The Last Girl

by Nadia Murad

  Rojian was the first one after me to escape. She arrived at my aunt’s house at two in the morning, still wearing the abaya given to her by ISIS. Before I could ask her any questions, she said, “What happened to everyone else?” and Hezni had to tell her the details. Telling was a burden. It was horrible to watch Rojian’s face distort when she heard what had happened to our village and our family. The men were confirmed dead, we didn’t know what happened to the older women, and most of the girls taken as sabaya were still with ISIS. After this, Rojian collapsed into such a state of sorrow I almost worried that she would take her own life right there at my aunt’s house, as Hezni had tried to the month before after finding out about the massacre in Kocho. But she survived her own grief, just as we all had to, and the morning after she arrived, we moved into the refugee camp.

  Chapter 10

  The road leading to the camp was narrow and made of dirt. It reminded me of the road into Kocho before they paved it, and when we arrived there that morning, I tried to imagine that I was actually going home. But anything familiar only made it more clear how far away my old life was and just added to my sadness.

  From a distance, you could see the camp’s hundreds of white container homes spread across the low slopes of northern Iraq like bricks in a wall, each separated by a dirt path that was usually glutted with water from the rain, the showers, or the makeshift kitchens. Fences surrounded the camp—for our own safety, they said—but children had already bent holes where the metal met the ground so that they could more easily reach the outside fields to play soccer. At the camp entrance, larger containers were offices for aid and government workers, as well as a clinic and a classroom.

  We moved in December, when it was beginning to get cold in northern Iraq, and even though the half-built house in Zakho offered more protection from the winter, I was looking forward to having a space that I could call my own. The containers were roomy enough, and we had a few next to one another, one that we used as a bedroom, another as a sitting room, and a third as a kitchen.

  The camp didn’t adapt well to northern Iraq’s seasons. When winter came, the walkways between the caravans were sticky with mud, and we struggled not to track it inside. We had water for only one hour a day, and one heater that we shared to try to warm up the container homes. When there was no warmth, the cool air would condense on the walls and drip down onto our beds, so we fell asleep with our heads on damp pillows and woke up to the sharp smell of mildew.

  Throughout the camp, people struggled to re-create the lives that were stolen from them. It’s comforting to do the same thing you used to do at home, even if it’s just going through the motions. In Duhok, in the camp, the routines were the same as they had been in Sinjar. Women cooked and cleaned obsessively, like if they did it well enough, they could be transported back to their villages, wake up their men from the mass graves, and return life to how it had been. Each day when their mops were stashed back in the corner and all the bread was baked, the fact that there was no home and no husband to go home to crashed down on them anew, and they cried, huge wails that shook the walls of our container home. Our houses in Kocho were always full of voices, children playing, and the camp was quiet by comparison. We even missed the sound of family members squabbling over things: those fights would play in our heads like the most beautiful music. We had no way to find work or go to school, so mourning the dead and the missing became our job.

  For the men, life in the camp was even harder. There was no work, and they didn’t have cars to go to the city for jobs. Their wives, sisters, and mothers were in captivity, and their brothers and fathers dead. Before my brothers joined the peshmerga or the police, we had no money coming in except for the stipends that the Iraqi government and some aid agencies, spearheaded by a Yazidi rights organization called Yazda, which was formed just after the Kocho massacre, were giving to survivors of the genocide. Yazda, which was being led by a group of Yazidis living all over the world who had dropped everything in their lives to help victims of the genocide (and to whom I would eventually devote my own life), was quickly becoming the main source of hope for Yazidis everywhere. We still ran for food when they came to deliver it, and sometimes we missed the trucks. One day they would stop on one side of the camp, and the next day on the other. Sometimes the food seemed rotten, and we would complain that the rice smelled like trash when you cooked it.

  When summer came, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I went to work in a nearby field where the farmer, a Kurd, was employing refugees to harvest cantaloupe. “If you work all day, we will serve you dinner,” he promised, in addition to the small wage, and so I stayed until the sun was nearly set, picking the heavy melons off their vines. When he served us the meal, though, I nearly gagged. It was the rancid rice from the camp, plain and stinking on our plates. I felt like crying because the farmer saw us this way—that he thought because we were so poor and we lived in the camps, he could feed us anything, and we would be grateful.

  We are human! I wanted to tell him. We had homes, we had a good life. We are not nothing. But I stayed quiet and ate what I could of the disgusting food.

  Back in the field, though, I grew angrier. I’ll finish my work today, I thought. But there is no way I’m coming back tomorrow to work for this person. Some of the other workers started to talk about ISIS. To the refugees who had escaped their villages before the terrorists came, those of us who had been captured were a curiosity, and they were always asking us questions about what life was like under ISIS, as though following the plot of an action movie.

  The farmer walked behind us. “Which of you came from Daesh?” he asked, and the others pointed at me. I paused my work. I thought he would say that he was sorry for the way he had treated us, that if he had known there were Islamic State survivors in the camp, he would have been nicer to us. Instead, he wanted to talk about how great the peshmerga were. “Oh, Daesh is going to be finished,” he said. “You know how the peshmerga do it. They did a great job, and we lost a lot of people from the peshmerga to free a lot of Iraq.”

  “Do you know how much we lost?” I couldn’t help saying back to him. “Thousands of our people died. They lost their lives because the peshmerga chose to withdraw.” The farmer stopped talking and walked away, and a young Yazidi man turned to me, upset. “Please don’t say anything like that,” he told me. “Just work.” When the day ended and I went to tell the Yazidi in charge that I didn’t want to work for the farmer anymore, he looked at me angrily. “The farmer told us all not to come back,” he said.

  I felt so guilty that because of what I had said, everyone had lost their job. Soon, though, it became a funny story that spread throughout the camp. After I left and started telling my story outside Iraq, a friend of mine visited the camp and complained to some of my friends there that I was being too easy on the peshmerga. “Nadia should tell the world what they did to us!” he said, and one of the Yazidis started laughing. “She said that from the beginning, and we were all fired because of it!”

  Dimal made it to the camp at four in the morning on January 1, 2015. She still teases me for being asleep when she arrived—“I can’t believe you were able to fall asleep while I was running for my life!” she says—but I just hugged her tight. “I stayed up until four in the morning,” I tell her. “You were late!” I did stay up as late as I could, until the moment that dizziness took over, and the next thing I knew my older sister was standing over my bed. She had run for hours along the border with Turkey and Syria, and her legs were bleeding where they had scraped the barbed wire on the border fence. It could have been worse, of course: she could have been discovered and shot by a border patrolman or stepped on a land mine.

  Having Dimal back felt like a big wound had healed. But we weren’t happy. We held on to each other and cried until ten in the morning, then she greeted the stream of guests who came to cry beside her. We didn’t get to talk about anyone else until the next morning. That was the hardest moment of Dimal’s homecomi
ng—waking up that morning on mattresses next to each other and hearing her ask, her voice hoarse from crying, “Nadia, where is the rest of the family?”

  Later that month Adkee also managed to escape. We were frantic with worry—we had received so little information about what had happened to her. Some weeks earlier a woman had escaped Syria and made it to the camp. She told us that she had been with Adkee in Syria. Eager for details, we begged her to tell us everything she knew. “They believed that Adkee was a mother,” she told us, “so they would wait before they touched her.” Keeping our nephew Miran safe was all Adkee cared about. “She told me that if I promised to take care of Miran, she would kill herself,” the woman told us. “I told her to be patient, we will get out of there one day, but she was distraught.”

  After we heard that, we feared the worst for Adkee. We began to mourn her, my spirited sister who had yelled at the men who told her she couldn’t learn to drive, and our sweet nephew. Then out of the blue, Adkee called Hezni’s phone. “They are in Afrin!” my brother told us, ecstatic. Afrin is in Kurdish-held Syria and was not part of ISIS. It was being defended by the Kurds in Syria, and I thought since those fighters had helped Yazidis off the mountain, they would certainly help my sister.

  Adkee and Miran had escaped Raqqa and been taken in by an Arab shepherd and his family. They stayed with them for a month and two days while they tried to figure out the safest way to get her out of Islamic State territory. The shepherd’s daughter was engaged to a man in Afrin, and the family waited until the day of the wedding, when they would have a good explanation for why they were all going up north. Later Hezni told us that he had known Adkee had been with the shepherd’s family, but he had kept it to himself because he didn’t want to get our hopes up.

  Two days after that first phone call from Afrin, Adkee arrived at the camp with Miran in tow. This time I waited up until six in the morning with Dimal. We dreaded having to tell Adkee what had happened to everyone else—those who we knew were dead and those who were missing—but we didn’t have to. She figured it out on her own, somehow, and soon Adkee was living with us in our small, mournful world.

  It was a miracle that my sisters got out. In the three years since ISIS first came to Sinjar, Yazidis have escaped slavery in extraordinary ways. Some have been helped by sympathetic locals, as I was, while others have had family members or the government pay money, sometimes huge sums, to smugglers or directly to the Islamic State member, buying the girl back from him. Each girl cost about five thousand dollars to get out, with a larger amount—what Hezni would describe as “the cost of a new car”—going to the head of the operation, who used his connections throughout Arab and Kurdish Iraq to coordinate the rescue. The money was spread among the many middlemen—drivers, smugglers, document forgers—that it would take to free one single girl.

  Every story of escape is incredible. One girl from Kocho was taken to Raqqa, the Islamic State’s capital in Syria, where she was held with a large group of women in a wedding hall to await distribution. Desperate, she tried to ignite a propane canister with a lighter and burn the hall down but was discovered before she could. Then she forced herself to vomit, and when an Islamic State militant told her to go outside, she and a group of girls ran into the dark fields surrounding the hall. Eventually they were turned in by a passing farmer, but she was lucky. Weeks later the wife of the man who had bought her helped coordinate her escape out of Syria. Soon after, the wife died of appendicitis; apparently there wasn’t a surgeon in the Islamic State capable of saving her.

  Jilan was in captivity for over two years before Hezni was able to get her out with the most elaborate and risky plan I’ve heard yet. Jilan’s captor’s wife had become weary of her husband’s abuse of Yazidi girls, and she called Hezni, offering to help. Her husband was a high-ranking Islamic State member and a target for the anti-ISIS coalition that was bearing down on the caliphate. “You will have to get your husband killed,” Hezni told her. “That’s the only way.” She agreed.

  Hezni put the wife in touch with a Kurdish commander who was working with the Americans to strike Islamic State targets. “Tell him when your husband leaves the house,” Hezni instructed her, and the next day the militant’s car was hit in an air strike. At first, the wife didn’t believe Hezni that her husband was dead. “Why isn’t anyone talking about it, then?” she said. She was scared that her husband had escaped and would discover what she was doing. She wanted to see his body. “It’s too destroyed,” Hezni told her. “The car has basically melted away.”

  Now the women had to wait for further instruction, and they had only a small window in which to get Jilan to safety. After two or three days, it was confirmed that the militant was in fact dead, and other Islamic State members came to the house to get Jilan and take her to a new owner. When they knocked, the wife came to the door. “Our sabiyya was in the car with my husband,” she told them, trying not to let her voice tremble. “She died, too.” Satisfied, the militants left, and when they were out of sight, Jilan and the wife were smuggled to an Iraqi Army outpost and, eventually, to Kurdistan. A few hours after they left, their house was bombed as well. “As far as Daesh is concerned, they are all dead,” Hezni told me.

  Others were not so fortunate. I learned that they had found a mass grave in Solagh in December 2015, a few months after I left the refugee camp and moved to Germany with Dimal, part of a German government program to help Yazidi victims of ISIS enslavement. Early in the morning I checked my phone. It was full of messages from Adkee and Hezni. They called often to update me on family who were still there, particularly Saeed, who had gotten his wish and was fighting in Sinjar with a newly formed Yazidi unit of the KDP peshmerga. “Saeed is close to Solagh,” Adkee told me when I called her. “Soon we will know what happened there.”

  Dimal and I were supposed to go to a German lesson that day, but we couldn’t move. All day we sat in our apartment, waiting for news. I got in touch with a Kurdish journalist who was covering the fight to retake Solagh, and between him, Saeed, and Adkee, my phone barely stopped ringing all day. Other than watch the phone, Dimal and I prayed for our mother to be found alive.

  Sometime in the afternoon, the journalist called. His voice was low, and I knew right away he had bad news. “We found a mass grave,” he said. “It’s near the institute, and it looks like there are about eighty bodies, women.” I listened to him and put down my phone. I couldn’t bear to be the one to tell Dimal or to call Adkee or Hezni and say that our mother, who had survived so much for so many years, was dead. My hands were shaking. Then Dimal’s phone buzzed; she had a message from our family. Everyone was screaming.

  I couldn’t move. I called Saeed, and he cried as soon as he heard my voice. “None of my work here has mattered,” he said. “I’ve been fighting for one year, and we have found nothing, no one.” I begged Hezni to let me come back to the camp for the funeral, but he said no. “We don’t have her body,” he said. “The military is still in Solagh. Even if you came, they wouldn’t let you anywhere near the grave. It’s not safe for you,” he said. I had already begun my work as an activist, and ISIS threatened me every day.

  After my mother’s death was confirmed, I clung to the hope that Kathrine, my niece and my best friend, who was so kind and loved by everyone who met her, would be able to escape and we would be reunited. I needed her with me if I was going to survive the rest of my life without my mother. Hezni, who loved his brother’s daughter like his own, had been struggling for months to find a way to get Kathrine to safety, and failing. Kathrine had tried to escape many times—from Hamdaniya and from Mosul—but she had always failed. Hezni kept a voicemail from her on his phone. In it, Kathrine begs my brother: “This time, please rescue me. Don’t let them keep me—save me this time.” Hezni would play it and cry, vowing to try.

  In 2015, we had a breakthrough. Hezni got a phone call from a garbage collector in a small town outside Kirkuk that had been an Islamic State stronghold since the early days of the
war. “I was collecting trash from a house belonging to Dr. Islam,” he told my brother. “A girl named Kathrine came out. She asked me to call you to tell you she was alive.” The garbage collector was scared that ISIS would find out he had made the call and told Hezni not to contact him again. “I won’t go back to that house,” he said.

  Escaping would be very hard. The town is home to at least a hundred thousand Sunni Arabs, and Dr. Islam was now high-ranking within ISIS. But Hezni had a contact in the town and, using the messaging app Telegram, was able to reach Kathrine. The contact told Kathrine to go to a hospital. “There is a pharmacy nearby,” he said. “I’ll be inside holding a yellow file in my hands. When you see me, don’t talk to me, just walk back to the house where you are being held, and I’ll watch to see where you are going so I know where it is.” Kathrine agreed. She was almost to the hospital when it was hit in an air strike, and she was so terrified, she immediately went back to the house without meeting the contact.

  Next, Hezni tried going through some Arabs who didn’t support ISIS and were trapped in the same town. They owned a house in a nearby village that they could reach without being stopped at major checkpoints and agreed to hide Kathrine there. Through them, Hezni was able to get messages to and from Kathrine, who said that after the air strike on the hospital, they had moved to a different house in the city. She described it to the new contact, who then took his wife to the neighborhood, knocking on doors, saying they were looking to rent a house nearby. When he knocked on the house where Kathrine was being held, another sabiyya opened the door. It was Almas, a nine-year-old girl from Kocho. Behind her he could see my niece and Lamia, my friend Walaa’s sister. All three were being held captive by Dr. Islam. “Tomorrow morning, if there are no militants in the house, hang a blanket from the window,” the contact whispered to Kathrine. “After nine-thirty a.m., if I see the blanket, I will know it is safe to come back.” Kathrine was scared, but she agreed.