The Last Girl

by Nadia Murad

  I knew that if I thought about it any longer, I would run out of time. I had to decide. But I couldn’t move. No matter what choice I played in my head, it always ended with me being captured and punished as Hajji Salman had punished me. I assumed that Hajji Amer had left me alone in the house with the door unlocked and no guards not because he had forgotten. He wasn’t stupid. He did that because he thought at this point, having been abused for so long and being so weak from sickness and hunger, I wouldn’t think of trying to escape. They thought they had me forever. They are wrong, I thought. And in the blink of an eye, I tossed my bag over the wall and then jumped over it myself, landing with a thud on the other side.

  PART III

  Chapter 1

  On the other side of the garden wall, I could see that the road leading straight from the house was in fact a dead end, and since it was time for evening prayer, it would be very risky to pass the large mosque to the left. The only option was to turn right, with no idea where that might lead me. I started walking.

  I was still wearing the men’s sandals Hajji Salman had given me that first night, taken from the hall that had been turned into a mosque, and it was the first time wearing them that I’d walked a distance greater than from the door of a house to a car. They flopped against the soles of my feet—I worried it was too loud—and sand caught between the straps and my toes. They’re too big! I thought. I had forgotten, and for a moment I delighted in that observation because it meant that I was moving.

  I didn’t walk a straight line. Instead I wove between parked cars, turned corners at random, and crossed and recrossed the same streets over and over, hoping that a casual observer would think I knew where I was going. My heart beat so hard in my chest that I worried the people I passed would hear it and know what I was.

  Some of the houses I passed were lit by generators and ringed by wide gardens full of purple-flowered bushes and tall trees. It was a nice neighborhood, built for large, well-off families. Since it was dusk, most people were in their homes, eating dinner and putting their kids to bed, but as it grew darker, they came outside to sit in the breeze and chat with their neighbors. I tried not to look at any of them, hoping that no one would notice me.

  My entire life, I’ve been scared of the night. I was lucky to be poor: it meant that I slept in the same room as my sisters and nieces or on the rooftop surrounded by family, and I never had to worry about what hid in the darkness. As I walked that evening in Mosul, the sky was quickly darkening, and my fear of the night became even worse than my fear of ISIS catching me. Without streetlights and with only some of the houses lit, the Mosul neighborhood would soon be pitch-black. Families would begin going to sleep, and the streets would be empty of everyone, I thought, except for me and the men who were looking for me. By now, I assumed, Hajji Amer had returned to the house with my new abayas and discovered that I was missing. He had probably radioed other Islamic State members, maybe a commander or even Hajji Salman specifically, to say that I had escaped. He would then run back to his van to look for the figure of a fleeing girl in the strong headlights. He was probably scared for himself. After all, it was because he had left me alone with the door unlocked that I had escaped so easily. I imagined this made him drive faster and look harder, knocking on doors and questioning people on the street, stopping any woman walking alone. I imagined he’d look well into the night.

  My abaya helped me blend in, but I didn’t feel invisible, as I’d hoped I would. All I could think about as I walked was the moment they would catch me, what their weapons and their voices would sound like, and then what their hands would feel like dragging me back to the house I had fled from. I had to find somewhere to hide before it got completely dark.

  As I passed each house, I imagined walking up to the door and knocking. Would the family that answered turn me in right away? Would they send me back to Hajji Salman? Islamic State flags hung from the lampposts and over gates, reminding me that I was in a dangerous place. Even the sound of children laughing in their yards frightened me.

  For a moment, I wondered if it would be better to go back. I could climb back over the garden wall and push back through the heavy front door and be sitting in the kitchen right where Hajji Amer left me when he returned. Maybe it would be better to go to Syria than to be caught trying to escape again. But then I thought, No, God has given me this chance and has made it easy for me to leave that house. The unlocked door, the quiet neighborhood, the lack of guards, and the trash can by the garden wall—all these had to be signs that it was time to risk another escape. A chance like this wouldn’t come twice, especially if I was caught.

  At first, I jumped at every noise and every movement. A car drove down the street, its only working headlight shining at me like a policeman’s flashlight, and I pressed myself against a garden wall until it passed. When I saw two young men in tracksuits walking toward me, I crossed the street to avoid them. They went by, chatting, as if they hadn’t seen me. Hearing the creak of a rusty gate opening in front of a house, I quickly turned a corner, walking as fast as I could without running, and when a dog barked, I turned another corner. These fearful moments were all that was guiding me, but I still couldn’t imagine where I was going. I thought I might walk forever.

  As I walked, the houses shrank from the multistory concrete homes of the wealthier families that ISIS had taken over—with the fancy cars parked out front and loud generators powering televisions and radios—into more modest dwellings, most of them one or two stories of gray cement. Fewer lights were on, and the neighborhoods grew quieter. I could hear babies crying inside the houses, and I imagined their mothers rocking them, trying to get them to be quiet. Grassy yards became small plots for vegetables, and family sedans became farmers’ pickup trucks. Streams of sewage and dishwater ran into gutters alongside the road: I was in a poor neighborhood.

  Suddenly I felt that this was what I had been looking for. If any Sunni in Mosul was going to help me, it was most likely to be a poor Sunni, maybe a family who’d stayed only because they didn’t have the money to leave and maybe was less interested in the politics of Iraq than in their own livelihood. Plenty of poor families joined ISIS. But that night, with nothing to guide me and no reason to trust one stranger over another, I just wanted to find a family like mine.

  I didn’t know which door to knock on. I had spent so many hours inside Islamic State centers, screaming as loud as I could with the other girls, knowing that the noise reached the people outside and yet none of them had helped. I’d been transported between cities in buses and cars, passing cars packed with families who didn’t even glance at us. Every day the militants executed people who disagreed with them, raped Yazidi women they had deemed worth less than objects, and carried out their plan to erase Yazidis from the face of the earth—and still no one in Mosul did anything to help. ISIS had been largely homegrown, and even though a great many Sunni Muslims fled Mosul when the organization took over—and more would be terrorized under Islamic State rule—there was no reason for me to think that behind any of these doors lived a single sympathetic person. I remembered how I’d longed for Morteja’s mother to look at me the way she might look at her own daughter, and how instead she’d looked at me with hatred. Were these houses full of people like her?

  Still, I had no choice. It was impossible for me to leave Mosul alone. Even if I made it past the checkpoint, which I almost certainly wouldn’t, I would be caught walking along the road or would die of dehydration long before I made it to Kurdistan. My only hope of getting out of Mosul alive was in one of these houses. But which one?

  Soon it was dark enough that it became hard to see in front of me. I’d been walking for a little under two hours, and my feet ached in my sandals. Each step seemed like a measure of safety, a distance, no matter how small, between me and ISIS. Still, I couldn’t walk forever. At one corner I paused beside a large metal door, as wide as it was tall, and raised my hand, about to knock. But then at the last moment, I lowered my hand bac
k down to my side and started walking again. I don’t know why.

  Around the corner from that house, I stopped by a green metal door, smaller than the first. There were no lights on in the house, which was two stories and concrete, similar to some of the new houses built in Kocho. There was nothing special about the house, nothing to tell me what the family inside was like. But I had walked enough. This time when I raised my hand, I banged my palm twice against the door. It made a loud, hollow thumping sound, and while it vibrated through the metal, I stood on the street waiting to see whether I would be saved.

  A second later the door swung open, and a man who looked to be in his fifties stood on the other side. “Who are you?” he asked, but I pushed past him without saying anything. In the small garden I saw a family sitting in a circle very close to the door, lit only by the moon. They stood up, startled, but didn’t say anything. When I heard the garden gate close, I lifted my niqab over my face.

  “I beg you,” I said. “Help me.” They were silent, and so I kept talking. “My name is Nadia,” I said. “I am a Yazidi from Sinjar. Daesh came to my village, and I was taken to Mosul to be a sabiyya. I lost my family.”

  Two young men in their twenties sat in the garden, along with an older couple who I thought must be the parents and a boy who looked to be around eleven years old. A young woman, also in her twenties, sat rocking a baby to sleep. She was pregnant and I thought I saw fear register on her face before anyone else’s. The power was out in their small house and they had brought mattresses to the garden where the air was cooler.

  For a moment my heart stopped. They could be Islamic State members—the men had beards and were wearing baggy black pants, and the women were dressed conservatively, though their faces were uncovered because they were at home. There was nothing to distinguish them from the people who had held me, and I thought for sure they would turn me in. I froze and stopped talking.

  One of the men grabbed my arm and pulled me from the garden into their house. It was hot and dark in the entranceway. “It’s safer in here,” the older man explained. “You shouldn’t talk about those kinds of things outside.”

  “Where are you from?” the older woman, who I assumed was his wife, asked me once we were inside. “What happened to you?” Her voice was anxious but not angry, and I felt my heart slow down a little bit.

  “I’m from Kocho,” I told them. “I was taken here as a sabiyya, and I just ran from the last house where Daesh had me. They were going to try to take me to Syria.” I told them what happened to me, even the rape and abuse. I thought that the more they knew, the more likely they were to help me. They were a family, so they were capable of pity and love. But I didn’t say the names of the militants who had bought or sold me. Hajji Salman was an important figure in ISIS, and who could imagine a more fearful person to defy than the judge who sends people to their deaths? I thought, If they knew that I belonged to Salman, they would return me right away, no matter how sorry they felt for me.

  “What do you want from us?” the woman asked.

  “Imagine that you have a young daughter who was taken away from her family and subjected to all this rape and suffering,” I said. “Just, please, think of that when you consider what to do with me now.”

  As soon as I finished, the father spoke up. “Have peace in your heart,” he said. “We will try to help you.”

  “How can they do that to little girls?” the woman whispered to herself.

  The family introduced themselves. They were indeed Sunnis who had stayed in Mosul when ISIS came, because they had nowhere else to go, they said. “We don’t know anyone in Kurdistan to help us get through the checkpoints,” they told me. “And besides, we are poor. All we have is in this house.” I didn’t know whether to believe them—plenty of poor Sunnis had left Mosul, while others stayed and became disillusioned by ISIS only when their own lives got worse, not because of the suffering of others—but I decided that if they helped me, that must mean they were telling the truth.

  “We are Azawi,” they said, referring to a tribe that has long, close relationships with Yazidis in the area. It meant they would probably know about Yazidism and may even have kiriv in villages near mine. It was a good sign.

  Hisham, the older man, was heavyset and wore a long black and white beard. His wife, Maha, had a plump, beautiful face. When I came in, she was only wearing a housedress, but after a moment, because I was a stranger, she went inside to put on her abaya. Their sons Nasser and Hussein were skinny, still growing into men, and they both, especially Nasser, peppered me with curious questions: How did I get here? Where was my family?

  At twenty-five, Nasser was the eldest, and he was very tall, with a deep, receding hairline and a large, wide mouth. I worried about the sons the most: if any of the family members would be loyal to ISIS, it would be these young Sunni men. But they swore they hated the militants. “Life has been terrible since they got here,” Nasser told me. “We feel we are living in a war.”

  Nasser’s wife, Safaa, was also in the garden. Like Nasser, she was tall, and she had striking eyes set very deep in her head. She didn’t say anything, just looked at me while bouncing her baby in her lap and glancing at Nasser’s youngest brother, Khaled, who was also very young and was oblivious to what was going on. Out of everyone, Safaa seemed the most worried about me being there. “Do you want a different abaya?” she asked me after I had taken off my dirty one. It was a kind gesture, but something in the way she said it made me think she was judging me for wearing a Yazidi dress in a Muslim house. “No, thank you,” I said. I didn’t want to wear the unfamiliar clothing any more than I had to.

  “Who were you with from Daesh?” Nasser finally asked.

  “Salman,” I said quietly, and he grunted knowingly but didn’t say anything more about my former captor. Instead, he asked me about my family and where I would go if I left Mosul. I felt that he wasn’t afraid and that he wanted to help me.

  “Have you met other Yazidi girls?” I asked.

  “I have seen some before in the court,” Hisham said. Hussein, his son, confessed that he had watched buses drive by that he thought were full of slaves like me. “There are signs in Mosul saying that if you turn in a sabiyya, Daesh will give you five thousand dollars,” he said. “But we’ve heard it’s a lie.”

  “We don’t like what is happening,” Hisham said. “We would have left Mosul long ago, when Daesh first came, but we don’t have any money, and we have nowhere to go.”

  “Four of our daughters are married here,” Maha said. “Even if we left, they would have stayed. Their husbands’ families might be with Daesh. We don’t know—so many people support them. But we can’t leave our daughters here alone.”

  I don’t want to sound ungrateful to the family who let me inside their home. They heard my story without judgment and they offered to help. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder where they had been the whole time I was captive. Listening to their excuses made me angry, although I tried not to show it. How could Hussein watch those buses drive by, thinking that on board were young girls and women about to be raped night after night by Islamic State militants? How could Hisham have watched in the court as militants dragged their sabaya into illegal marriages? They were helping me, but only after I showed up at their door. And I was one of thousands. They said they hated ISIS, but none of them had done anything to stop them.

  Maybe, I thought, it was asking too much of a normal family to fight back against terrorists like the men in ISIS, men who threw people they accused of being homosexual off rooftops; men who raped young girls because they belonged to the wrong religion; men who stoned people to death. My willingness to help others had never been tested like that. But that was because Yazidis had never been shielded by their religion, only attacked. Hisham and his family had remained safe in ISIS-occupied Mosul because they were born Sunni and therefore were accepted by the militants. Until I showed up, they’d been content to wear their religion as armor. I tried not to hate them for i
t, because they were showing me such kindness, but I didn’t love them.

  “Do you have anyone in Kurdistan that we can call to tell them you are with us?” Hisham asked.

  “I have brothers there,” I told him, and recited Hezni’s number, which was etched in my brain.

  I watched as Hisham dialed the number and began to speak. Then he took the phone off his ear in confusion and dialed again. The second time the same thing happened, and I worried that I had the wrong number. “Is he picking up?” I asked Hisham.

  He shook his head. “A man keeps answering, but as soon as I tell him who I am and where I am calling from, he starts cursing at me,” he told me. “It might not be your brother. If it is, I don’t think he believes me that you are with me.”

  Hisham tried again. This time whoever picked up let him talk. “Nadia is here with us, she ran away from her captor,” he explained. “If you don’t believe me, I know Yazidis who will tell you who I am.” Hisham had served in Saddam’s military with a connected Yazidi politician from Sinjar. “He will tell you that I am a good person and that I won’t hurt your sister.”

  It was a brief conversation, and afterward Hisham told me that it had been Hezni he was talking to. “At first, when he saw that it was a phone call from Mosul, he thought I was calling to be cruel,” he said. “Apparently the men who are holding his wife call him sometimes just to remind him of what they are doing to her. All he can do is curse at them and hang up.” My heart hurt for Hezni and Jilan, who had struggled so hard to be together in the first place.