The Last Girl

by Nadia Murad

  She paused, thinking. “After you leave Mosul, where will you go?”

  “To my brother,” I said. “He’s waiting to go to a refugee camp with other Yazidis.”

  “What is the camp like?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Almost everyone who survived will go there. My brother, Hezni, says it will be hard. There will be nothing to do, no work, and it’s far from cities. But they will be safe.”

  “I wonder what will happen here,” she said. It wasn’t really a question, so I didn’t say anything. I continued washing the dishes, and she was quiet until I was finished.

  By then the baby had stopped crying and was falling asleep in Mina’s arms. I went back upstairs to the daughters’ room and lay down on a mattress, but I didn’t close my eyes.

  Chapter 3

  It was decided that Nasser would be the one to go with me. That made me happy; Nasser liked to talk to me, and in the days leading up to our journey, he was the one I felt more comfortable with. By the time we left, he was almost like a brother.

  Like my brothers, Nasser teased me when I got lost in my own head, which was often. We had a running joke together that no one else understood. During the first days at the house, when Nasser would ask me how everything was, I would just answer absentmindedly, “It’s very hot, very hot.” I was too distracted by fear to say anything else. And so he would ask me when I saw him again, an hour later, “Nadia, how is everything now?” and I would say again, without realizing that I was repeating myself, “Nasser, it is very hot, very hot,” just like that. Eventually, he began to answer for me, asking in a joking tone, “Hey, Nadia, how is it? Is it very hot? Or is it very hot, very hot?” and I laughed when I realized what he was doing.

  Nasser came back the third day with an ID card. It listed my name as Sousan and my hometown as Kirkuk, but otherwise it contained all of Safaa’s information. “Make sure you memorize everything on this ID card,” he told me. “If they ask you when or where you were born at the checkpoint, and you don’t know…that will be the end of it.”

  I studied the ID day and night, memorizing Safaa’s date of birth—she was a little older than me—and her mother’s and father’s names, as well as Nasser’s date of birth and his mother’s and father’s names. On Iraqi IDs, both before and during ISIS, a woman’s father’s or husband’s information is as important as her own.

  Safaa’s picture was pasted into one corner. We didn’t look very much alike, but I didn’t worry about the guards at the checkpoints asking me to lift up my niqab to show my face. I couldn’t imagine an Islamic State member telling a Sunni woman to show her face in front of her husband, who was presumably also with ISIS. “If they ask you why you haven’t gotten a Daesh ID yet, just tell them you haven’t had time,” Hisham said. I was so scared, I memorized the information quickly, and after that I felt like it was imprinted on my brain.

  Our plan was simple. Nasser and I would pretend to be husband and wife, traveling to Kirkuk to visit my family. Sousan was a popular name in the city. “You tell them you are staying a week or so,” they told me. “Nasser will say that he is accompanying you and will come back that day or the next, depending on what time you arrive.” That way Nasser wouldn’t have to worry about bringing a bag or paying the fine ISIS required of Sunnis who wanted to stay outside the caliphate for an extended time.

  “Do you know anything about Kirkuk?” they asked me. “Names of neighborhoods, or anything about what it looks like, in case they ask?”

  “I’ve never been,” I said. “But I can ask my brother some things.”

  “What about her bag?” Nasser asked. I still had the black cotton sack with me. Inside were dresses that had belonged to Kathrine, Dimal, and me, as well as the sanitary pads that hid my jewelry and my mother’s ration card. “It doesn’t look like the kind of bag a Muslim woman packs for a week visiting family.”

  Hisham went out and returned with a bottle of shampoo and a bottle of conditioner, as well as a couple of simple dresses in the style popular among Muslim women, and I added these things to my bag. I started to feel guilty about the money they were spending on me. They were a poor family, like mine, and I didn’t want to be a burden. “When I am back in Kurdistan, I will send you something,” I told them. They insisted it was fine, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I still worried that if the money became too much of a strain, they would decide to turn me in.

  Hezni told me not to think about it. “The five-thousand-dollar reward is a lie,” he said. “Daesh just says that so that girls will be less willing to try to escape. They want you to think that you are like cattle and that every family wants to catch one of you to sell. But they don’t pay.

  “Anyway, it’s good for Nasser to leave Mosul,” Hezni told me.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, confused.

  “You don’t know?” Hezni said. “Ask Hisham.”

  That evening I told Hisham what my brother had said. “What did he mean? Does Nasser want to leave?” I asked.

  After a moment, he told me. “We are worried about Nasser,” he said. “He’s a young man and it’s only a matter of time before Daesh forces him to fight.”

  Nasser grew up poor under a Shiite government during the American occupation, and when he was younger, he had been angry at what he saw as the persecution of Sunnis. Young men like him were prime recruits for ISIS, and his family thought the terrorists wanted Nasser to join their police force. He was already fixing the sanitation systems in buildings around Mosul and everyone worried that even that job, although it was not violent, could brand him a terrorist later on.

  By the time I arrived out of nowhere on their doorstep, they had been desperately trying to think of a way to get him out of Mosul. They thought it was possible that if the family helped a Yazidi escape slavery, the Kurdish authorities would eventually let them into Kurdistan.

  Hisham urged me not to tell Nasser that I knew and, no matter what, not to tell anyone that he had worked for ISIS, even just repairing toilets. “It doesn’t matter what the job was,” he said. “The Kurds or the Iraqi Army will put him in prison.”

  I promised him that I wouldn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t imagine Nasser becoming an Islamic State policeman, arresting people on the basis of religion or because they had violated some vicious rule or dissented in some way and probably sending them to their death. Would he have to work with Hajji Salman? Nasser was my friend now, and he seemed too gentle and too understanding to take such a job. On the other hand, I had only just met him, and so many Sunnis had turned against Yazidis. I wondered if there had been a part of his life when he thought that all religions in Iraq other than Sunni Islam should be forced out of the country, and whether he had felt that by thinking that, he was taking part in a revolution to take back Iraq. I had heard my brothers talk about the Sunnis who, because of years of oppression under the Americans, Kurds, and Shia, and the Islamic radicalization that came at the same time, had turned so violently against their neighbors. Now one of them was helping me. But was he doing it only to save himself? Did that matter?

  Over the past few years, I have thought a lot about Nasser and his family. They took a huge risk in helping me. ISIS would have killed them, and maybe captured the daughters and enlisted the sons, if they had found out that the family had taken in a sabiyya—and they could have easily found out. They were everywhere. I wish that every human being acted with the same courage as Nasser’s family did.

  Still, for every family like Nasser’s, there were thousands more in Iraq and Syria who did nothing or who took an active role in the genocide. Some of them betrayed girls like me who tried to escape. Kathrine and Lamia were turned in six times by people they approached for help, first in Mosul and then in Hamdaniya, and every time they were punished. A group of sabaya who were taken to Syria were hunted in the reeds of the Tigris like escaped criminals after a local farmer called the Islamic State commander to tell him about some slaves who had rushed to him out of the d
arkness to ask for his help.

  Families in Iraq and Syria led normal lives while we were tortured and raped. They watched us walk through the streets with our captors and gathered on the streets to witness executions. I don’t know how each individual was feeling. After the liberation of Mosul began in late 2016, families talked about the hardship of living under ISIS, how brutal the terrorists were, and how frightening it was to hear the war planes overhead, knowing they could bomb their homes. They couldn’t find enough food to eat, and their electricity was cut off. Their kids had to go to Islamic State schools, their boys had to fight, and everything they did involved a fine and a tax. People were killed in the streets, they said. It was no way to live.

  But when I was in Mosul, life seemed normal, even good, for the people there. Why did they stay in the first place? Did they agree with ISIS and consider the idea of their caliphate a good thing? Did it seem like a natural continuation of the sectarian wars they had been fighting since the Americans came in 2003? If life had continued to get better, as ISIS had promised them it would, would they have let the terrorists kill whomever they wanted?

  I try to have compassion for these families. I’m sure many of them were terrified, and eventually even those who welcomed ISIS at the beginning would come to hate them and say, after Mosul was liberated, that they had no choice but to let the terrorists do what they wanted. But I think they did have a choice. Had they gathered together, pooled their weapons, and stormed the Islamic State center where militants were selling girls or giving them as gifts, it’s possible we all would have died. But it would at least have sent the message to ISIS, Yazidis, and the rest of the world that not all Sunnis who stayed in their homes supported terrorism. Maybe if some people in Mosul had gone into the streets and shouted, “I am a Muslim, and what you are demanding of us is not true Islam!” the Iraqi forces and the Americans would have gone in earlier, with help from the people living there, or smugglers working to free Yazidi girls could have expanded their networks and gotten us out by the handfuls instead of one at a time like a dripping faucet. But instead they let us scream in the slave market and did nothing.

  After I arrived at Nasser’s family’s house, they told me that they had started thinking about their own role in ISIS. They said they felt guilty that it had taken me showing up on their doorstep, desperate and begging, for them to help a sabiyya; they knew that their survival, and the fact that they had not been displaced, was in some way a collusion with the terrorists. I didn’t know how they would have felt about ISIS if life had gotten better, not worse, when the militants took over Mosul. They told me they were changed forever. “We swear that after you leave, we will help more girls like you,” they said.

  “There are so many others who need you,” I told them.

  Chapter 4

  We waited a few days before Nasser and I made the trip. I was comfortable being in the house, but I desperately wanted out of Mosul. ISIS was everywhere, and I was sure that they were looking for me. I could imagine Hajji Salman, his skinny frame shaking in anger and his soft, menacing voice threatening me with torture. I couldn’t be in the same city as that kind of man. One morning in Mina’s house, I woke up covered in tiny red stinging ants and took it as a sign. I wouldn’t feel an ounce of real safety until we passed through the first checkpoint, and I knew there was a chance we wouldn’t make it at all.

  A few days after I arrived at Mina’s, Nasser’s mother and father came to the house early in the morning. “It’s time to go,” Hisham said. I put on Kathrine’s pink and brown dress and, just before I was to leave, covered it with a black abaya.

  “I will read a prayer,” Maha said to me. She said it kindly, and so I agreed, listening as she spoke the words. Then she gave me a ring. “You said that Daesh took your mother’s ring,” she said. “Please take this one instead.”

  My bag was packed with all the extra things the family had bought for me, as well as the things I still had from Kocho. At the last minute, I took out Dimal’s beautiful long yellow dress and gave it to Mina. Kissing her on both cheeks, I thanked her for taking me in. “You will look beautiful in this dress,” I said, handing it to her. “It belonged to my sister Dimal.”

  “Thank you, Nadia,” she said. “Insha’allah you will make it to Kurdistan.” I couldn’t watch while the family, and his wife, said goodbye to Nasser.

  Before we left the house, Nasser gave me one of the two cell phones he had brought with him. “If you need anything or if you have a question while we are in the taxi, text me,” he said. “Don’t talk.”

  “I throw up when I ride in cars for too long,” I warned him, and he picked up a few plastic grocery bags from the kitchen and handed them to me. “Use these. I don’t want to have to stop.

  “At the checkpoints, don’t act afraid,” he continued. “Try to be calm. I will answer most of the questions. If they turn to you, answer them briefly and keep your voice low. If they believe that you are my wife, they won’t ask you to talk very much.”

  I nodded. “I’ll do my best,” I said. Already I felt like I might faint from fear. Nasser seemed calm; he never acted afraid of anything.

  At around eight-thirty in the morning, we started walking together to the main road. There we would hail a taxi to take us to the Mosul garage, where another taxi that Nasser had hired in advance was waiting to take us all the way to Kirkuk. Nasser stayed a bit ahead of me on the sidewalk, and we didn’t talk. I kept my head down, trying not to look at the people we passed, sure that the fear in my eyes would tell them immediately that I was Yazidi.

  It was a hot day. Mina’s neighbors watered their lawns, trying to revive the dead plants, while their kids raced up and down the streets on brightly colored plastic bicycles. The noise startled me. After being inside so long, the bright streets felt threatening, wide open and full of danger. All the hope I had tried to gather while waiting at Mina’s disappeared. I was sure that ISIS would catch up to us, and that I would go back to being a sabiyya. “It’s okay,” Nasser whispered to me as we stood on the sidewalk of the main road, waiting for a taxi to appear. He could tell I was frightened. Cars sped by, covering the front of my black abaya with a fine yellow dust. I was shaking so much that by the time we got a taxi, it was hard for me to maneuver my body inside it.

  Every scenario that ran through my head led to our capture. I saw our taxi breaking down on the side of the highway and us being picked up by a truck full of militants. Or I saw us driving unknowingly over an IED and dying there on the road. I thought about all the girls I knew from home, family and friends, who were now scattered across Iraq and Syria, and my brothers who had been taken behind the school in Kocho. Who was I even going home to?

  The Mosul garage was crowded with people looking for taxis to take them to other cities in Iraq. Men bartered with drivers over prices, their wives standing silently beside them. Boys hawked icy bottles of water, and vendors along the edges sold silver bags of chips and candy bars or stood proudly next to elaborate towers of cigarettes. I wondered if any of the women at the garage were Yazidi like me. I hoped they all were, and that the men were like Nasser, helping them. Yellow taxis, marked by small signs on their roofs, parked and idled under signs advertising destinations: Tal Afar, Tikrit, Ramadi. All of them were at least partly under Islamic State control or threatened by the terrorists. So much of my country now belonged to the men who had enslaved and raped me.

  While the taxi driver prepared for our trip, he and Nasser chatted. I sat on a bench slightly away from them, trying to act the part of Nasser’s wife, and I couldn’t hear much of what they were saying. Sweat ran into my eyes, making it hard to see, and I clutched my bag tightly to my lap. The driver was in his late forties. He looked strong even though he wasn’t very big, and he wore a small beard. I had no idea how he felt about ISIS, but I was scared of everyone. While they negotiated, I tried to feel brave, but it was hard to think of any outcome in which I was not recaptured.

  Finally Nasser nodded at me t
o get into the car. He sat beside the driver, and I climbed into the seat behind him, putting my bag down gently beside me. The driver fiddled with the radio as we pulled out of the garage, looking for a station, but everything was static. He sighed and turned it off.

  “It’s a hot day,” he said to Nasser. “Let’s buy some water before we start driving.” Nasser nodded, and a moment later we pulled up beside a kiosk where the driver bought a few bottles of cold water and some crackers. Nasser handed a bottle to me. Water dripped down the sides of it, pooling on the seat beside me. The crackers were too dry to eat; I tried one, just to appear relaxed, and it stuck in my throat like cement.

  “Why are you going to Kirkuk?” the driver asked.

  “My wife’s family is there,” Nasser replied.

  The driver looked at me in his rearview mirror. When I saw his eyes, I turned away, pretending to be mesmerized by the city outside my window. I was sure the fear in my eyes would give me away.

  The street around the garage was full of militants. Islamic State police cars were parked along the sides, and officers strolled along the sidewalks, guns in their belts. There seemed to be more police than people.

  “Will you stay in Kirkuk or come back to Mosul?” the driver asked Nasser.

  “We’re not sure yet,” Nasser said, just as his father had told him. “We’ll see how long it takes to get there, and what it’s like in Kirkuk.”

  Why is he asking so many questions? I thought. I was glad that I wasn’t expected to talk.

  “If you like, I can wait and take you back to Mosul,” the driver told us, and Nasser smiled at him. “Maybe,” he said. “We’ll see.”

  The first checkpoint was inside Mosul, a large, spider-like structure made of high columns holding up a metal roof. Once an Iraqi Army checkpoint, it was now proudly displaying the Islamic State flag, and Islamic State vehicles, also once belonging to the Iraqi Army, were parked in front of a small office. They, too, were covered in black and white flags.