The Last Girl

by Nadia Murad

  “What if Daesh came into this garage right now?” I asked Nasser. “What do you think would happen?”

  “Everyone would be frightened,” he said. I imagined a militant dressed in all black, carrying an automatic rifle into this crowd of distracted, busy people.

  “But who do you think he would try to get first?” I said. “Who would be worth more—me, the escaped sabiyya? Or you, a Sunni who left Mosul and who helped me escape?”

  Nasser laughed. “It sounds like a riddle,” he said.

  “Well, I know the answer,” I said. “He would get both of us. We would both be dead.” And we laughed, just for a moment.

  Chapter 7

  Kurdistan is technically one territory consisting of distinct governorates. Until recently there were only three—Duhok, Erbil, and Sulaymaniyah—but in 2014 the KRG made Halabja, which was the biggest target during the Anfal campaign, a governorate as well.

  In spite of all the talk about an independent Kurdistan and the emphasis on Kurdish identity, the provinces can feel very different from one another and very, very divided. The major political parties—Barzani’s KDP, Talabani’s PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan), the newer Gorran Party, and a coalition of three Islamist parties—split the region’s loyalty, and the division between the KDP and PUK is particularly noticeable. In the mid-1990s, people and peshmerga loyal to the two parties fought a civil war. Kurds don’t like to talk about it because if they have any hope of becoming independent from Iraq, they have to be united, but it was a terrible war and left lasting scars. Some hoped that the fight against ISIS would unify Kurds, but when you travel through the region, you can still feel like you are moving between countries. Both parties have their own peshmerga and their own security and intelligence forces, called asayish.

  Sulaymaniyah, which borders Iran, is the home of the PUK and the Talabani family. It’s considered more liberal than Erbil, which is KDP territory. The PUK areas are influenced by Iran, while the KDP is in an alliance with Turkey. Kurdish politics are very complex. After I was freed and began doing human rights work, I started to see how something like the failure in Sinjar could have happened.

  The first checkpoint on our way to Erbil was manned by peshmerga and asayish loyal to the PUK. After looking at our IDs, they told the taxi driver to pull over to the side and wait.

  We were sharing the taxi with a young man and woman, who may have been a couple. The girl seemed startled when she heard Nasser and I speaking Arabic to each other. “Do you speak Kurdish, too?” she asked me, and when she was satisfied that I did, she seemed to relax. I sat in the back with them, and Nasser took the front. Both of the other passengers were from Kurdistan, and it was clear that we had been pulled over because Nasser and I had IDs from outside the region. The girl sighed impatiently when the officer told the driver to wait, flicking her ID against her hand and looking out the window, trying to see what was taking so long. I glared at her.

  The peshmerga pointed to me and Nasser. “You two, come with us,” he said. “You may as well go,” he told the driver, and we grabbed our things before the taxi took off down the road. As we followed the soldier back to the offices, I suddenly felt scared again. I hadn’t expected to encounter so much trouble once we were inside Kurdistan, but it was clear that, as long as I insisted on pretending to be Sousan from Kirkuk, traveling through Kurdistan was not going to be easy. If they suspected us of being Islamic State sympathizers, or if they simply doubted our connections in Erbil, they could easily turn us away.

  Inside the office, the soldier started asking us questions. “Who are you?” he wanted to know. “Why are you going to Erbil when one ID says Mosul and the other says Kirkuk?” He was particularly suspicious of Nasser, who was the right age to be an Islamic State fighter.

  We were exhausted. All I wanted was to make it to Erbil and see Sabah. I realized that the only way this was going to happen was if I stopped pretending and admitted who I really was. “Enough is enough,” I told Nasser. “I’ll tell them.”

  And then I addressed the soldier in Kurdish.

  “I’m Nadia,” I said. “I’m a Yazidi from Kocho. My ID is a fake. I got it in Mosul, where I was held captive by Daesh.” I pointed to Nasser. “This man helped me escape.”

  The soldier was stunned. He stared at the two of us, and once he had recovered, he said, “You need to tell your story to the asayish. Follow me.”

  He made a phone call and then took us to a building nearby that served as the security headquarters for the asayish, where a group of officers waited for us in a large meeting room. Chairs were arranged for me and Nasser at the head of a large table, and a video camera, set up on the table, pointed to those two chairs. When Nasser saw the camera, he immediately shook his head. “No,” he said to me in Arabic. “I can’t be on film. No one can know what I look like.”

  I turned to the officers. “Nasser has taken a huge risk coming with me, and his whole family are still in Mosul,” I told them. “If anyone knows who he is, he could be hurt, or his family could. Besides, why do you want to tape this? Who will see it?” I was also agitated that the PUK asayish wanted to film the interview—I wasn’t ready to recall my experience in Mosul for an audience.

  “It’s just for our records, and we will blur Nasser’s face anyway,” they said. “We swear on the Koran no one will ever see this but us and our bosses.”

  When it became clear that they wouldn’t let us pass until we told them our story we agreed. “Just as long as you swear that no one will be able to identify Nasser and that only the peshmerga and asayish will see this video,” I said. “Of course, of course,” they said, and we started. The interview lasted hours.

  A high-ranking officer asked the questions. “You are a Yazidi from Kocho?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I am a Yazidi girl from the Kocho village in Sinjar. We were at the village when the peshmerga left. Daesh wrote on our school: ‘This village belongs to Dawlat al-Islamiya.’ ” I explained how we had been forced into the school and the women and girls taken to Solagh and then to Mosul.

  “How long were you in Mosul?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure exactly,” I told him. “We were held in dark rooms and it was hard to know how much time passed in each place.” The asayish knew what had happened in Sinjar, that the Yazidi men had been killed and the girls taken to Mosul and after that distributed across Iraq. But they wanted to know the details of my story—in particular, what exactly had happened to me in captivity and how Nasser had helped me to escape. Nasser whispered to me, in Arabic, to be careful talking about both topics. When it came to his family, he told me, “Don’t say that when you came to the home it was evening and we were sitting outside. Say it was midnight. Otherwise they will think that because we were sitting, just relaxing in our garden, we were with Daesh.” I told him not to worry.

  When it came to the rape, although the PUK officials pressed me for details, I refused to admit that it had happened. My family loved me, but until I saw them, I honestly didn’t know how they, or the Yazidi community in general, would react when I returned if they knew that I was no longer a virgin. I remembered how Hajji Salman would whisper to me, just after he had raped me, that if I escaped, my family would kill me the moment they saw me. “You are ruined,” he said. “No one will marry you, no one will love you. Your family doesn’t want you anymore.” Even Nasser worried about delivering me back to my family, and how they might react when they discovered that I had been raped. “Nadia, they are filming—I don’t trust them,” he whispered to me in the PUK office. “You should wait to see how your family treats you. Maybe they will kill you if they find out.” It was painful to have these doubts about the people who raised you, but Yazidis are conservative, sex before marriage is not allowed, and no one could have predicted this happening to so many Yazidi girls all at once. A situation like this would test any community, no matter how loving and no matter how strong.

  One of the officers gave us a little water a
nd some food. I was anxious to leave. “We are supposed to meet my family in Zakho,” I said. “It’s getting late.”

  “This is a very important case,” they told me. “PUK officials will want to know the details of how you were taken and how you got out.” They were particularly interested in hearing how the KDP peshmerga had left us. I told them about that and about how militants came to the slave market, choosing the most beautiful girls first, but when it came to my captivity I lied.

  “Who took you?” the interviewer asked.

  “One enormous guy chose me and said you are going to be mine,” I said, shaking just thinking about Salwan. “I said no. I stayed in the center until one day I saw there were no guards and I was able to run away.”

  Then it was Nasser’s turn to talk.

  “It was around twelve-thirty or one o’clock in the morning when we heard knocking on the door,” he said. He slouched a little in his seat and in his striped T-shirt looked younger than he was. “We were so afraid it was Daesh and they would have weapons.” He described me, a scared girl, and how they made me an ID and he pretended to be my husband to get me out of Mosul.

  The PUK peshmerga and asayish were very happy with Nasser. They thanked him and treated him like a hero, asking him what life was like under ISIS and declaring, “Our peshmerga will fight the terrorists until they are all gone from Iraq.” They were proud that Kurdistan was a safe haven for people fleeing Mosul, and they were happy to remind us that it was not forces loyal to the PUK who had abandoned Sinjar.

  “There are thousands of girls like Nadia in Mosul,” Nasser told them. “Nadia was one of them and I brought her here.” It was close to four in the afternoon by the time we finished the interview.

  “Where are you planning to go now?” the officer asked.

  “To the camp near Duhok,” I said. “But first to see my nephew in Erbil.”

  “Who is in Duhok?” the officer asked. “We don’t want to let you go into a dangerous situation.”

  I gave him the number of Walid, my half brother who had joined the peshmerga after the massacres, along with many other Yazidi men, eager to fight and desperate for a salary. I figured they would trust a fellow soldier, but it only made the PUK officer more wary. “Walid is a KDP peshmerga?” the officer asked, after he hung up the phone. “If he is, you shouldn’t be going with him,” he replied. “You know, they left you unprotected.”

  I didn’t say anything. Already, even without knowing a lot about Kurdish politics, I sensed that it wouldn’t be smart to take sides. “You should have talked about that more in the interview,” the officer said. “The world should know that the KDP peshmerga left you to die.

  “I can help you if you stay,” he continued. “Do you even have enough money to go home?”

  We argued for a moment, the officer insisting I would be safer in PUK territory and me telling him that I needed to go. Eventually he saw that there was no way to convince me. “I want to be with my family, KDP or not,” I said. “I haven’t seen them for weeks.”

  “Fine,” he said at last, and handed Nasser a piece of paper. “Take this with you the rest of the way. Don’t use your IDs at checkpoints—use this. They will let you pass.”

  They hired a taxi to take us the rest of the way to Erbil, paying him in advance, and thanked us for staying so long. Nasser and I didn’t say anything when we got in the taxi, but I could tell he was just as relieved as I was to be past the checkpoint.

  At every checkpoint after that, we showed the paper and were immediately let through. I slouched down into the seat, wanting to sleep a little bit before we met Sabah in Erbil. The landscape at this point was greener than before, and the farms and pastures were well kept because they hadn’t been abandoned. Small farming villages, similar to Kocho with their mud brick homes and tractors, gave way to larger towns, which gave way to cities, some of which had grand-looking buildings and mosques, bigger than anything in Sinjar. It felt safe in the taxi. Even the air, when I opened the window, was cooler and more refreshing.

  It wasn’t long before Nasser’s phone buzzed. “It’s Sabah,” he told me, and then he cursed. “He has seen our interview! They shared it after all.”

  Sabah called, and Nasser handed the phone to me. My nephew was furious. “Why did you do this interview?” he asked me. “You should have waited.”

  “They said they weren’t going to share it,” I told him. “They promised.” I felt sick with anger, worrying that I had exposed Nasser and his family to ISIS and that right at that moment militants were knocking on Hisham and Mina’s doors, ready to punish them. Nasser knew a lot of Islamic State militants, and they knew him as well. Even with his face blurred (at least the PUK asayish had kept that promise), they might be able to identify him. I couldn’t believe that my story, which until that moment was something so private that only a few people I trusted knew, was now on the news. I was so afraid.

  “This is the life of Nasser’s family, and ours!” Sabah went on. “Why would they do that!”

  I froze in my seat, close to sobbing. I didn’t know what to say. The video seemed like the ultimate betrayal of Nasser, and I hated the PUK asayish for giving it to the news, no doubt to make themselves look better than the KDP, who they insisted had abandoned the Yazidis. “I wish I was dead in Mosul rather than here with this video public,” I told him, and I meant it. The PUK had used us.

  That video haunted me for a long time. My brothers were angry that I had put my face out there and identified our family, and Nasser was worried about his safety. Hezni said, “How horrible it will be for us to have to call Hisham and tell him that because he helped you, his son is dead.” They were angry that I had criticized the KDP peshmerga on camera. After all, the refugee camps for Yazidis were being set up in KDP territory; we were dependent on them again. I was quickly learning that my story, which I still thought of as a personal tragedy, could be someone else’s political tool, particularly in a place like Iraq. I would have to be careful what I said, because words mean different things to different people, and your story can easily become a weapon to be turned on you.

  Chapter 8

  The PUK papers stopped working at the checkpoint outside Erbil. That checkpoint was big, with lines of cars separated by concrete blast walls in case of suicide bombers and decorated with photos of Masoud Barzani. This time neither of us was surprised when a peshmerga ordered us out of the taxi, and we followed him to his supervisor’s office, which was just one small room. At the end of the room, the commander sat behind a wooden desk. There was no camera and no crowd, but before we started, I called Sabah, who had been texting asking what was taking so long, to give him directions to the checkpoint. We didn’t know how long the interview would last.

  The commander asked the same questions as the PUK security, and I answered them all, once again leaving out the rape and any details about Nasser’s family. This time I was also careful not to say anything bad about the KDP peshmerga. He wrote down everything I said, and when we finished, he smiled and stood up.

  “What you’ve done will not be forgotten,” he told Nasser, kissing him on both cheeks. “Allah loves what you have done.”

  Nasser’s expression never changed. “I didn’t do this alone. My whole family risked their lives to get us to Kurdistan,” he said. “Anyone who had a bit of human kindness in them would have done the same thing.”

  They confiscated my fake Mosul ID, but Nasser kept his. Then the door opened, and Sabah walked in.

  So many of the men in my family were fighters—my father and the trail of heroic stories he left behind after his death; Jalo fighting alongside the Americans in Tal Afar; Saeed, who had been eager to prove his bravery since he was a little boy, dragging himself out of the mass grave with bullets in his legs and arm. Sabah, though, was a student and only two years older than me. He worked at the hotel in Erbil because he wanted to make enough money to one day go to university and get a good job and have a better life than as a farmer or a shepherd.
Before ISIS came to Sinjar, that was how he fought.

  The genocide changed everyone. Hezni dedicated his life to assisting smugglers in freeing sabaya. Saeed lived in the nightmare of the day he survived and became obsessed with fighting. Saoud passed his days in the monotony of the refugee camp, trying to cope with his survivor’s guilt. Malik, poor Malik, who was just a young boy when the genocide started, had become a terrorist, sacrificing his whole life and even his love for his mother to ISIS.

  Sabah, who never wanted to be a soldier or a police officer, left the hotel in Erbil and his school and went to Mount Sinjar to fight. He had always been shy and slow to show his feelings, but now that was coupled with a kind of manliness that hadn’t been there before. When I hugged him at the checkpoint and started weeping, he told me to be calm. “There are officers here, Nadia. We shouldn’t cry in front of them,” he said. “You’ve seen so much, and you are safe now. You shouldn’t cry.” He had grown years in weeks; I supposed we all had.

  I tried to collect myself. “Which one is Nasser?” Sabah asked, and I pointed to him. They shook hands. “We should go to the hotel,” Sabah said. “There are some other Yazidis staying there. Nasser, you’ll stay with me, and Nadia, you can stay with some women in another room.”

  We drove a short distance from the checkpoint to the center of the city. Erbil is shaped like a big, uneven circle, with the roads and houses spreading out from an ancient citadel that some archaeologists say is the oldest continuously inhabited place in the world. Its high, sand-colored walls can be seen from much of the city, and they contrast with the rest of Erbil, which is new and modern. Erbil’s roads are crowded with white SUVs, driving fast with few rules to slow them down, and malls and hotels line the streets, new ones always in the process of being built. When we arrived, a lot of those construction sites had been turned into makeshift refugee camps while the KRG figured out how to deal with the huge number of Iraqis and Syrians fleeing to the region.