by Nadia Murad
I was in the shower when Elias came back with the news, and through a crack in the stall door I could see him speaking to our mother. They both began to cry. Without rinsing the soap out of my hair, I grabbed the first dress I saw, one of my mother’s that fell over my small body like a tent, and ran to join my family in the courtyard.
“What happens if we don’t pay the fine?” my mother asked.
“Right now they are still saying that they will take us to the mountain and live in Kocho themselves,” Elias said. His handmade white undershirt, worn by observant Yazidi men, had turned gray with dirt and grime. His voice was steady, and he was no longer crying, but I could tell he was panicked. No Yazidis in Sinjar had been given the option of paying a fine instead of converting, as Iraqi Christians had. Elias was sure that the militants were lying when they said we would be given that choice, maybe even just taunting us. He breathed slowly; he must have told himself to stay calm for us, practiced what he would say on the way home from the jevat. He was such a good brother. He couldn’t help it when he said next, to no one in particular, “Nothing good will come of this,” and then repeated, “Nothing good will come of this.”
My mother snapped into action. “Everyone, pack a bag,” she told us, running into the house herself. We gathered together whatever we thought we might need—a change of clothes, diapers, baby formula, and our Iraqi IDs, the ones that state plainly that we are Yazidi. We swept up any valuables we had, though we didn’t have much. My mother packed the state-issued ration card she received when my father died, and my brothers threw extra cell phone batteries and chargers into their bags. Jilan, longing for Hezni, packed one of his shirts—a black one with buttons down the front that she had held close to her throughout the siege.
I opened a drawer in the bedroom I shared with my sisters and Kathrine, pulling out my most prized possession—a long silver necklace inlaid with cubic zirconia and a matching bracelet. My mother had bought them for me in Sinjar City in 2013, after a cable connected to our tractor snapped while I was loading hay into the trailer behind it. The cable hit me across the midsection with the force of a horse kick, nearly killing me, and while I lay unconscious in the hospital, my mother raced to the bazaar to buy the jewelry. “When you get out of here, I will buy you earrings to match,” she whispered, squeezing my hand. It was her way of betting on me surviving.
I hid the necklace and braclet inside sanitary pads, which I ripped open at the seam and stuffed back into their packaging. Then I laid them on top of the extra clothes in a small black bag and zipped it shut. Next, my mother started taking photographs down from the walls. Our house was full of family photos—Hezni and Jilan at their wedding; Jalo, Dimal, and Adkee sitting in a field outside Kocho; Mount Sinjar in the spring, in such bright colors it looked almost artificial. These photos told the history of our family, from when we were desperately poor and crammed into a small house behind my father’s, through years of struggle, and into our happier recent lives. Now all that was left were faint rectangles on the walls where the photos once hung. “Find the albums, Nadia,” she said, noticing me standing there. “Bring everything out to the courtyard, to the tandoor.”
I did what my mother asked, filling my arms with photo albums and heading to the courtyard where she knelt in front of our oven, holding out her hands for the photos my siblings took out of frames, then methodically throwing them into its wide mouth. The squat oven was the center of our home, and all bread, not just the holiday loaf baked for Batzmi, is holy to Yazidis. My mother would make extra bread to hand out to Kocho’s poorest, which was a blessing for our family. When we were poor, bread from that oven kept us alive, and every meal I can remember included a tall stack of flat, blistered round loaves.
Now, as the photos turned to ash, the tandoor spat out a black chemical smoke. There was Kathrine as a baby in Lalish, being baptized in the White Spring that starts in the Lalish valley and runs underneath the old stone temple. There was my first day of school, when I cried at the thought of being separated from my mother. There was Khairy’s wedding to Mona, the bride’s hair crowned with flowers. Our past is ashes, I thought. One by one the photographs disappeared into the fire, and when they were gone, my mother picked up a pile of her white clothing, all but what she had on, and added it to the high flames. “I won’t have them seeing who we were,” she said, watching the pure white cloth curl and turn black. “Now they can’t touch them.”
I couldn’t watch the photos burn. Back inside, in the small room I shared with the other girls, I opened the tall armoire. Checking to make sure I was alone, I pulled out my thick green photo album and opened it slowly, gazing at the brides. Women in Kocho would prepare for days before their weddings, and it showed in the photos. Intricate braids and curls, highlighted blond or dyed red with henna, were hair-sprayed high on a bride’s head, her eyes lined thickly with kohl and decorated with bright blue or pink eye shadow. Sometimes she would weave small beads into her hair, and sometimes she would top it all with a sparkly tiara.
When the bride was ready, she was presented to the villagers, who fawned over her, then everyone would dance and drink until the sun came up and they noticed that the bride and groom had, as they were supposed to, left for their wedding night. As early as they could, the bride’s girlfriends visited her to get the whole story of that first night. They giggled, examining the bedsheet, stained with a little telltale blood. To me, weddings defined Kocho. Women carefully practiced their makeup while men watered patches of earth so that the next day they wouldn’t be too dusty to dance on. We were known throughout Sinjar for throwing elaborate parties, and even, some said, for having particularly beautiful women, and I thought each bride in my album looked like a piece of art. When I opened my salon, the album would be the first thing I put in it.
I understood why my mother asked us to burn the family photos. I also felt sick thinking about the militants looking at them and touching them. I imagined that they would sneer at us, the poor Yazidi family who thought they deserved to be happy in Iraq, who thought they could go to school and get married and live forever in the country where they had been born. The idea made me furious. But instead of taking the green album to the courtyard to be burned, I put it back in the armoire, then closed the doors and, after a moment, locked it as well.
If my mother knew that I was hiding the album, she would have told me that it wasn’t good to burn our own photos to stop ISIS from finding them but to keep other people’s, and I know that she would have been right. The armoire wasn’t even a safe place to hide the album; militants could easily break in to it, and as soon as they opened it, the green album would be the first thing they saw. If my mother had found out and asked me why I saved the photos, I wouldn’t have known what to tell her. I still don’t know exactly why they meant so much to me. But I couldn’t bear to see the photos destroyed, all because we were scared of terrorists.
That night after we climbed onto the roof, Khairy received a phone call. It was a Yazidi friend who had stayed on the mountain even after the PKK established the safe passage to Syria. A lot of Yazidis decided not to leave the mountain, although life up there was very hard. They stayed because they felt safest high up with a steep, rocky slope separating them from ISIS, or because their religious devotion meant they would rather die than leave Sinjar. Eventually they would build a large refugee settlement, stretching from east to west on the plateau, guarded by PKK-affiliated soldiers, many of them the brave Yazidi men who had defended Sinjar as long as they possibly could.
“Look at the moon,” Khairy’s friend told him. Yazidis believe that the sun and the moon are holy, two of God’s seven angels, and the moon that night was bright and big, the kind of moon that would have lit up our farm when we worked at night and kept us from tripping on our walk home. “We are all praying to it right now. Tell the people in Kocho to join us.”
One by one Khairy woke up any of us who were sleeping. “Look at the moon,” he said. Instead of crouching low so
that ISIS couldn’t see us on the roof, he told us just this once to pray standing up as we normally would. “Who cares if they see you? God will protect us.”
“Just a few at a time,” my mother cautioned. In small groups, we stood. The moon lit up our faces and made my mother’s white dress glow. I prayed with my sister-in-law, who was lying on a mattress next to me. I kissed the small red and white string bracelet I still wear around my wrist and whispered, simply, “Don’t leave us in their hands,” before quietly lying back down beneath that enormous moon.
The next day, Ahmed Jasso, still trying to be the diplomat, invited five leaders from a neighboring Sunni tribe—the same tribe whose members had kidnapped Dishan—to the jevat for lunch. Women in the village prepared an elaborate meal for the tribal leaders, boiling rice, chopping vegetables, and filling clear tulip-shaped glasses with a half-inch of sugar in expectation of the sweet tea they would drink after the meal. The men slaughtered three sheep for the guests to eat, which was a huge honor for visiting tribal leaders.
Over lunch, our mukhtar tried to persuade the Sunni leaders to help us. Out of all our neighbors, this tribe was the most religiously conservative and the most likely to have leverage with ISIS. “Surely there is something you can say to them,” Ahmed Jasso said. “Tell them who we are, that we mean no harm.”
The leaders shook their heads. “We want to help you,” they told Ahmed Jasso. “But there is nothing we can do. Daesh doesn’t listen to anyone, not even us.”
After the tribal leaders left, a cloud hung over our mukhtar. Naif Jasso, Ahmed’s brother, called from Istanbul, where he had taken his sick wife to the hospital. “On Friday they will kill you,” he told his brother.
“No, no,” our mukhtar insisted. “They said that they will take us to the mountain, and they will take us to the mountain.” He was hopeful until the end that there was a solution, even though no one in Baghdad or Erbil was willing to intervene, and the authorities in Washington told Haider, Jalo’s friend, that they could not conduct air strikes in Kocho because the risk of civilian death was too great. They thought that if they bombed around Kocho, we all would die along with ISIS.
Two days later Islamic State militants walked through Kocho, delivering ice. It was welcome in the hottest days of August, after nearly two weeks drinking water that had been baking in the sun. Ahmed Jasso called Naif to tell him what was happening. “They swear that nothing bad will happen to us as long as we do what they tell us,” he told his brother. “Why would they give us ice if they planned to kill us?”
Naif was not convinced. He paced in the Istanbul hospital room waiting for his phone to ring with updates. Forty-five minutes later, Ahmed called Naif again. “They told all of us to gather in the primary school,” he said. “From there, they will take us to the mountain.”
“They won’t,” Naif said to his brother. “They will kill all of you.”
“There are too many of us to kill all at once!” Ahmed Jasso insisted. “It’s impossible.” And then, like the rest of us, he did what ISIS said and started walking toward the school.
We were making food when we heard. Unaware of anything but their own hunger, the children had been crying for a meal, and very early that morning we slaughtered a few of our young chickens to boil for them. Normally we would have let the chickens get older and waited until they had given us eggs before we ate them, but we had nothing else to feed the children.
The chickens were still boiling when my mother told us to get ready to go to the school. “Wear as many layers as you can,” she said. “They might take our bags from us.” We turned off the gas underneath the pot of greasy water and did what she said. I put on four pairs of stretchy pants, a dress, two shirts, and a pink jacket—as many clothes as I could stand to have on in the heat. Sweat immediately started streaming down my back. “Don’t wear anything too tight, and don’t show skin,” my mother said. “Make sure you look like a decent woman.”
Next, I added a white scarf to the bag, along with two dresses—one of Kathrine’s cotton dresses and a bright yellow one Dimal had helped design herself with fabric bought in Sinjar City, and which she had barely worn. When I was young, we wore our clothes until they fell apart. Now we had enough money to afford one new dress a year, and I couldn’t bear to leave our newest ones behind. Then, without thinking, I put my collection of makeup in the armoire with the album of bride photos and locked it again.
Already a slow stream of people had begun walking in the direction of the school. I could see them through the window, carrying their own bags. Babies hung their heads limply in their mothers’ arms, and little kids dragged their feet in exhaustion. Some elderly people had to be pushed in wheelbarrows; they looked dead already. It was dangerously hot. Sweat soaked through the men’s shirts and the women’s dresses, staining their backs. The villagers were pale, they had lost weight. I heard them groaning but couldn’t make out any words.
Hezni called from our aunt’s house. As distressed as we were, he sounded like a wild animal, shouting at us that he wanted to come back to Kocho. “If something bad is going to happen to all of you, I need to be there, too!” he screamed.
Jilan shook as she spoke on the phone, trying to comfort him. They had recently decided to have children, and they expected that one day they would have the big family they both wanted. When ISIS came to Sinjar, they had just finished putting a roof on their new concrete house. My mother told us to memorize Hezni and Saoud’s cell phone numbers. “You might need to call them,” she told us, and I can still recite both by heart.
I walked through my house toward the side door. Even more than usual, each room felt alive with memories. I passed through the living room, where my brothers sat on long summer evenings drinking strong, sugary tea with other men from the village; the kitchen, where my sisters spoiled me by cooking my favorite meal, okra and tomatoes; my bedroom, where Kathrine and I would condition our hair with olive oil, falling asleep with our heads wrapped in plastic and waking up to the peppery smell of the warm oil. I thought of eating meals in the courtyard, the family sitting around a floor mat pinching bits of rice slick with butter between pieces of fresh bread. It was a simple house and could feel overcrowded. Elias was always threatening to move out with his family to give them more room, but he never did.
I could hear our sheep, crowded together in the courtyard. Their coats would grow thick while their bodies shrank with starvation. I couldn’t bear the thought of them dying or being slaughtered for the militants to eat. They were all we had. I wish I had known to memorize every one of these details in my house—the bright colors of the cushions in the living room, the spices perfuming the kitchen, even the sound of the water dripping in the shower—but I didn’t know I was leaving my home for good. I paused in the kitchen beside a stack of bread. We had taken it out for the children to eat with their chicken, but no one had touched it. I grabbed a few round loaves, which had gone cool and a bit stale, and put them into a plastic bag to take with me. It seemed like the right thing to do. Maybe we would be hungry, waiting for whatever was coming, or maybe the holy food would protect us from ISIS. “May the God who created this bread help us,” I whispered, and followed Elias out onto the street.
Chapter 10
For the first time since August 3, Kocho’s roads and alleyways were full of people, but they were ghosts of themselves. No one greeted anyone or kissed each other on the cheeks or the top of the head as usual. No one smiled. The stench of all our bodies, unwashed and wet with sweat, stung my nostrils. The only sounds were people groaning in the heat and the shouts of the Islamic State militants who had taken positions along the route and on rooftops, watching us and pushing us in the direction of the school. Their faces were covered up to their eyes, which followed us on our slow, labored walk.
I walked with Dimal and Elias. I didn’t cling to them, but having them nearby made me feel less alone. As long as I was with my family and we were all going to the same place, I knew that at least we wo
uld have the same fate, no matter what happened. Still, leaving my home, for no reason except fear, was the hardest thing I had ever done.
We didn’t say a word to one another as we walked. In the alleyway beside our house, one of Elias’s friends, a man named Amr, ran up to us. He was a new father, and he was panicked. “I forgot baby formula!” he shouted. “I need to go back home!” He was jumpy, ready to run as fast as he could against the tide of people.
Elias put his hand on Amr’s shoulder. “It’s impossible,” he told him. “Your house is too far away. Just go to the school—people will have formula.” Amr nodded, and fell back in line with the others walking in the direction of the school.
We saw more militants where the alleyways emptied into the main road. They watched us, holding their guns ready. Just looking at them terrified us. Women put on headscarves, as though the scarves would protect them from the militants’ gazes, and looked down as they walked, watching the small puffs of dry dust collect around their feet with each step. I moved quickly to the other side of Elias, putting my eldest brother between me and ISIS. People walked as if they had no control over their movements or direction. They looked like bodies without souls.
Every house on that walk was familiar. The daughter of the village doctor lived along the way, as did two girls from my class at school. One of them had been taken on August 3, when ISIS first came to Sinjar and her family tried to escape. I wondered what had happened to her.
Some of the homes were long and made of mud bricks, like ours, while others were concrete, like Hezni’s. Most were whitewashed or left gray, but some were painted bright colors or decorated with elaborate tiles. Those homes would have taken a lifetime or two to pay for and build, and their owners expected their children and grandchildren to live there long after they died, then give the house to their children and grandchildren. Kocho’s houses were always full of people, loud and crowded and happy. Now they sat empty and sad, watching us as we walked. Livestock ate absentmindedly in the courtyards, and sheepdogs barked helplessly from behind the gates.