by Nadia Murad
Because Kirkuk is not officially part of the autonomous Kurdish region and has a large Arab population, it is normally somewhat easier for non-Kurds to pass through its checkpoints than, say, the checkpoint into Erbil. Sunni Arab students go through once a week or every day to go to school in the city, and families go to shop or visit relatives. Kirkuk is very diverse—Turkmen and Christians live alongside Arabs and Kurds—and that has long been its charm and its curse.
After ISIS came to Iraq, the peshmerga raced to Kirkuk to secure the city, and its valuable oil fields, from the terrorists. They were the only military force in Iraq that was capable of protecting Kirkuk from the terrorists, but some people living there complained that they were like occupiers in their insistence that the city was Kurdish, not Arab or Turkmen. We didn’t know whether it also meant that it would be harder for Nasser to pass through the checkpoint. Since we were coming from the Islamic State’s capital in Iraq, they would be suspicious of our explanation that we were going to visit my family, and they might not let us in unless I admitted to being an escaped Yazidi sabiyya. I wasn’t willing to do that, though, at least not yet.
Since the massacres in Sinjar, Yazidis had been welcomed into Kurdistan, where the government helped establish camps for the displaced. Some Yazidis were suspicious about the KRG’s motives. “The Kurds want us to forgive them for abandoning us,” those Yazidis said. “It’s just about the bad press. The world watched Yazidis stranded on the mountain, and the KRG wants them to forget what they saw.” Others thought that the KRG wanted to resettle Yazidis inside of Kurdistan rather than help them retake Sinjar, so that our numbers might strengthen their bid for independence from Iraq.
Whatever their motives, Yazidis needed the Kurdish government now. KRG camps were being built specifically for Yazidis near Duhok, and the KDP had established an office devoted to helping free Yazidi sabaya like me. Slowly the KRG was trying to repair its relationship with Yazidis and reestablish our trust in them, hoping that we would once again call ourselves Kurds and want to be a part of Kurdistan. But on that day I was not ready to forgive them. I didn’t want them to think that, by letting me in, they were saving me when they could have kept my family from being torn apart before ISIS came to Sinjar.
Nasser turned to me. “Nadia,” he said, “you can go and tell them you are Yazidi. Tell them who you are, and who I am. Speak to them in Kurdish.” He knew that I would be let in instantly if I told them who I really was.
I shook my head. “No,” I said. I felt angry seeing the peshmerga in their uniforms, carrying out their work at the Kirkuk checkpoint. They hadn’t left Kirkuk, so why had they left us?
“Do you know how many of those men abandoned us in Sinjar?” I asked Nasser. I thought about all those Yazidis who had felt scared with ISIS nearby and had tried to cross into Kurdistan but were turned away. “Don’t worry!” they were told at the KRG checkpoints. “The peshmerga will protect you, it’s better for you to stay home.” If they weren’t going to fight to defend us, they should have let us into Kurdistan. Because of them, thousands of people were killed, kidnapped, and displaced.
“I won’t tell them I’m Yazidi, and I won’t speak Kurdish,” I told him. “It won’t change anything.”
“You have to relax,” Nasser said. “You need them now. Be practical.”
“There’s no way!” I said, almost shouting. “I’m not going to do anything that lets them know I need them.” After that, Nasser didn’t say anything more about it.
At the checkpoint, the soldier examined our IDs and looked us over. I didn’t say a word to them and still spoke to Nasser in Arabic. “Open your bag,” the soldier said, and Nasser took it from me and opened it for the peshmerga. They spent a lot of time rummaging through my things, lifting up the dresses and examining the bottles of shampoo and conditioner. I was relieved that they didn’t look inside the box of maxi pads, where I still had the jewelry carefully hidden away.
“Where are you going?” they asked us.
“We are staying in Kirkuk,” Nasser said. “With my wife’s family.”
“Who is taking you there?” they asked.
“A taxi,” Nasser said. “We’ll find one on the other side of the checkpoint.”
“Okay,” he said, pointing to a large crowd of people standing in a loose crowd by the small checkpoint offices. “Go stand over there and wait.”
We stood with the others in the hot sun, waiting for the peshmerga to let us into Kirkuk. Whole families huddled together, carrying huge suitcases and clear plastic bags full of blankets. Old people sat on their things, the women fanning their faces and groaning quietly about the heat. Cars were piled so high with furniture and mattresses that they looked like they might collapse from the weight. I saw a young boy carrying a soccer ball and an old man with a yellow bird in a cage as though those things were the most important things in the world. We were all from different places, of different ages and different religions, but waiting together, unsure and scared, at the Kirkuk checkpoint, we were all the same. We wanted the same things—safety, security, to find our families—and we were running from the same terrorists. This is what it means to be Iraqi under ISIS, I thought. We are homeless. Living at checkpoints until we live at refugee camps.
Finally a soldier called us over. I spoke to him in Arabic. “I’m from Kirkuk, but I live in Mosul now, with my husband,” I said, gesturing to Nasser. “We are going to see my family.”
“What are you taking with you?” they asked.
“Just some clothes for the week,” I said. “Some shampoo, some personal things…” My voice trailed off, and my heart was beating fast. If they turned us away, I didn’t know what we would do. Nasser might have to go back to Mosul. We looked at each other nervously.
“Are you carrying any weapons?” they asked Nasser. He said no, but they searched him anyway. Next they scrolled through his phone, looking for photos or videos that might suggest he was with ISIS. They left me alone and didn’t ask to look at the phone Nasser had given me.
After a while, the soldier handed us our things back and shook his head. “Sorry, we can’t let you in,” he said. He wasn’t cruel, but he was very efficient. “Every visitor to Kurdistan needs to have someone sponsor them. Otherwise we don’t know who you are, really.”
“We have to call my father’s friend in Sinjar,” Nasser said to me when the soldier had left. “He has connections and he can tell them that we should be let in. They will listen to him.”
“Fine,” I said. “Just as long as he doesn’t tell them that I am Yazidi and that you are helping me escape.”
Nasser made the call and handed the phone to the soldier, who spoke into it briefly. He looked surprised and a little annoyed. “You should have just called him from the beginning,” he told us, giving Nasser back the phone. “You can go.”
On the other side, I immediately took off my niqab. The evening breeze felt good on my face, and I smiled. “What, you didn’t like wearing it?” Nasser teased, smiling back at me.
Chapter 6
When the taxi driver, a bubbly Kurdish man in his midforties, asked us where we wanted to go, Nasser and I looked at each other blankly. “Take us to Kurdistan,” Nasser said, and the driver laughed. “You are in Kurdistan!” he replied, then tried again. “What city do you want to go to? Erbil? Sulaymaniyah?”
Nasser and I laughed. Neither of us knew the geography of Kurdistan. “Which is closest?” Nasser asked him.
“Sulaymaniyah,” the driver answered.
“Sulaymaniyah, then,” we said. We were exhausted and relieved, and as we settled in for the drive, we forgot to call Sabah, my nephew, as Hezni had told us to.
It was getting dark. From the ring road, all I could see of Kirkuk was the glow of the houses and streetlights from afar. When I was younger, we watched Kurds celebrate Newroz, their New Year, on TV, dancing in huge groups around bonfires and grilling piles of meat on the sides of green mountains. I would say somewhat bitterly, “Look at
how great life is in Kurdistan, while we are living in these poor villages,” and my mother would scold me. “They deserve good lives, Nadia,” she would say. “They went through a genocide under Saddam, you know.”
I was a stranger in Kurdistan. I didn’t know what the towns were called or what the people who lived there were like. I had no friends in Kirkuk or Sulaymaniyah, and even though Sabah worked in a hotel in Erbil and Saoud had worked on construction sites near Duhok, they were more like the Bangladeshi or Indian laborers who came to Kurdistan for a paycheck, and they hadn’t made Erbil or Duhok their home. Maybe I was a stranger in all of Iraq. I could never go back to Mosul, where I had been tortured. I had never been to Baghdad or Tikrit or Najaf. I had never seen the great museums or ancient ruins. In all of Iraq, all I really knew was Kocho, and now that belonged to ISIS.
Our driver was a proud Kurd, pointing out sites along the way in a happy mixture of Kurdish and Arabic and trying to strike up a conversation with Nasser about life in Mosul. “The whole city is taken over by Daesh?” he asked, shaking his head.
“Yes,” Nasser replied. “A lot of people want to get out, but it’s hard.”
“The peshmerga will run them out of Iraq!” our driver declared. Nasser said nothing.
I was more relaxed in the taxi. There was a chance that Nasser would get interrogated at the next checkpoint, which separated the disputed territory from true Kurdistan, but we had Hisham’s friend from Sinjar on our side. Clearly, he had some authority. At least I was no longer looking over my shoulder for Islamic State cars and worrying that the people around me were secretly terrorists.
“See those buildings, close to the mountains?” the driver asked us, pointing his thin fingers at Nasser’s window. To our right, massive housing developments were being built in the shadows of Iraq’s eastern mountains. Huge billboards proudly advertised the project, with mock-ups of the finished neighborhood. “When they’re finished, they will look like American apartment buildings,” our driver said. “Very new, very beautiful. Wonderful things are happening in Kurdistan.”
“What is your wife’s name?” the driver asked, looking at me in his rearview mirror.
“Sousan,” Nasser replied, still using the name on my ID.
“Sousan!” the driver said. “What a pretty name. I’ll call you Su Su,” he said, smiling at me. After that, whenever he pointed something out, he made sure he had my attention. “Su Su! Do you see that lake out there? It’s so beautiful in the springtime,” or “Su Su, that town we just passed? That place has the best ice cream you have ever tasted.”
I remember that drive and wonder if Sinjar could ever do what Kurdistan had, recover from genocide to become even better than it was before. I longed to believe it could, but I had to admit it seemed unlikely. Sinjar is not like Kurdistan, where the population is almost all Kurdish and where the enemy, Saddam’s army, came from the outside. In Sinjar, Yazidis and Arabs all live together. We rely on one another for trade, and we pass through one another’s towns. We tried to be friends, but our enemy built itself up inside Sinjar, like a disease aimed at killing anything it came into contact with. Even if the Americans and others helped us the way they did after Saddam attacked the Kurds—Yazidis couldn’t offer them much in return, so they probably wouldn’t—how could we go back to our old lives and live among Arabs again?
“Su Su!” The driver was trying to get my attention again. “Do you like to picnic?” I nodded my head. “Of course you do! Well, you should come here, to the mountains outside Sulaymaniyah for a picnic. You won’t believe how beautiful it is in the springtime.” I nodded again.
Later Nasser and I would laugh at the driver and the nickname he’d given me. “We didn’t let Daesh take you,” Nasser said. “But if we’d stayed longer with him, he wouldn’t have let you go.”
We arrived in Sulaymaniyah at close to four in the morning, when everything, including the garage where we would need to get a taxi to Erbil, was closed. As we neared the checkpoint, the driver told us not to worry. “I know these guys,” he said, and sure enough, after a few words in Kurdish, they waved us through.
“Where should I take you?” the driver asked, but we shook our heads.
“Just take us close to the garage,” Nasser said.
“It’s closed now,” the driver replied. He was kind, and he worried for us.
“That’s fine,” Nasser said. “We will wait.”
The driver pulled over, and Nasser paid him. “Su Su, good luck!” he said, and drove away.
We sat down outside a supermarket near the garage and leaned against the wall. The street was empty, and the whole city was quiet. Tall buildings, their windows dark, loomed over us. One of them was shaped like a sail and lit up bright blue; I later learned it was modeled after a building in Dubai. A soothing breeze blew over us, and the sight of the mountains, which encircle Sulaymaniyah like a necklace, was familiar and comforting. I needed to find a restroom, but I was too shy to tell Nasser, and so we just sat there, exhausted, waiting for the shops to open so we could eat something.
“You’ve never been here before?” Nasser asked.
“No,” I said. “But I knew that it was a beautiful place.” I told him about the Newroz celebrations I had watched on TV, but I didn’t bring up Saddam or Anfal. “There is a lot of water here, and things stay green much longer,” I told him. “There are parks with games and rides for kids. Iranians cross the border just to walk around in the park. And the mountains remind me of home.”
“Where will we go tomorrow?” I asked Nasser.
“We’ll get a taxi to Erbil,” he said. “And meet your nephew at his hotel. Then you will go to Zakho to be with Hezni.”
“Without you?” I asked, and he nodded. I felt sorry for him. “I wish your family could come to Kurdistan. I wish you didn’t have to live under Daesh.”
“I don’t know how that could happen,” Nasser said. “Maybe one day.” He seemed very sad.
My body ached from sitting in cars for so long, and so did my feet from the walk to the first Kurdish checkpoint. Eventually we both fell asleep, but not for long. An hour or two later the sound of morning traffic and the soft light of the dawn sun woke us up. Nasser turned to me. He was happy that I had slept. “The sun rose on you without fear this morning,” he said.
“It’s a morning without fear,” I replied. “It’s beautiful here.”
Our stomachs were empty. “Let’s get something to eat,” Nasser suggested, and we walked a short distance to a shop where we bought sandwiches made of eggs and fried eggplant. They were not very good, but I was so hungry I ate my sandwich quickly. I no longer felt like I might throw up.
In the restaurant bathroom, I took off my abaya and Kathrine’s dress, which both smelled terrible from sweat, and swiped some wet towels underneath my armpits and across my neck. Then I changed into a pair of pants and a shirt from my bag. I was careful not to look in the mirror. I hadn’t seen my reflection since that morning in Hamdaniya, and I was scared to see how I might look. Folding up Kathrine’s dress, I carefully put it back inside. I’ll keep it until she is free, and then I’ll give it back to her, I thought. I got ready to throw my abaya into the garbage, but stopped at the last moment, deciding to keep it as evidence of what ISIS had done to me.
Outside, the streets started to fill with people on their way to work and school. Cars honked as the traffic thickened, and stores pulled up metal grates and opened their doors. Sunlight reflected off the sail-shaped skyscraper, which I could see now was covered in a bluish glass and had a round observatory on the top. Every bit of life made the city look more beautiful. No one looked at us, and I didn’t fear anyone.
We called Sabah. “I’ll come to Sulaymaniyah to get you,” he offered, but Nasser and I said no. “There’s no need,” I said. “We’ll come to you.”
At first Nasser wanted me to go to Erbil alone. “You don’t need me anymore,” he said, but I argued with him until he agreed to come along. My old stubbornn
ess was back, and I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to him yet. “We will come to Erbil together,” I told Sabah. “I want you to meet the man who helped me escape.”
The Sulaymaniyah garage was busy that morning while we waited for a taxi to take us to Erbil. Already four drivers had turned us down. They didn’t tell us why, but we suspected it was because we had come from Mosul and because Nasser was an Arab. One by one the drivers would ask for our IDs and look them over, glancing at us, then back at the IDs, then back at us. “You want to go to Erbil?” they would ask, and we nodded.
“Why?” they wanted to know.
“To see family,” we told them, but they just sighed and handed us our IDs back. “Sorry,” they said. “I’m booked. Try someone else.”
“They’re scared because we are from Mosul,” Nasser said.
“Who can blame them?” I said. “They are scared of Daesh.”
“You still won’t speak Kurdish?” Nasser asked, and I shook my head no. I wasn’t ready to show them who I really was. We weren’t in real trouble yet.
We sat there in silence as the sun got hotter, becoming more worried about finding a driver who would take us to Erbil. Finally a driver agreed, but since we were the first passengers, we would have to wait until he filled up his car. “Sit over there,” he said, pointing to the sidewalk, where a large crowd had already gathered in small bits of shade, waiting for their drivers to tell them they were ready.
As the garage filled, I scanned the crowds. No one looked at us. I wasn’t scared anymore, but I didn’t have the feeling of relief I thought I would have. All I could think about was what life would be like when I finally made it to Zakho. So much of my family was dead or missing, and I wasn’t going home, I was going back to all the holes left by the people I lost. I felt happy and empty at the same time, and I was grateful that Nasser was there to talk to.