by Nadia Murad
While I lay there, another militant stopped in front of us. I had my knees pulled up to my forehead, and all I could see were his boots and calves, as thick as tree trunks, sticking out of them. He was a high-ranking militant named Salwan who had come with another girl, another young Yazidi from Hardan, who he planned to drop off at the house while he shopped for her replacement. I peered up at him. He was the most enormous man I had ever seen, like a giant in a white dishdasha as big as a tent, scowling behind a reddish beard. Nisreen, Rojian, and Kathrine draped their bodies over me trying to hide me, but he didn’t go away.
“Stand up,” he said. When I didn’t, he kicked me. “You! The girl with the pink jacket! I said, stand up!”
We screamed and huddled together more tightly, but this just provoked Salwan even more. He leaned down and tried to pull us apart, clutching at our shoulders and arms. Still, we held on to one another as though we were one person. Our resistance made him furious, and he yelled at us to stand up, kicking at our shoulders and hands. Eventually, the struggle got the attention of a guard, who came over to help, beating our hands with a stick until the pain was so great we had to let go of one another. After we were separated, Salwan loomed over me smirking, and I saw his face clearly for the first time. His eyes were sunk deep into the flesh of his wide face, which seemed to be nearly entirely covered in hair. He didn’t look like a man—he looked like a monster.
We couldn’t resist anymore. “I’ll go with you,” I said. “But you have to take Kathrine, Rojian, and Nisreen as well.”
Nafah came over to see what was happening. When he saw me, his face turned red with anger. “It’s you again?” he shouted, and he slapped each of us across our faces. “I won’t go without them!” I screamed back, and Nafah started hitting us faster and harder, hitting us and hitting us until our faces went numb and Rojian started bleeding from her mouth.
Then he and Salwan grabbed me and Rojian and tore us away from Kathrine and Nisreen, dragging us downstairs. Salwan’s footsteps sounded heavy on the staircase. I didn’t get to say goodbye to Kathrine or Nisreen, or even look behind me as they took me away.
Attacking Sinjar and taking girls to use as sex slaves wasn’t a spontaneous decision made on the battlefield by a greedy soldier. ISIS planned it all: how they would come into our homes, what made a girl more or less valuable, which militants deserved a sabiyya as incentive and which should pay. They even discussed sabaya in their glossy propaganda magazine, Dabiq, in an attempt to draw new recruits. From their centers in Syria and sleeper cells in Iraq, they mapped out the slave trade for months, determining what they thought was and was not legal under Islamic law, and they wrote it down so that all Islamic State members would follow the same brutal rules. Anyone can read it—the details of the plan for sabaya are collected in a pamphlet issued by ISIS’s Research and Fatwa Department. And it is sickening, partly because of what it says and partly because of how ISIS says it, so matter-of-fact, like the law of any state, confident that what they are doing is sanctioned by the Koran.
Sabaya can be given as gifts and sold at the whim of the owner, “for they are merely property,” the Islamic State pamphlet reads. Women shouldn’t be separated from their young children—which is why Dimal and Adkee were told to stay in Solagh—but grown children, like Malik, can be taken away from their mothers. There are rules for what happens if a sabiyya becomes pregnant (she cannot be sold) or if her owner dies (she is distributed as “part of his estate”). An owner can have sex with a prepubescent slave, it says, if she is “fit for intercourse,” and if she is not, “then it is enough to enjoy her without intercourse.”
Much of it they support with verses from the Koran and medieval Islamic laws, which ISIS uses selectively and expects its followers to take literally. It is a horrible, stunning document. But ISIS is not as original as its members think it is. Rape has been used throughout history as a weapon of war. I never thought I would have something in common with women in Rwanda—before all this, I didn’t know that a country called Rwanda existed—and now I am linked to them in the worst possible way, as a victim of a war crime that is so hard to talk about that no one in the world was prosecuted for committing it until just sixteen years before ISIS came to Sinjar.
On the lower floor, a militant was registering the transactions in a book, writing down our names and the names of the militants who took us. Compared to upstairs, the downstairs was orderly and calm. I sat down on a couch next to a few other girls, but Rojian and I were too scared to talk to them. I thought about being taken by Salwan, how strong he looked and how easily he could crush me with his bare hands. No matter what he did, and no matter how much I resisted, I would never be able to fight him off. He smelled of rotten eggs and cologne.
I was looking at the floor, at the feet and ankles of the militants and girls who walked by me. In the crowd, I saw a pair of men’s sandals and ankles that were skinny, almost womanly, and before I could think about what I was doing, I flung myself toward those feet. I started begging. “Please, take me with you,” I said. “Do whatever you want, I just can’t go with this giant.” It still amazes me the kinds of decisions we all made, thinking it possible that one choice would lead to torture while another would save us, not realizing that we were now in a world where all paths led to the same terrible place.
I don’t know why the thin guy agreed, but taking one look at me, he turned to Salwan and said, “She’s mine.” Salwan didn’t argue. The skinny man was a judge in Mosul, and no one disobeyed him. I raised my head and almost felt like smiling at Salwan, thinking I had won, but then I felt him grab my hair and pull my head back violently. “He can have you now,” Salwan said. “After a few days you will be with me.” And then he let my head fall forward.
I followed the thin man to the desk. “What’s your name?” he asked me. He spoke in a soft but unkind voice. “Nadia,” I said, and he turned to the registrar. The man seemed to recognize the militant right away and began recording our information. He said our names as he wrote them down—“Nadia, Hajji Salman”—and when he spoke the name of my captor, I thought I heard his voice waver a bit, as if he were scared, and I wondered if I had made a huge mistake.
Chapter 6
Salwan took Rojian, who was so young and so innocent, and years later I still think of him with the most anger. I dream about one day bringing all the militants to justice, not just the leaders like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi but all the guards and slave owners, every man who pulled a trigger and pushed my brothers’ bodies into their mass grave, every fighter who tried to brainwash young boys into hating their mothers for being Yazidi, every Iraqi who welcomed the terrorists into their cities and helped them, thinking to themselves, Finally we can be rid of those nonbelievers. They should all be put on trial before the entire world, like the Nazi leaders after World War II, and not given the chance to hide.
In my fantasy, Salwan is the first to be tried, and all of the girls from that second house in Mosul are in the courtroom, testifying against him. “This is the one,” I say, and point to the monster. “This is the huge one who terrified all of us. He watched me be beaten.” Then Rojian, if she wants to, can tell the court what he did to her. If she is too scared or too traumatized, I will speak for her. “Not only did Salwan buy her and abuse her over and over, he beat her whenever he could,” I would tell the court. “Even that first night, when Rojian was too scared and exhausted to even think about fighting back, Salwan beat her when he discovered that she was wearing layers of clothing, and he beat her and blamed her for me getting away. When Rojian managed to escape, he bought her mother and enslaved her in retaliation. Her mother had a sixteen-day-old baby, which Salwan took from her, even though your own rules say that you should not separate a mother from her children. He told her that she would never see her baby again.” (Many of ISIS’s rules, I would learn, were made to be broken.) I would tell the court every detail of what he did to her, and I pray to God that when ISIS is defeated, Salwan is captured alive.<
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That night, when justice was a far-off dream and there was no chance of us being rescued, Rojian and Salwan followed me and Hajji Salman out of the house and into the garden. The screams from the slave market followed us, loud enough to echo through the entire city. I thought about the families in the houses on those streets. Were they sitting down to dinner? Putting their children to bed? There was no way they couldn’t hear what was going on in the house. Music and television, which otherwise might have drowned out our screams, were banned by ISIS. Maybe they wanted to hear our anguish, which was evidence of the power of the new Islamic State leadership. What did they think would happen to them in the end, when Iraqi and Kurdish forces fought to get Mosul back? Did they think ISIS would protect them? I shivered at the thought.
We got into a car, with me and Rojian in the back and the men in the front, and drove away from the house. “We’ll go to my place,” Hajji Salman said into his cell phone. “There are eight girls there now. Just get rid of them.”
We pulled up to a large hall, like something for weddings, with a double-doored entrance surrounded by concrete columns, which looked like it was being used as a mosque. Inside, the room was full of Islamic State militants, close to three hundred of them, all praying. None of them paid attention to us as we walked inside, and I stayed close to the door while Hajji Salman grabbed two pairs of sandals from a large stack and handed them to us. They were men’s sandals, made of leather, too big and hard to walk in, but Islamic State militants had taken our shoes from us and now we were barefoot. We tried not to trip as we passed the praying men and went back outside.
Salwan waited by another car, and it was clear then that they meant to separate Rojian and me. We held on to each other’s hands and pleaded with them not to break us apart. “Please, don’t make us go alone,” we said, but neither Salwan nor Hajji Salman listened. Salwan grabbed Rojian by the shoulders and ripped her away from me. She looked so small and so young. We screamed each other’s names, but it was useless. Rojian disappeared into a car with Salwan, leaving me alone with Hajji Salman and feeling like I might die, right there, from grief.
Hajji Salman and I got into a small white car, where a driver and a young guard named Morteja waited for us. Morteja stared at me as I took the seat next to him, and I thought that if Hajji Salman hadn’t been there, he would have tried to touch me like the men at the slave market. I shrank against the window, sitting as far from him as I could.
By then, the narrow streets were nearly empty and pitch-black, lit by the lights of just a few houses powered by loud generators. We drove for about twenty minutes in silence, the darkness so thick it was almost like we were driving into water, and then we stopped. “Out of the car, Nadia,” Hajji Salman ordered. He pulled me roughly by the arm through a gate leading into a garden. It took me a moment to realize that we were back at the first house, the Islamic State center where militants had separated a group of girls destined to go across the border. “Are you taking me to Syria?” I asked softly, and Hajji Salman didn’t respond.
From the garden, we could hear girls screaming inside the building, and a few minutes later eight girls wearing abayas and niqabs were pulled by militants through the front door. As they walked by, they turned their heads toward me and stared. Maybe they knew me. Maybe it was Nisreen and Kathrine, and they were too terrified to say anything, just as I was. Whoever they were, their faces were lost behind the niqabs, and a moment later they were shoved into a minibus. Then the doors closed, and it drove away.
A guard took me up to an empty room. I didn’t see or hear any other girls, but as in the other houses, ISIS had left piles of Yazidi scarves and clothes as evidence of all the girls who had once been there. A small mound of ashes was all that remained of the documents they had taken from us. Only the ID of one girl from Kocho was partially intact; it stuck out from the ashes like a tiny plant.
Because ISIS hadn’t bothered to clear the house of the personal belongings of the family who owned it, remnants of their lives were everywhere. In one room, which had been for exercising, the walls were full of framed photos of a boy, who I assumed was the eldest son, lifting enormous weights. Another room was just for playing games, like pool. But the saddest were the children’s rooms, still full of toys and brightly colored blankets, ready for the kids to come back.
“Who did this house belong to?” I asked Hajji Salman when he came to join me.
“A Shiite,” he told me. “A judge.”
“What happened to them?” I hoped they had managed to escape and were safe in the Kurdish areas by now. Even though they weren’t Yazidi, I felt heartbroken for them. Just like in Kocho, ISIS had taken everything from this family.
“He’s gone to hell,” Hajji Salman said, and I stopped asking questions.
Hajji Salman went to take a shower. When he came back, he was dressed in the same clothes as before, and I could smell faintly the sweat from his clothes and his cologne against the soap. He closed the door behind him and sat down on the mattress next to me. Quickly I stammered, “I have my period,” and looked away, but he didn’t respond.
“Where are you from?” he asked, sitting close to me.
“Kocho,” I answered. In my terror, I had barely thought about my home or my family or anything other than what was going to happen to me from one moment to the next. Saying the name of my village hurt. It brought back memories of home and the people I loved, most vividly of my mother quietly laying her uncovered head in my lap while we waited in Solagh.
“Yazidis are infidels, you know,” Hajji Salman said. He spoke softly, almost in a whisper, but there was nothing gentle about him. “God wants us to convert you, and if we can’t, then we can do what we like to you.”
He paused. “What happened to your family?” he asked.
“Almost all of us managed to escape,” I lied. “Only three of us were captured.”
“I went to Sinjar on August third, when it all began,” he said, relaxing on the bed as if he were telling a happy story. “Along the road I saw three Yazidi men in police uniforms. They were trying to escape, but I managed to catch up to them, and when I did, I killed them.”
I stared at the floor, unable to talk.
“We came to Sinjar to kill all the men,” my captor went on, “and to take the women and the children, all of them. Unfortunately, some made it to the mountain.”
Hajji Salman talked like this for close to an hour, while I sat on the edge of the mattress trying not to hear what he was saying. He cursed my home, my family, and my religion. He told me that he had spent seven years in Mosul’s Badush prison and wanted to get his revenge against the infidels in Iraq. What had happened in Sinjar was a good thing, he said, and that I should be happy that ISIS planned to erase Yazidism from Iraq. He tried to convince me to convert, but I refused. I couldn’t look at him. His words became meaningless. He paused his monologue only to pick up a phone call from his wife, whom he called Umm Sara.
Even though what he said was meant to hurt me, I hoped he would never stop talking. As long as he did, he wouldn’t touch me, I thought. Yazidi rules for girls and boys being together were not as strict as they were in other communities in Iraq, and in Kocho I had taken rides in cars with male friends and walked to school with male classmates without worrying what people would say. But those boys would never have touched me or hurt me, and before Hajji Salman, I had never been alone with a man like this.
“You’re my fourth sabiyya,” he said. “The other three are Muslim now. I did that for them. Yazidis are infidels—that’s why we are doing this. It’s to help you.” After he finished talking, he ordered me to undress.
I started to cry. “I have my period,” I told him again.
“Prove it,” he said, and started to take off his clothes. “That’s what my other sabaya said, too.”
I undressed. Because I really had my period, he didn’t rape me. The Islamic State manual does not outlaw sex with sabaya who are menstruating, but it does say that
the captor should wait for his slave to finish her menstrual cycle before having sex with her, to be certain that she is not pregnant. Maybe this was what stopped Hajji Salman that night.
Still, he didn’t leave me alone. All night we lay on the mattress naked, and he never stopped touching me. I felt like I had on the bus when Abu Batat was reaching into my dress and forcefully holding my breast—my body hurt and went numb wherever Hajji Salman’s fingers went. I was too scared to try to fight him off, and besides, there was little point. I was tiny, thin, and weak. I hadn’t eaten a real meal in days, maybe longer when I thought back to the days spent trapped in Kocho, and nothing would stop him from doing whatever he wanted.
When I opened my eyes in the morning, Hajji Salman was already awake. I started putting my clothes on, but he stopped me. “Take a shower, Nadia,” he said. “We have a big day.”
After my shower, he handed me a black abaya and niqab, which I put on over my dress. It was the first time I had worn the clothes of a conservative Muslim woman, and although the fabric was light, I found it hard to breathe. Outside, hidden behind my niqab, I saw the neighborhood in the daylight for the first time. The Shiite judge had obviously been wealthy; he lived in an upper-class part of Mosul, where elegant homes were set back from the road by gardens and surrounded by walls. The Islamic State’s religious propaganda was a strong lure for potential jihadists, but militants from all over the world were also enticed with the promise of money, and when they came into Mosul, they occupied the nicest homes first and looted the rest of anything they wanted. Residents who hadn’t abandoned the city were told they would be given back the authority they had lost after 2003, when the United States dismantled Baathist institutions and redistributed power to the Shia in Iraq, but they were also heavily taxed by ISIS, which seemed to me to be a terrorist group run on greed.