The Last Girl

by Nadia Murad

  Four militants were on duty when we pulled up, working out of small white booths where they could take breaks from the heat and fill out paperwork. ISIS was intent on controlling all the traffic in and out of Mosul. Not only did they make sure that no anti-ISIS fighters or smugglers came into the city, they also wanted to know who left, why, and for how long. If they defected, ISIS could punish their families. At the very least, the militants could try to extort money out of them.

  Only a few cars were in line ahead of us, and we quickly approached one of the guards. I started shaking uncontrollably and felt tears come out of my eyes. The more I willed myself to be calm, the more I shook and I thought for sure it would give me away. Maybe I should run, I thought, and as we slowed down, I put one of my hands on the door handle, preparing to jump out of the car if I needed to. Of course, it wasn’t really an option. There was nowhere for me to go. On one side of the car, the hot plain stretched into nowhere, and on the other side and behind us was the city I was so desperate to flee. Militants watched every inch of Mosul, and they would have no trouble catching up with a sabiyya escaping on foot. I prayed to God not to be captured.

  Sensing I was scared and without being able to talk to me, Nasser glanced at me in the side mirror. He smiled just for an instant, to calm me down, the way Khairy or my mother would have back in Kocho. Nothing could have stopped my heart from racing, but at least I was no longer imagining myself jumping from the car.

  We stopped beside one of the guard booths, and I watched as the door opened and a militant in full Islamic State uniform stepped out. He looked like the guys who had come to the Islamic State center to buy us, and I started shaking again in fear. The driver rolled down his window, and the militant leaned down. He looked at the driver, then over at Nasser, and then he glanced at me and the bag next to me. “Salam alakum,” he said. “Where are you going?”

  “Kirkuk, hajji,” Nasser said, and passed our IDs through the window. “My wife is from Kirkuk.” His voice didn’t waver.

  The militant took the IDs. Through the open door to the guard booth, I saw a chair and a small desk with a few papers and the militant’s radio sitting on top of it. A small fan whirred softly on the corner of the desk, and a nearly empty bottle of water teetered close to the edge. Then I saw it. Hanging on the wall, with three others, was the photo that had been taken of me in the Mosul courthouse, the day Hajji Salman forced me to convert. Below it, there was some writing. I was too far away to read what it said, but I guessed it listed my information and what to do if I was caught. I gasped softly and quickly scanned the other three photos. Two of them I couldn’t see because of the sun’s glare, and the other was of a girl I didn’t recognize. She looked very young, and like me, her fear registered on her face. I looked away, not wanting the militant to notice that I was staring at the photos, which would certainly have made him suspicious.

  “Who are you going to see in Kirkuk?” the guard was still questioning Nasser and had barely paid attention to me.

  “My wife’s family,” Nasser said.

  “For how long?”

  “My wife will stay for a week, but I will return today,” he said, just as we had rehearsed it. He didn’t sound scared at all.

  I wondered if Nasser could see my photo hanging in the guard post from where he was sitting. I thought for sure if he could, he would make us turn back. Seeing my photo confirmed that they were actively looking for me, but Nasser just continued answering questions.

  The guard circled the car to my side, then motioned for me to roll down my window. I did so, all the while feeling like I might faint from fear. I remembered Nasser’s advice to stay calm and answer his questions as quietly and as briefly as possible. My Arabic was perfect, and I had been speaking it from a young age, but I didn’t know if there was something in my accent or choice of words that would give me away as being from Sinjar, not Kirkuk. Iraq is a big country, and you can usually tell where someone grew up based on the way they talk. I had no idea how someone from Kirkuk was supposed to sound.

  He leaned down and looked through the window at me. I was grateful that my niqab covered my face, and I tried to control my eyes, not to blink too much or too little, and certainly, under no circumstances, to cry. Underneath my abaya, I was soaked in sweat and still shaking from fear, but the image of me in the guard’s glasses was of a normal Muslim woman. I sat up and prepared to answer his questions.

  They were brief. “Who are you?” His voice was level—he sounded bored.

  “I am Nasser’s wife,” I said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Kirkuk.”

  “Why?”

  “My family is in Kirkuk.” I spoke softly and looked down, hoping my fear would come across as modesty and my answers didn’t seem rehearsed.

  The guard straightened up and walked away.

  Finally he asked the driver, “Where are you from?”

  “Mosul,” the driver said, sounding as though he had answered this question a million times.

  “Where do you work?”

  “Wherever there’s a fare!” the driver answered, chuckling. Then without another word, the guard handed our IDs back through the window and waved us through.

  We drove over a long bridge, none of us speaking. Beneath us, the Tigris River shimmered in the sun. Reeds and plants hugged the water; the closer they could get, the more likely they were to live. Away from the bank, the plants were less lucky. They were singed by the Iraqi summer sun, and only a few, carefully watered by the people living there or catching some moisture from a rainfall, would sprout again in the spring.

  Once we were on the other side, the driver spoke up. “You know, that bridge we just crossed is covered with IEDs,” he said, “bombs planted by Daesh in case the Iraqis or the Americans try to retake Mosul. I hate driving over it. I feel like it could explode at any moment.”

  I turned around to look. Both the bridge and the checkpoint were retreating in the distance. We had made it past both of them alive, but it could have gone very differently. The Islamic State militant at the checkpoint could have asked me more questions—he could have heard something in my accent or noticed something in my demeanor that made him suspicious. “Get out of the car,” I imagined him saying, and I would have had no choice but to do what he asked, following him into the guard booth, where he would have commanded me to lift up my niqab, showing him that I was the woman in the photo. I thought of the bridge exploding while we were on it, the IEDs shattering our car and killing all three of us in an instant. I prayed that when the bridge did explode, it would be full of Islamic State militants.

  Chapter 5

  As we drove away from Mosul, we went by scenes of past battles. Smaller checkpoints that had been abandoned by the Iraqi Army were piles of burned rubble. The wreckage of a huge truck was left like trash on the side of the road. I had seen on TV that militants burned the checkpoints after the army abandoned them, and I couldn’t understand why they would do that. They just wanted to destroy things for no reason. Not even the flocks of sheep walking alongside the road, led by a young shepherd sitting on top of a slow-moving donkey, could make the landscape appear anything close to normal.

  Soon we arrived at another checkpoint. This one was manned by only two Islamic State militants, who seemed far less concerned about who we were and where we were going. They ran through the same questions more quickly. Again I could see through the door into the guard booth, but I didn’t see any photos hanging inside. They waved us through after only a few minutes.

  The road from Mosul to Kirkuk is long and winds through the countryside. Some of it is wide while parts are narrow and two lanes of traffic pass each other head-on. These roads are notorious for accidents. Cars try to speed past huge slow trucks, flashing their lights at oncoming traffic, forcing them to drive onto the shoulder to let them pass. Trucks full of building material spill gravel along the way, chipping cars and windshields, and in places the roads are so uneven, you feel like you
are driving off a cliff.

  Iraqi cities are connected by a series of these kinds of roads, some more dangerous than others, and they are always crowded. When ISIS came, they were strategic about controlling the roads even before they took the cities, cutting off traffic and isolating people who would otherwise flee. Then they set up checkpoints, making it easy to catch anyone trying to leave. In much of Iraq, the paved highways are the only option for a citizen on the run. In the open plains and deserts, there are few places for people to hide. If the cities and towns are the vital organs of Iraq, the roads are the veins and arteries, and as soon as ISIS controlled them, they controlled who lived or died.

  For a while I watched the landscape, which was a dry and desert-like flat plain of sand and rock, so unlike the parts of Sinjar I loved the most, where in springtime everything was covered with grass and flowers. I felt like I was in a foreign country, and in some ways, I guess I was—we weren’t out of Islamic State territory yet. As I watched more closely, though, I noticed that the landscape wasn’t monotonous at all. Rocks grew bigger until they became small cliffs and then shrank back into sand. Spiky plants appeared in the sand and sometimes grew into skinny trees. Occasionally I would see the teetering head of an oil pump or a small group of mud brick houses making up a village. I watched until carsickness took over and I could no longer look out the window.

  I felt dizzy and reached for one of the plastic bags Nasser had given me before we left Mina’s house. A moment later I threw up. My stomach had been mostly empty—I had been too nervous to eat breakfast—but the watery vomit filled the taxi with a sour odor that I could tell bothered the driver, who kept his window open until he could no longer tolerate the grit that blew in with the hot air. “Please tell your wife that next time she has to be sick, I can pull over,” the driver told Nasser, not unkindly. “It smells terrible in here.” Nasser nodded.

  A few minutes later I asked him to pull over, and I got out. Cars sped by, creating a strong wind that inflated my abaya around my body like a balloon. I walked as far as I could away from the car—I didn’t want the driver to be able to see my face—and lifted up my niqab. The vomit stung my throat and lips, and the smell of the petrol made me retch even more.

  Nasser came to check on me. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Can we go, or do you need to stay here longer?” I could tell he was worried, both about me and about being stopped on the side of the road. Every once in a while an Islamic State military vehicle passed by, and I was sure that the sight of a vomiting girl, even one dressed in an abaya and niqab, would turn some heads.

  “I’m okay,” I told him, walking slowly back to the taxi. I felt weak and dehydrated. I had sweat through my layers of clothing, and I couldn’t remember the last thing I had eaten. Back in the car, I sat in the middle seat and closed my eyes, hoping I could fall asleep.

  We approached a small town, one built up just on the sides of the road. Stores selling snacks and busy mechanic’s shops opened up directly onto the highway, waiting for customers to pull in. A cafeteria-style restaurant advertised typical Iraqi food like grilled meat and rice with tomato sauce. “Are you hungry?” the driver asked us, and Nasser nodded. He hadn’t eaten breakfast. I didn’t want to stop, but it wasn’t up to me.

  The restaurant was large and clean, with tiled floors and plastic-covered chairs. Families sat beside one another, but collapsible plastic partitions separated the men from the women, which was normal for more conservative parts of Iraq. I sat on one side of the partition while Nasser and the driver went to get food. “If I eat, I’ll just throw up,” I whispered to Nasser, but he insisted. “You’ll get sicker if you don’t eat,” he said, and a minute later he came back with some lentil soup and bread, which he put down on the table in front of me before disappearing behind the partition.

  I lifted my niqab just far enough from my face so that I could eat without getting the fabric dirty. The soup was delicious, made of lentils and onions like I would have in Kocho and spicier than I was used to, but I could only eat a few spoonfuls. I worried about having to stop along the road again if I got sick.

  Because of the partition, I felt like I was alone. A group of women sat at the opposite end of the restaurant, far enough away that I couldn’t hear what they were saying. They were dressed like me and ate slowly, methodically lifting their niqabs to take bites of kebab and bread. Men in long white dishdashas, who I assumed were with them, had taken seats on the other side of the partition from them; I saw them when we came in. They ate without talking, and so did we, and it was so quiet in the restaurant that I thought if I could hear the lift and fall of the women’s veils, it would sound like someone breathing.

  Two Islamic State militants walked toward us in the parking lot when we left. Their truck, one of the beige-painted military vehicles flying an Islamic State flag, was parked near our taxi. One of them had an injured leg, and he walked with a cane, and the other walked slowly beside him so that he could keep up. My heart stopped. Quickly, I dashed over to the other side of Nasser, putting him between me and the militants, but when we passed them, they didn’t give us a second glance.

  Across the street, an Islamic State police car sat with two police officers inside. Were they here for us? Had they dropped off a colleague who was patrolling the street for me and Nasser? At any moment I expected them to notice us coming out of the restaurant and to run toward us, pointing their guns at our heads. Maybe they wouldn’t even bother to ask us questions. Maybe they would kill us right there in the parking lot.

  I was scared of everyone. The men in the restaurant in the white dishdashas—were they ISIS? Were the women who were with them their wives or their sabaya? Did they love ISIS the way Morteja’s mother had? Every person on the street, from the cigarette seller to the mechanic rolling out from underneath a car, was my enemy. The sounds of cars or kids buying candy were as terrifying as if a bomb had gone off. I rushed to get back in the car. I wanted to get to Kirkuk quickly, and I could tell by the way Nasser followed me that he, too, was anxious to go.

  By now it was past noon, and the sun was even hotter. If I looked out the window, I instantly felt nauseous, but if I tried to close my eyes, the darkness behind them swirled and was dizzying. So I stared straight ahead at the back of Nasser’s seat, thinking of nothing but myself and what might happen along the road. My fear was unrelenting. I knew we had more Islamic State checkpoints to go through, and after that the peshmerga. The phone Nasser gave me buzzed, and I saw that I had a text message from him.

  “Your family has been messaging me,” it said. “Sabah will wait for us in Erbil.”

  Sabah, my nephew, had been working in a hotel in the Kurdish capital when ISIS massacred Kocho’s men. We planned on staying with him for a night or two before I made my way to Zakho, where Hezni was waiting. Assuming we made it that far.

  At the third Islamic State checkpoint, they didn’t ask us any questions, not even our names. They just glanced at our IDs and waved us through. Either the system for catching escaped sabaya wasn’t in place yet or the militants were sloppier and less organized than they wanted people to believe.

  From there we drove a little bit in silence. I think we were all tired. Nasser didn’t send me any more text messages, and the driver stopped searching for radio stations and asking Nasser questions. He just looked straight ahead at the road, driving at a steady pace past the fields and pastures of northern Iraq, mopping sweat off his forehead with a handful of paper napkins until they were worn into small wet pieces.

  I felt drained from fear and sickness, and I wondered if Nasser was getting nervous about crossing the Kurdish checkpoints, where the peshmerga were trained to be suspicious of Sunni men trying to enter Kurdistan. I had decided, after my conversation with Hezni, that I wouldn’t leave Nasser in Islamic State territory, even if it meant going back to Mosul. I wanted to tell him not to worry, but I remembered my promise to stay quiet, and I wanted to save text messaging for emergencies, so I said nothing. I hoped a
t that point Nasser knew that I wasn’t the kind of person who would leave friends in danger.

  We arrived at a crossroads with one sign pointing toward Kirkuk, and the driver stopped. “I can’t take you any further,” he said. “You have to walk to the checkpoint from here.” Because he had Mosul license plates, he might be questioned and detained by the peshmerga.

  “I’ll wait here,” he said to Nasser. “If they don’t let you in, come back, and we will go back to Mosul together.”

  Nasser thanked him and paid him, and we collected our things from the car. We started walking in the direction of the checkpoint, the only people on the shoulder of the road. “Are you tired?” Nasser asked me, and I nodded. “I’m very tired,” I said. I felt drained of everything, and I still wasn’t hopeful that we were going to make it all the way. I couldn’t help imagining the worst with every step I took—ISIS picking us up now, as we walked, or the peshmerga detaining Nasser. Kirkuk was a dangerous city, often the site of sectarian fighting even before the war with ISIS, and I imagined us getting through only to be caught in a car bomb or IED. We still had a long journey ahead of us.

  “Let’s just get to the checkpoint and see what happens,” he told me. “Where is your family?” he asked.

  “Zakho,” I told him. “Near Duhok.”

  “How far is that from Kirkuk?” he asked, and I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “Far.” We walked in silence the rest of the way, side by side.

  At the checkpoint, people lined up in cars and on foot to be interviewed by the peshmerga. Since the war with ISIS started, the Kurdistan Regional Government has taken in hundreds of thousands of displaced Iraqis, including a lot of Sunnis from Anbar Province and other Sunni-dominated areas that had become unlivable for anyone not aligned with ISIS. They didn’t make it easy for them to get into Kurdistan, though. Most Sunni Arabs needed to have a Kurd sponsor them if they wanted to pass through the checkpoints, and the process could take a long time.