by Nadia Murad
Saeed and Ali stayed in the shed until the sun went down. While Saeed waited, he watched the school through a small window. “Can you see what is happening to the women and children?” Ali asked from the corner where he sat.
“Not yet,” my brother said. “Nothing is happening yet.”
“If they are going to kill them, too, wouldn’t they have done it by now?” Ali wondered.
Saeed was quiet. He didn’t know what was going to happen to us.
When it was almost dark, the trucks returned to the village and parked at the entrance of the school while women and children streamed out of the building, militants ushering us onto the trucks. Saeed craned his neck, trying to find us in the crowd. When he recognized Dimal’s headscarf moving in line toward one of the buses, he started to weep.
“What’s happening?” Ali asked.
Saeed didn’t know. “They are putting the women on the trucks now,” he said. “I don’t know why.” When the trucks were full, they drove away.
To himself, Saeed whispered, “If I survive, I swear to God I will become a fighter and I will rescue my sisters and my mother.” And when the sun was down completely, he and Ali started walking as quickly as their wounded bodies would allow in the direction of the mountain.
Chapter 2
In the school, we could hear the gunshots that killed the men. They came in loud bursts and lasted for an hour. Some of the women who stayed by the window said they could see puffs of dirt rising up behind the school. When it was quiet, the militants turned their attention to us. Women and children were all that was left of Kocho. We were panicked but trying not to make any noise, not wanting to anger the militants who watched us. “The home of my father is torn apart,” my mother whispered from where she sat. It’s a saying we use only in the most desperate times; it means that we have lost everything. My mother sounded like she was completely without hope. Maybe she had seen Elias and Massoud get onto the trucks, I thought.
A militant ordered us downstairs, and we followed him to the first floor. There the only men were Islamic State militants. A twelve-year-old boy named Nuri, who was a little tall for his age, had been taken along with Amin, his older brother, to the ditch. Amin was shot along with the men, but Nuri had been returned to the school after the militants, asking him to raise his arms over his head, discovered that he had no armpit hair. “He’s a child—take him back,” the commander said. At the school, the boy was encircled by worried aunts.
On the stairwell, I saw Kathrine reach down and pick up a roll of American dollars—hundreds, it looked like—that must have fallen out of one of the bags. She stared at it in her hand. “Keep it,” I told her. “Hide it. We’ve already given them everything else.”
But Kathrine was too scared to keep the money, and she thought that if they saw how cooperative she was, they would take pity on her and her family. “Maybe if I give them the money, they won’t do anything to us,” she said, and handed the roll to the next militant she saw, who took it without saying anything.
When we saw that the trucks had returned to the school gates, we stopped crying for the men and started screaming for ourselves. Militants began pushing us into groups, but it was chaos. No one wanted to let go of their sister or their mother, and we kept asking, “What have you done to our men? Where are you taking us?” The militants ignored us, pulling us by the arms onto the truck beds.
I tried to hold on to Kathrine, but we were pulled apart. Dimal and I, along with sixteen or seventeen other girls, were loaded onto the first truck, a red pickup with an open flatbed like the ones I used to love riding in. Somehow the other girls got between me and my sister, and while I stayed in the back, Dimal was pushed into a corner in the front where she sat, shoulder to shoulder with other women and children, staring at the floor. We started moving before I saw what happened to everyone else.
The driver sped away from Kocho, driving fast along the narrow, bumpy road. He drove as if he were angry and in a hurry, and every jerky movement threw us against one another and the metal railings so hard, I thought my back might break. Thirty minutes later we all groaned in relief as he slowed down, and we entered the outskirts of Sinjar City.
With only Sunni Muslims left in Sinjar City, I was amazed to see that life was going on as usual. Wives shopped for food at the markets while their husbands smoked cigarettes at tea shops. Taxi drivers scanned the sidewalks for passengers, and farmers drove their sheep out to pasture. Civilian cars filled the road in front of us and behind us, the drivers barely glancing at the trucks full of women and children. We couldn’t have looked normal, stuffed into the backs of trucks, crying and holding on to one another. So why wasn’t anyone helping us?
I tried to stay hopeful. The city was still familiar, and that comforted me. I recognized some of its streets, lined with cramped groceries and restaurants selling fragrant sandwiches, the oil-slicked driveways of its auto shops, and the produce stands stacked with colorful fruits. Maybe we were going to the mountain after all. Maybe the militants hadn’t been lying and they just wanted to get rid of us, to drop us at the foot of Mount Sinjar and let us run away from them toward the grueling conditions on the top. They could think that was equal to a death sentence. I hoped they did. Already our homes were occupied and our men were probably dead, but at least on top of the mountain, we would be around other Yazidis. We could find Hezni and start to mourn the people we had lost. After a little while, we would start to put what was left of our community back together.
I could see the outline of the mountain on the horizon, tall and flat on the top, and I willed our driver to continue straight toward it. But the truck turned east and began driving away from Mount Sinjar. I didn’t say anything, although the wind through the truck grates was so loud I could have screamed without anyone noticing.
The moment it became clear that we were not being taken to the mountain, I reached into my bag, looking for the bread I had taken with me from home. I was furious. Why hadn’t anyone helped us? What had happened to my brothers? By now, the bread was hard and stale and covered with bits of dust and lint. It was supposed to protect me and my family, and it hadn’t. As Sinjar City retreated into the background, I pulled the bread out of the bag and tossed it over the side of the truck, watching as it bounced off the road into a pile of trash.
We arrived in Solagh a little bit before sunset and pulled up in front of the Solagh Institute, a school just outside the town. The large building was silent and dark. Dimal and I were among the first to be unloaded from the trucks, and we sat, exhausted, in the yard, watching women and children tumble out of the other trucks as they pulled up. As members of our family were pulled off the trucks, they walked through the gates toward us in a daze. Nisreen couldn’t stop crying. “Just wait,” I told her. “We don’t know what will happen.”
Solagh was famous in Kocho for its homemade brooms, and once a year my mother or someone from my family would travel there to buy a new one. I went once, shortly before ISIS came. On that trip I had found the town beautiful, lush and green, and I had felt special to be included on that trip. Now it was like another country.
My mother was on one of the last trucks. I’ll never forget how she looked. The wind had pushed her white headscarf back on her head, and her dark hair, normally parted neatly down the middle, was wild and messy, her scarf covering only her mouth and her nose. Her white clothes were dusty, and she stumbled when she was pulled down to the ground. “Get going,” a militant yelled at her, pushing her toward the garden, laughing at her and other older women who couldn’t move quickly. She came through the gates and walked toward us in a trance. Without saying a single word, she sat down and rested her head on my lap. My mother never lay down in front of men.
A militant hammered at the locked door of the institute until it swung open and then he ordered us inside. “First, take off your headscarves,” he said. “Leave them here by the door.”
We did as he said. With our hair uncovered, the militants looked
at us more closely, then sent us inside. As the women arrived by the truckful at the institute gate—children clinging to their mothers’ skirts, young wives with eyes bright red from crying over their lost husbands—the pile of headscarves grew, the gauzy white traditional material mixing with the colorful scarves favored by young Yazidi women. When the sun was nearly down and the trucks stopped pulling up, a militant, whose own long hair was partly covered by a white scarf, poked the barrel of his gun into the pile of headscarves, laughing. “I’ll sell you these back for two hundred fifty dinars,” he said to us, knowing that it was a pitifully small amount of money—about 20 U.S. cents—and also that we had no money at all.
With all of us stuffed into one room, it was unbearably hot. I wondered if I had a fever. Pregnant women groaned and stretched their legs out in front of them, leaning their backs against the wall and closing their eyes as though trying to block out the room. Other than that, the only sound was the shuffling of clothes and muffled sobs. Suddenly a woman a bit younger than my mother, started screaming at the top of her lungs. “You’ve killed our men!” she yelled over and over, and her rage spread through the crowd. More women began weeping and screaming, demanding answers or just howling as though her outburst had unlocked their own grief.
The noise made the militants angry. “Stop crying, or I will kill you here,” a militant said, pointing his gun at the woman and slapping her across her forehead. But it was as if she were possessed—she couldn’t stop. Some women went to comfort her, walking in front of the militant and his gun. “Don’t think about what happened to the men,” one said to her. “We have to help ourselves now.”
They gave us some food—potato chips and rice, along with bottles of water. Although few of us had had anything to eat or drink since leaving our homes that morning, we had no appetite and were too frightened to eat what they gave us. They pushed the packages into our hands when we ignored them. “Eat,” they commanded, as though they felt insulted by our refusal. Then they handed some of the older boys plastic bags and told them to walk around the room collecting garbage.
It was late, and we were exhausted. My mother’s head still rested on my lap. She hadn’t said anything since she arrived, but her eyes were open and she wasn’t sleeping. I assumed we would spend the night crammed together in the institute, and I wondered if I would be able to sleep at all. I thought about asking my mother what she was thinking, but it was too hard to talk. I wish I had said something. After we ate, the militants began separating us into smaller groups and ordering most of us back outside to opposite ends of the garden. “Married women, over here with your children, but only the little ones,” they shouted, pointing toward one end of the room. “Older women and girls, outside.”
We started panicking, not knowing what it meant. Mothers held on to their older children, refusing to let them go. Around the room militants were forcefully pulling apart families, pushing young, unmarried girls toward the door. Back in the garden, Kathrine and I held tightly to my mother, who was again sitting on the ground; Kathrine was even more petrified at the thought of leaving her than I was, and she buried her head into my mother’s arm. A militant came up to us. “You!” he barked, pointing my mother toward the south side of the garden. “Go over there.”
I shook my head, leaning in closer to my mother. The militant crouched down and pulled on my sweater. “Come on,” he said, but I didn’t respond. He pulled harder and I looked away. He shoved his hands under my armpits and picked me up off the floor, tearing me away from my mother and pushing me toward the garden wall. I screamed. Then he did the same to Kathrine, who held on to my mother’s hand as though glued to her, and begged him not to separate them. “Let me stay with her!” she said. “She’s not well.” They didn’t listen, they carried Kathrine away from my mother while my niece and I both howled.
“I cannot move, I feel I am going to die,” I heard my mother say to the militant.
“Come on,” he told her, impatiently. “We will take you to a place with air-conditioning.” And my mother heaved herself off the ground and followed him slowly, away from us.
To save themselves, some of the older single women began lying, telling the militants that they were married or grabbing children they knew and claiming they were their own. We didn’t know what was going to happen to us, but at least the militants seemed less interested in the mothers and married women. Dimal and Adkee pulled two of our nephews close to them. “These are our sons,” they told the militants, who stared at them a moment, then passed them by. Dimal hadn’t seen her children since her divorce, but she played a convincing mother, and even Adkee, who had never been married and was less maternal, filled the role well. It was a decision made in one split second, a matter of survival. I didn’t get to say goodbye to my sisters before they were herded upstairs with the young boys still clutched to their sides.
It took an hour for all the women to be separated. I sat outside with Kathrine, Rojian, and Nisreen; we waited and held one another. Again, the militants offered us chips and water, and although we were too scared to eat, I drank a little water, then a little more. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was. I thought about my mother and my sisters upstairs and wondered whether ISIS would take pity on them, and what that pity might look like. The faces of the girls crowded around me were red from crying. Their hair was falling out of braids and ponytails, their hands clutching at the person nearest them. I was so tired I felt like my head was sinking into my body and any moment the world would go dark. But I didn’t lose all hope until I saw the three buses pull up to the school. They were enormous, the kind normally used to transport tourists and religious pilgrims around Iraq and to Mecca, and we instantly knew they were for us.
“Where are they taking us?” Kathrine wailed. She didn’t say it, but we were all terrified that they were going to take us to Syria. Anything seemed possible, and I was sure that we would die in Syria.
I held my bag close to me. It was a bit lighter without the bread, and now I regretted throwing it away. Wasting bread was a sin. God doesn’t judge Yazidis based on how often we pray or go on pilgrimages. We don’t have to build elaborate cathedrals or attend years of religious schooling in order to be a good Yazidi. Rituals, like baptism, are performed only when the family has enough money or time to make the trip.
Our faith is in our actions. We welcome strangers into our homes, give money and food to those who have none, and sit with the body of a loved one before burial. Even being a good student, or kind to your spouse, is an act equal to prayer. Things that keep us alive and allow poor people to help others, like simple bread, are holy.
But making mistakes is part of being human, which is why we have brothers- and sisters-of-the-hereafter—members of the Yazidi sheikh caste whom we choose to teach us about our religion and help us in the afterlife. My sister-of-the-hereafter was a bit older than me, beautiful and very knowledgeable about Yazidism. She had been married once, then divorced, and when she came back to live with her family, she devoted herself to God and her religion. She had managed to escape before ISIS came close to her home, and she was now safe in Germany. The most important job these brothers and sisters have is to sit with God and Tawusi Melek and defend you after you have died. “I knew this person when she was alive,” your sister or brother will say. “She deserves to have her soul return to earth. She is a good person.”
When I died, I knew my sister-of-the-hereafter would have to defend me for some of the sins I committed while I was alive—stealing candy from the Kocho store, for instance, or the times I was too lazy to go to the farm with my siblings. Now she would have to defend me for a great deal more, and I hoped she could forgive me first—for defying my mother by saving the bridal photos, for losing faith and throwing away the bread, and now for getting on that bus and whatever came after.
From left to right: my sister Adkee, my brother Jalo, and my sister Dimal.
My father, Basee Murad Taha, as a young man.
My niece Kath
rine at a wedding in 2013.
From left to right: my sister-in-law Sester, my sister Adkee, my brother Khairy, my niece Baso, my sister Dimal, my niece Maisa, and me in 2011.
Clockwise from back row, left: my sister-in-law Jilan; my sister-in-law Mona; my mother; my niece Baso; my sister Adkee; my nieces Nazo, Kathrine, and Maisa; and me at our home in Kocho in 2014.
My brother Hezni driving my family’s tractor with me and Kathrine (at left) in the back.
My brothers and half brothers in 2014. Back row, from left to right: Hezni, a neighbor, my half brother Khaled, and my brother Saeed. Front row: my half brother Walid, my brother Saoud, and me.
Jilan and Hezni on their wedding day in 2014.
My mother at her grandson Samih’s wedding.
From left to right: my brothers Massoud, Saoud, and Hezni.
My half brother Hajji.
At school with a classmate in 2011.
My mother, Shami.
Chapter 3
Girls like me were loaded onto two of the buses. The boys, including teenagers like Nuri and my nephew Malik who had been spared in Kocho because they were young, got onto the third. They were as terrified as we were. Armored jeeps full of Islamic State militants waited to escort the buses as if we were going to war, which maybe we were.