. A stroller, a coat, a cooking pot—when they first ran from their homes, it must have seemed impossible that they would leave those things. How could they eat without a pot to cook in? What would happen when their arms started to ache from carrying a baby? Would they make it home before winter? Eventually, though, as the walk became more strenuous and the distance to the mountain seemed longer with each step they took, all of that stuff became dead weight and was left by the side of the road like trash. Children dragged their feet until their shoes split apart beneath them. When they reached the mountain, some people scrambled straight up the craggy sides while others hid in caves, temples, or mountain villages. Cars sped along the winding roads, some tumbling over the sides when the drivers, in their haste, lost control. The mountain’s plateaus became crowded with the displaced.
On top of the mountain, there was hardly any relief. Some Yazidis immediately went searching for food and water or for missing relatives, begging those living in the villages for help. Others sat frozen where they were. Maybe they were tired. Or maybe in the first calm moment since ISIS came to Sinjar, in relative safety, they were starting to think about what had happened to them. Their villages were occupied, and everything they had now belonged to someone else. As they swept through the region, ISIS militants destroyed the small temples that stood near the bottom of the mountain. One graveyard near the mountain that was normally reserved for children was now packed with bodies of all ages, people who had been killed by ISIS or who had died trying to reach the mountain. Hundreds of men had been slaughtered. Boys and young women were kidnapped and later taken to Mosul or to Syria. Older women, women my mother’s age, were rounded up and executed, filling mass graves.
The Yazidis on the mountain thought about the decisions they had made as they fled. Maybe they cut off another car heading to the mountain so they could get there first, or didn’t stop to pick up someone who was walking. Could they have managed to take their animals with them, or waited just a moment longer to save someone else? My mother’s nephew had been born
with a disability that made it hard for him to walk, and when ISIS came, he insisted his loved ones go to the mountain ahead of him, knowing he could not get there on foot. Would he make it at all? Now the survivors were trapped in the grueling heat on the mountaintop, with ISIS swarming below and no sign of rescue.
We received this news feeling that we were getting word of our own future, and we prayed. We called everyone we knew in the Sunni Arab villages and in Kurdistan, but no one had anything hopeful to say. ISIS didn’t attack Kocho that night or that morning, but they made it known that if we tried to escape, they would kill us. Those who lived close to the edge of the village told us what they looked like. Some had scarves pulled up to their eyes. Most had beards. They carried American weapons, given to the Iraqi Army when the Americans left and then taken from the posts the army had abandoned. The militants looked exactly like they had on TV and in propaganda videos online. I couldn’t see them as people. Like the guns they carried and the tanks they drove, the men themselves were just weapons to me, and they were aimed at my village.
The first day, August 3, an Islamic State commander came to Kocho, and Ahmed Jasso called the men to the jevat. Because Elias was the eldest, he went to find out what was happening. We waited for him in our courtyard, sitting in the small bits of shade beside our sheep, which we had moved there for safekeeping. They bleated softly, oblivious to what was happening.
Sitting beside me, Kathrine looked young and frightened. Although we were a few years apart in age, we were in the same grade at school, and we were inseparable. In our teens, we had both become obsessed with makeup and hair, and we practiced on each other, debuting our new styles and techniques at village weddings. The brides inspired us; they would never spend more money and time on their appearance than they did that day, and they all looked like pictures out of a magazine. I studied them closely. How did she get her hair to do that? What shade of lipstick is she wearing? Then I would ask the bride for a photograph, which I added to a collection I kept in a thick green photo album. I imagined that, when I opened my salon, women would flip through that album, looking for the perfect hairstyle. By the time ISIS came, I had over two hundred photographs. My favorite was one of a young brunette, her hair curled loosely on top of her head and studded with small white flowers.