The Last Girl

by Nadia Murad

  Hajji Salman and I left Morteja’s home. As we walked to the door, I saw Morteja’s mother in the kitchen, where she was busy applying hot glass cups to a man’s back—a type of massage that leaves big red circles on the skin and is supposed to help with circulation. Because it was polite to thank the woman of the house—and because in spite of everything, the habits you grow up with become second nature—I looked at her and said, “Salman is here, I am going, thank you.”

  “God be with you,” she said, and turned back to what she was doing.

  Hajji Salman and I drove back to the building where the slave market had taken place the night before. “They’re upstairs,” he told me, and he left me.

  Racing up the stairs, I found Kathrine and Nisreen alone in that large room with the blacked-out windows. I could tell they were exhausted; Kathrine was lying down on one of the thin mattresses, her eyes barely open, and the two others were sitting beside her. When I opened the door, they just stared at me blankly. I had forgotten to lift up my niqab. “Are you here to recite Koran for us?” Kathrine asked quietly.

  “It’s me, Nadia,” I said, and when they saw my face, they rushed to me. We cried so hard, we felt like we could die from crying. Our muscles hurt, and we could barely breathe. “They told us to wait for a woman who was coming to check to make sure we were virgins,” they said. “We thought you were her!”

  Kathrine’s eyes were swollen and bruised. “I can’t see very well,” she told me when I sat down beside her.

  “You look so weak,” I said, taking her hand.

  “I’m fasting so that God might help us,” she explained. I worried about her collapsing without food, but I didn’t say that. Yazidis observe two official fasts a year and we can choose to fast at other times, to reinforce our commitment to God and open up our communication to Tawusi Melek. Fasting can give us strength rather than take it away.

  “What happened to you?” I asked Kathrine.

  “A man named Abu Abdullah bought me and took me to another house in Mosul,” she said. “I told him that I have cancer and he shouldn’t touch me, so he beat me and returned me to the market. That’s why my eyes are bruised.”

  “I tried to escape,” Nisreen said. “They caught me and beat me and then brought me back here.”

  “Why are you wearing that?” Kathrine asked me. She was still wearing two Yazidi dresses layered on top of each other.

  “They took away my clothes and made me wear this,” I said. “I lost my bag. I don’t have anything else.”

  “I have your bag!” Kathrine said, and handed it to me. Then she peeled off her top layer and gave me that as well. It was a pink and brown dress, one of her new ones, and to this day Dimal and I take turns wearing it, because it is beautiful and because it reminds us of our niece. “Wear this under the abaya,” she told me, and I kissed her on the cheek.

  One of the guards came to the door. “You have five minutes,” he said. “Then Hajji Salman wants you downstairs.”

  After he left, Kathrine reached into the pocket of her dress and handed me a pair of earrings. “Keep them with you. We might not see each other again.”

  “If you have the chance to escape, you should escape,” she whispered to me, taking my hand and walking with me down the stairs. “I will also try.” We held hands until we got to the kitchen and Hajji Salman pulled me outside.

  We drove in silence back to Hajji Salman’s house. I wept quietly for Kathrine and Nisreen, praying to God that they would survive whatever happened to them. When we got there, Hajji Salman told me to go inside with one of the guards and wait for him. “I won’t be long,” he said, and I started to pray for myself.

  Before I went inside, Hajji Salman looked at me for a long time. “When I come back, I don’t care if you have your period,” he said after a moment. “I promise you, I will come to you.”

  That’s how he put it: “I will come to you.”

  Chapter 8

  Over the past three years, I have heard a lot of stories about other Yazidi women who were captured and enslaved by ISIS. For the most part, we were all victims of the same violence. We would be bought at the market, or given as a gift to a new recruit or a high-ranking commander, and then taken back to his home, where we would be raped and humiliated, most of us beaten as well. Then we would be sold or given as a gift again, and again raped and beaten, then sold or given to another militant, and raped and beaten by him, and sold or given, and raped and beaten, and it went this way for as long as we were desirable enough and not yet dead. If we tried to escape, we would be punished severely. As Hajji Salman had warned me, ISIS hung our photos at checkpoints, and residents in Mosul were instructed to return slaves to the nearest Islamic State center. They were told there was a five-thousand-dollar reward if they did.

  The rape was the worst part. It stripped us of our humanity and made thinking about the future—returning to Yazidi society, marrying, having children, being happy—impossible. We wished they would kill us instead.

  ISIS knew how devastating it was for an unmarried Yazidi girl to convert to Islam and lose her virginity, and they used our worst fears—that our community and religious leaders wouldn’t welcome us back—against us. “Try to escape, it doesn’t matter,” Hajji Salman would tell me. “Even if you make it home, your father or your uncle will kill you. You’re no longer a virgin, and you are Muslim!”

  Women tell stories about how they fought against their attackers, how they tried to beat away the men who were much stronger than them. Although they could never have overtaken the militants who were determined to rape them, their fight allowed them to feel better after the fact. “There’s not one time that we let them do it quietly,” they say. “I would resist, I would hit, I would spit on his face, I would do anything.” I heard of one girl who penetrated herself with a bottle so that she would no longer be a virgin when her militant came for her, and others who tried to light themselves on fire. After they were free, they were able to say proudly that they scratched so hard at their captor’s arm that they drew blood, or they bruised his cheek while he was raping them. “At least I didn’t let him do whatever he wanted,” they would say, and every gesture, no matter how small, was a message to ISIS that they did not truly own them. Of course, it was the voices of the women who were not there, who had killed themselves rather than be raped, that spoke the loudest.

  I have never admitted this to anyone, but I did not fight back when Hajji Salman or anyone else came to rape me. I just closed my eyes and wished for it to be over. People tell me all the time, “Oh, you are so brave, you are so strong,” and I hold my tongue, but I want to correct them and tell them that, while other girls punched and bit their attackers, I only cried. “I am not brave like them,” I want to say, but I worry what people would think of me. Sometimes it can feel like all that anyone is interested in when it comes to the genocide is the sexual abuse of Yazidi girls, and they want a story of a fight. I want to talk about everything—the murder of my brothers, the disappearance of my mother, the brainwashing of the boys—not just the rape. Or maybe I am still scared of what people will think. It took a long time before I accepted that just because I didn’t fight back the way some other girls did, it doesn’t mean I approved of what the men were doing.

  Before ISIS came, I considered myself a brave and honest person. Whatever problems I had, whatever mistakes I made, I would confess them to my family. I told them, “This is who I am,” and I was ready to accept their reactions. As long as I was with my family, I could face anything. But without my family, captive in Mosul, I felt so alone that I barely felt human. Something inside me died.

  Hajji Salman’s house was full of guards, so I went upstairs immediately. About a half hour later, one of the guards, Hossam, came in with a dress, some makeup, and a hair-removal cream. “Salman said you have to take a shower and prepare yourself before he comes,” he said, and then he went back downstairs, leaving the things on the bed.

  I took a shower and did what Ho
ssam said, using the cream to remove all the hair from my feet to my underarms. It was a brand my mother had often given us to use, and I always hated it, preferring to use the sugar wax popular in the Middle East. The cream had a strong chemical smell that made me feel dizzy. In the bathroom, I noticed that my period had, in fact, stopped.

  Next, I put on the dress Hossam left for me. It was black and blue, with a short skirt falling above the knees and only thin straps over the shoulders. There was a bra inside so I didn’t have to wear one. It was a type of party dress I would see on television, not modest enough for Kocho or, in fact, for Mosul. It was the kind of dress a wife wore only for her husband.

  Putting it on, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror. I knew that if I didn’t wear any makeup, I would be punished, so I looked through the pile that Hossam had left for me. Normally, Kathrine and I would have been thrilled at the new makeup, which was a brand I recognized and could very rarely afford. We would have stood in front of the bedroom mirror, painting our eyelids different colors, surrounding our eyes with thick lines of kohl, and covering our freckles with foundation. At Hajji Salman’s, I could barely stand to look at myself in the mirror. I put on some pink lipstick and eye makeup—just enough, I hoped, to avoid being beaten.

  I looked in a mirror for the first time since leaving Kocho. Before, when I had put on makeup, I always felt that when I finished, I looked like another person, and I had loved that, the possibility of transforming. But that day at Hajji Salman’s, I didn’t feel that I looked any different. No matter how much lipstick I wore, the face in the mirror reflected exactly what I had been turned into—a slave who, at any moment, was going to be a prize for a terrorist. I sat down on the bed and waited for the door to open.

  Forty minutes later I heard the guards outside greet my captor, and then Hajji Salman came into the room. He wasn’t alone, but the men who were with him stayed in the hallway. As soon as I saw him, I collapsed, trying to shrink into a ball so that he couldn’t touch me, like a child.

  “Salam alakum,” Hajji Salman said to me, and looked me up and down. He seemed surprised that I had dressed up as he had asked. “I had other sabaya who I had to sell after a few days,” he said. “They didn’t do what I asked them. You did a good job,” he said approvingly, and then he left and closed the door behind him, leaving me feeling exposed and ashamed.

  It was early evening when the door opened again. This time Hossam peered into the room. “Hajji Salman wants you to bring tea to the guests,” he said.

  “How many are there? Who are they?” I didn’t want to leave the room dressed as I was, but Hossam refused to answer. “Just come,” he said. “And hurry, the men are waiting.”

  For a moment, I had hope that the rape wasn’t going to happen that night. He’s just going to give me to one of these men, I said to myself, and I walked downstairs to the kitchen.

  One of the guards had prepared the tea, pouring the strong reddish-brown liquid into small glass cups and arranging them around a dish of white sugar, and left it on a tray on the stairs. I picked up the tray and brought it into the living room, where a group of militants sat on plush couches. “Salam alakum,” I said as I entered, then walked around the room, placing teacups on small tables set up by the men’s knees. I could hear them laughing and speaking a distinctly Syrian Arabic, but I couldn’t pay attention to what they were saying. My hand shook as I served the tea. I could feel them looking at my bare shoulders and legs. The accent in particular scared me. I was still sure that at some point they would take me out of Iraq.

  “Syrian soldiers are so terrible,” one of the men said, and the others laughed. “They just give up quickly. They are so scared!”

  “I remember,” said Hajji Salman. “They gave their country to us so easily. Almost as easily as Sinjar!” That last comment was for me, and I hoped I didn’t show how much it hurt to hear it. I held out a cup of tea toward Hajji Salman. “Put it on the table,” he said, without looking at me.

  I went back to the hallway, where I sat cowering and waiting. After twenty minutes, the men got up, and when they had all left the house, Hajji Salman came to see me, holding an abaya. “It’s time to pray,” he said. “Cover yourself up so we can pray together.”

  I couldn’t recite the words, but I knew the movements of the Islamic prayer, and I stood next to him, trying to mimic exactly what he was doing so that he would be satisfied and not hurt me. Back in the room, he turned on some religious songs, then went into the bathroom. When he came back, he turned off the music and the room was silent again.

  “Take off your dress,” he said as he had the night before, and he took off his clothes. Then he came to me, as he’d said he would.

  Each moment was terrifying. If I pulled away, he roughly pulled me back. He was loud enough for the guards to hear—he shouted as if he wanted all of Mosul to know that he was finally raping his sabiyya—and no one interfered. His touch was exaggerated, forceful, meant to hurt me. No man ever touched his wife like this. Hajji Salman was as big as a house, as big as the house we were in. And I was like a child, crying out for my mother.

  Chapter 9

  I stayed with Hajji Salman four or five nights before he got rid of me. I was always in pain. Every day, whenever he had time, he raped me, and each morning he left after giving me instructions: “Clean the house. Cook this food. Wear this dress.” Other than that, all he said to me was “salam alakum.” He commanded me to act like a wife, and I was so scared I did everything he asked. If anyone had been watching from a distance, far enough away that they couldn’t see how much I cried or how my body shook when he touched me, they might have thought we were truly married. I went through the actions of a wife as he commanded me to. But he never called me his wife, only his sabiyya.

  A guard called Yahya brought food and tea to the room I shared with Salman. He was young, maybe twenty-three, and he wouldn’t even look at me as he laid the tray inside the door. They wouldn’t deprive me of food or water—I was too valuable as a sabiyya to risk killing—but I would eat only a few bites of the rice and soup they served me, just enough to stop feeling dizzy. I cleaned the house as Hajji Salman told me to, from top to bottom, scrubbing the bathrooms, which were filthy with six guards and Salman using them, and sweeping the staircase. I picked up the clothes they left strewn all over the house—black Islamic State pants and white dishdashas—and put them in the washing machine. I scraped leftover rice into the garbage and washed their lip prints off the teacups. His house was full of guards, so they didn’t worry about me discovering anything or escaping, and I was allowed to go into any room except for the garage, where I think they kept their weapons.

  Through the windows, I watched the city move. Hajji Salman lived in a crowded part of Mosul, near a highway that was usually full of cars. The windows on the staircase overlooked a circular access ramp, and I pictured myself trying to run over it to get to safety. Hajji Salman was constantly trying to warn me about escaping. “If you try, Nadia, you will regret it, I promise you,” he would say. “The punishment won’t be good.” His constant reminders gave me some hope. He wouldn’t have been so worried unless some girls had managed to escape their captors.

  ISIS was so calculating when it came to enslaving Yazidi girls, but they made mistakes and gave us opportunities. The biggest mistake they made was dressing us like all the women in Mosul, in the anonymous black abaya and niqab. Once we were in that clothing, we blended in, and with ISIS in charge, men were much less likely to engage with a woman they didn’t know on the street and therefore were less likely to find us out. Sweeping the staircase, I watched women walking through the city, each one dressed just like the others. It was impossible to tell who might be a Sunni woman going to market and who might be a Yazidi girl escaping her captor.

  Many of the Islamic State centers were in crowded neighborhoods like Hajji Salman’s, which would be helpful if I were ever outside alone. I imagined myself climbing out the big window in the kitchen, putting on
my abaya, and blending into a crowd. Somehow I would make my way to the taxi garage and find a seat in a car to Kirkuk, a frequently used checkpoint into Iraqi Kurdistan. If anyone tried to talk to me, I would just say that I was a Muslim from Kirkuk trying to visit my family. Or maybe I would say I had fled the war in Syria. I memorized the short opening verse from the Koran in case a militant tried to test me, and my Arabic was perfect, and I already knew the shahada. I had even committed two popular Islamic State songs to memory, one of which celebrated military victories: “We’ve taken Badush and we’ve taken Tal Afar, everything is good now.” I hated the sound of them, but the songs played in my head as I cleaned. The other one went “Give your lives to God and to the religion.” Whatever happened, I would never admit to being Yazidi.

  For me, though, I knew it was an impossible plan. Salman’s center was full of Islamic State militants, and there was no way I could climb through the window and over the garden fence without one of them noticing. Plus, Hajji Salman let me wear my abaya and niqab only when I went outside with him or a guard who could keep an eye on me. In the house, I wore the dresses I brought from Kocho or whatever Hajji Salman picked out for me. Lying in bed at night, anticipating the creak of the door as Hajji Salman came to join me, I would go over my escape fantasies and have to admit to myself that they could never happen, and then I would fall into such a deep sadness that I would pray for death.

  One afternoon after he raped me, Hajji Salman told me to prepare myself for guests who were coming that night. “You might know the sabiyya,” he told me. “She asked to see you.”

  My heart leaped in anticipation. Who would it be? As much as I longed to see a familiar face, I wasn’t sure I could bear to meet Kathrine or one of my sisters in the clothes Hajji Salman liked me to wear. Normally when Salman asked me to dress for visitors, he wanted me to wear things like the short blue and black dress, and I was mortified at the thought of another Yazidi girl seeing me like that. Luckily, I was able to find a black dress that, although it had thin straps, at least covered my knees. I pulled my hair back and put on a little lipstick but nothing on my eyes. When Hajji Salman was satisfied, we went downstairs.