The Last Girl

by Nadia Murad

  That morning he drove slowly by the house. A blanket hung out of the window, and he got out of his car and knocked on the door. The three Yazidi sabaya—Kathrine, Lamia, and Almas—ran out and got into his car. After the girls were safely in the nearby village, the man called Hezni, and he wired him some money.

  Three days later Hezni found smugglers who, for ten thousand dollars, were willing to take the three girls, and the Arab family who had helped them, to safety. But without the right papers, they would have to walk across the Kurdish border at night. “We will take them as far as the river,” the smugglers told Hezni. “After that another guy will take them to you.” At midnight the first smuggler called Hezni and told him that he had made the handoff. My family prepared for Kathrine to come to the camp.

  Hezni waited by his phone all night, expecting the call telling him that Kathrine had made it into Kurdish territory. He was desperate to see her. But the phone never rang that night. Instead, at about one-thirty in the afternoon the next day, a Kurdish man called and asked if Kathrine, Lamia, and Almas were our people. “Where are they?” Hezni asked.

  “Lamia, she is badly wounded,” the man told Hezni. They had stepped on an IED while trying to cross into Kurdistan, and it had exploded beneath them. Most of Lamia’s body was covered with third-degree burns. “Bless the souls of the other two, they passed,” he finished. Hezni dropped the phone. He felt as if someone had shot him.

  I had already left Iraq by the time this happened. Hezni had called me after they made it to the first smuggler’s house and told me that Kathrine was safe. I was ecstatic at the thought of seeing my niece again, but that night I had a terrible dream. I dreamed that I saw my cousin Sulaiman standing next to one of the generators that supplied Kocho with electricity. In the dream, I was walking with my brother Massoud and my mother, and when we got close to Sulaiman, we saw that he was dead and that animals were eating his body. I woke up in a sweat, and in the morning I called Hezni. “What happened?” I asked, and he told me.

  This time Hezni agreed that I should come back to Iraq for the funeral. We arrived at four a.m. in the Erbil airport and went first to see Lamia in the hospital. She couldn’t talk, her face was so badly burned. Next we went to Kirkuk to see the Arab family who had helped Kathrine and the others escape. We wanted to find Kathrine’s body so that we could bury her properly, in the Yazidi tradition, but the family couldn’t help us. “When they stepped on the bomb, she and Almas immediately died,” they told us. “We carried Lamia to the hospital, but we couldn’t take the bodies, too. They are with ISIS now.”

  Hezni was beyond consoling. He felt that he had failed his niece. He still listens to her pleading voicemail, torturing himself. “Save me this time,” she says. I can picture Kathrine’s hopeful face when I hear it and Hezni’s face, too, covered in tears.

  We drove to the refugee camp. It looked the same as when I had first moved there with my brothers, nearly two years before, although people had made their containers more like homes, hanging tarps to create shaded outdoor spaces and decorating the insides with family photos. Some people had jobs now, and there were more cars parked between the container homes.

  As we got closer, I could see Adkee, my half sisters, and my aunts standing together outside. They were pulling at their hair and holding up their hands to the sky, praying and crying. Kathrine’s mother, Asmar, had been crying so hard the doctor worried that she would go blind. I heard the sound of the funeral chant before we passed through the camp gates, and when we got to my family’s container, I joined in, walking in a circle with my sisters, slapping my chest and wailing. I felt all the wounds of my captivity and escape open anew. I couldn’t believe that I would never see Kathrine or my mother again. That was the moment I knew that my family was truly destroyed.

  Chapter 11

  Yazidis believe that Tawusi Melek first came to earth to connect human beings to God in a beautiful valley in northern Iraq called Lalish. As often as we can, we travel there to pray and reconnect with God and his Angel. Lalish is remote and tranquil; to get to it, you drive along a narrow road that winds through a green valley, past the conical roofs of smaller tombs and temples, and up a hill to the village. During important holidays, like our New Year, the road is filled with Yazidis making the pilgrimage, and the center is like a festival. At other times of year, it is quiet, with only a handful of Yazidis praying in the dimly lit temples.

  Lalish has to be kept pristine. Visitors must take off their shoes and walk barefoot even through the streets, and every day a group of volunteers helps to maintain the temples and the temple grounds. They sweep the courtyards and trim the holy trees; they wash the walkways; and a few times a day they walk through the dim stone temples to light lamps fueled by a sweet-smelling oil made from Lalish’s olive trees.

  We kiss the door frames of temples before entering, careful not to step on the entranceway, which we also kiss, and inside we tie colorful silk into knots, each knot representing a wish and a prayer. On important religious occasions, the Baba Sheikh visits Lalish to wait for pilgrims in the main temple and prays alongside them and blesses them. That temple is the tomb of Sheikh Adi, a man who spread the Yazidi religion in the twelfth century and is one of our holiest figures. The White Spring runs through Lalish. We baptize ourselves outside where the spring pools into marble cisterns. And in the humid, dark caves beneath Sheikh Adi’s tomb, where condensation drips off the rough walls, we splash ourselves with water in prayer at the site where the spring splits and ends.

  The best time to go is in April, around the Yazidi New Year, when the seasons turn and new rain fills the holy White Spring. In April the stones are just cool enough underneath our feet to keep us moving, and the water is cool enough to wake us up. The valley is fresh and beautiful, becoming new again.

  Lalish is a four-hour drive from Kocho, and traveling there—paying for gas and food and taking people away from their work in the fields, not to mention the animals many families sacrificed—was too expensive for us to go often, but I would often dream about making the trip. Our house was full of photos of Lalish, and on the TV you could watch programs about the valley and the holy sheikhs who lived there, and watch pilgrims dancing together. Unlike Kocho, Lalish is full of water, and that water feeds the trees and flowers that color the valley. The temples are made of ancient stone and decorated with symbols taken from our stories. Most important, it was in Lalish that Tawusi Melek first made contact with the world and gave human beings a purpose and a connection to God. Even though we can pray anywhere, prayer in the temples of Lalish is the most meaningful.

  When I was sixteen years old, I went to Lalish to be baptized. I could hardly wait for the day to come, and in the weeks beforehand I listened to every word my mother said. She told us to be respectful of the other pilgrims and of every object in the valley, and that we were never to wear shoes or leave a mess. “Don’t spit, don’t curse, don’t behave badly,” she cautioned us. “Don’t step on the entranceways to the temples. You kiss them.”

  Even Saeed, the mischievous one, listened carefully to her directions. “This is where you will be baptized,” she told me, pointing to a picture of a stone cistern dug into the ground where a trickle of fresh water from the White Spring ran in ribbons down the main road. “And here is where you will pray for your family.” I never felt like there was anything wrong with me because I wasn’t yet baptized at sixteen; it didn’t mean that I wasn’t yet a “real” Yazidi. We were poor, so God wouldn’t judge us for having to delay the trip. But I was delighted that it was finally happening.

  I was baptized in the White Spring along with a few of my siblings, both boys and girls. A woman, one of the guardians of Lalish, dipped a small aluminum bowl into the stream and poured the cool water over my head, then left me to splash more onto my face and head while I prayed. Then the woman wrapped a piece of white cloth around my head, and I dropped a little bit of money, an offering, on a stone nearby. Kathrine was baptized at the same time. �
��I won’t disappoint you,” I whispered to God. “I won’t go backward. I will go forward and stay on this path.”

  When ISIS came to Sinjar, we all worried about what would happen to Lalish. We worried that they would destroy our temples, as they had so many others. Yazidis fleeing ISIS took refuge in the holy city, guarded by the temple servants and the prayers of the Baba Sheikh and Baba Chawish. The Yazidis who fled their homes for the holy valley were on edge, mentally destroyed and physically exhausted by the massacres. They were certain that at any moment ISIS would storm the temples.

  One day one of these fleeing Yazidis, a young father, was sitting in the entranceway to the temple courtyard with his son. He hadn’t been sleeping: all he could think about was the people who died and the women who were kidnapped. The weight of these memories was tremendous. He took his gun out of his belt, and before anyone could stop him he shot himself, right there in the temple entrance beside his son. Hearing the shot and assuming it was ISIS, the Yazidis living there began fleeing into the Kurdistan region. Only the servants and the Baba Chawish stayed behind, to clean up the dead man’s blood, perform the burial, and wait for whatever came next. They were prepared to die if ISIS came. “What do I have if this place is destroyed?” Baba Chawish said. But the terrorists never made it to the valley. God protected it.

  After the massacres, as women were slowly escaping from Islamic State captivity, we wondered what our next trip to Lalish would be like. We needed the temples and the solace they offered, but at first no one was sure how the escaped sabaya would be treated by the holy men who lived there. We had converted to Islam, and most of us had lost our virginity. Maybe it didn’t matter that both had been forced on us against our will. Growing up, we knew these to be sins worthy of expulsion from Yazidi society.

  We shouldn’t have underestimated our religious leaders. In late August, when the shock of the massacres was still new, they held meetings trying to determine the best response. Quickly they came to a decision. Former sabaya, they announced, would be welcomed back to society and not judged for what had happened to us. We were not to be considered Muslim because the religion had been forced upon us, and because we had been raped, we were victims, not ruined women. The Baba Sheikh met personally with escaped survivors, offering guidance and reassuring us that we could remain Yazidis, and then in September, our religious leaders wrote a dictum telling all Yazidis that what had happened to us was not our fault and that if they were faithful, they should welcome sabaya back to the community with open arms. I have never loved my community more than in that moment of compassion.

  Still, nothing the Baba Sheikh said or did could make us feel completely normal again. We all felt broken. Women went to great lengths to try to purify themselves. Many survivors underwent “re-virginization” surgery, repairing the hymen in the hope of erasing the memory and the stigma of the rape. In the camp a couple of doctors treating survivors offered that service to us, saying casually to “come for the treatment,” as though it were just a normal checkup. “It will only take twenty minutes,” they told us.

  I was curious, so I went with some of the girls to the clinic. “If you want to have your virginity back, it’s just a simple procedure,” the doctors said. Some of the girls I knew decided to do it, but I said no. How could a “simple procedure” erase the times Hajji Salman raped me, or when he had allowed his guards to rape me as punishment for trying to escape? The damage from those attacks wasn’t to one body part, or even just to my body, and it was nothing a surgery could repair. Still, I understood why other girls would do it. We were desperate for any kind of solace, and if it helped them imagine a normal future in which they were married and had a family, then I was happy for them.

  I had a difficult time thinking about my own future. When I was young in Kocho, my world was so small and so full of love. I had to worry only about my family, and everything told me that things were getting better for all of us. Now even if all of us girls survived and worked hard to recover, where were the Yazidi boys who would marry us? They were in mass graves in Sinjar. Our entire society had been nearly destroyed, and Yazidi girls were going to have very different lives from what we had imagined as children. We weren’t looking for happiness, just to survive and, if we could, to do something meaningful with the lives we had been so randomly allowed to keep.

  A few months into my stay at the refugee camp, I was approached by activists, one of whom asked me for my abaya. “I’m collecting evidence of the genocide,” she said. “One day I want to open a museum.” Another, after listening to my story, wondered if I would feel comfortable going to the U.K. to tell officials what had happened to me. I said yes, not knowing how much that one trip would change my life.

  The last few months at the camp were spent preparing to go to Germany. Dimal and I were both emigrating, but Adkee refused. “I won’t ever leave Iraq,” she told us. She was always stubborn, and I envied her. Germany promised safety, school, a new life. But Iraq would always be home.

  We had been through piles of paperwork to prepare for the move and had gone to Baghdad to get our passports made. It was the first time I had ever been to Iraq’s capital and also my first time in an airplane. I stayed there for twelve days, every day going to a different office—to be fingerprinted, to have photos taken, to get vaccinated against various strange diseases. It seemed like an endless procedure, and then one day in September, we were told it was almost time to go.

  They took us to Erbil and gave us each some money to buy clothes. Dimal and I wept saying goodbye to everyone in the camp, especially Adkee. I thought of Hezni, so many years ago, trying to sneak into Germany, thinking that if he made money—real money, the kind you can make in Europe—Jilan’s family would have no choice but to let them marry. He had been sent back, and here I was with a ticket paid for by the government. And it was the hardest thing I had ever done.

  Before leaving for Germany, we went to Lalish. Dozens of former sabaya flooded the streets of the holy village, crying and praying, dressed in mourning black. Dimal and I kissed the door frame of Sheikh Adi’s temple and tied the colorful silk fabric into knots, each knot a prayer—for the safe return of everyone who was alive; for happiness in the afterlife to those, like our mother, who had died; for Kocho to be liberated; and for ISIS to have to answer for what they did to us. We splashed the cool water from the White Spring onto our faces and prayed to Tawusi Melek harder than we ever had.

  Lalish was serene that day, and while we were there, the Baba Chawish came out to meet the group. The holy man is tall and thin, with a long beard and kind, inquisitive eyes that make people open up in his presence. As he sat with his legs folded underneath him in the courtyard of Sheikh Adi’s tomb, his white robes fluttered in the breeze, and the thick smoke from the green tobacco he had packed into his wooden pipe floated over the large crowd of women who went to greet him.

  We knelt in front of him, and he kissed our heads and asked us questions. “What happened to you?” he wanted to know, and we told him that we had been captured by ISIS but escaped and were now on our way to Germany. “Good,” he said in a soft, sad voice. It was painful for him to see so many Yazidis leaving our homeland in Iraq. The community was dwindling before his eyes, but he knew we had to move on.

  He asked us more questions. Where are you from? How long were you with ISIS? What was the camp like? And then at the end, when his pipe was nearly empty and the sun was lower in the sky, he turned to us and asked, simply, “Who have you lost?”

  Then he sat and listened closely as each of the women, even the ones who had been too shy to speak before, recited the names of their family and friends, their neighbors and children and parents, the dead and the missing. Their answers seemed to go on for hours, as the air grew cooler and the stone on the temple walls darkened in the fading light, Yazidi names listed in an endless chorus, stretching out into the sky to where God could hear them, and when it was my turn I said: Jalo, Pise, Massoud, Khairy, and Elias, my brothers. Malik
and Hani, my nephews. Mona, Jilan, and Smaher, my brother’s wives. Kathrine and Nisreen, my nieces. Hajji, my half brother. So many who were taken and escaped. My father, who wasn’t alive to save us. My mother, Shami, wherever she is.

  Epilogue

  In November 2015, a year and three months after ISIS came to Kocho, I left Germany for Switzerland to speak to a United Nations forum on minority issues. It was the first time I would tell my story in front of a large audience. I had been up most of the night before with Nisreen, the activist who had organized the trip, thinking about what to say. I wanted to talk about everything—the children who died of dehydration fleeing ISIS, the families still stranded on the mountain, the thousands of women and children who remained in captivity, and what my brothers saw at the site of the massacre. I was only one of hundreds of thousands of Yazidi victims. My community was scattered, living as refugees inside and outside of Iraq, and Kocho was still occupied by ISIS. There was so much the world needed to hear about what was happening to Yazidis.

  The first part of the journey was by train through the dark German woods. The trees passed by in a blur close to my window. I was frightened by the forest, which is so different from the valleys and fields of Sinjar, and glad that I was riding by it, not wandering between the trees. Still, it was beautiful, and I was starting to like my new home. Germans had welcomed us to their country; I heard stories of ordinary citizens greeting the trains and airplanes carrying fleeing Syrians and Iraqis. In Germany we were hopeful that we could become a part of society and not just live on the edge of it. It was harder for Yazidis in other countries. Some refugees had arrived in places where it was clear they weren’t wanted, no matter what kind of horrors they were escaping. Other Yazidis were trapped in Iraq, desperate for the opportunity to leave, and that waiting was another kind of suffering. Some countries decided to keep refugees out altogether, which made me furious. There was no good reason to deny innocent people a safe place to live. I wanted to say all this to the UN that day.