The Last Girl

by Nadia Murad

  I wanted to tell them that so much more needed to be done. We needed to establish a safe zone for religious minorities in Iraq; to prosecute ISIS—from the leaders down to the citizens who had supported their atrocities—for genocide and crimes against humanity; and to liberate all of Sinjar. Women and girls who escaped from ISIS needed help to rejoin and rebuild society, and their abuse needed to be added to the list of Islamic State war crimes. Yazidism should be taught in schools from Iraq to the United States, so that people understood the value of preserving an ancient religion and protecting the people who follow it, no matter how small the community. Yazidis, along with other religious and ethnic minorities, are what once made Iraq a great country.

  They had only given me three minutes to talk, though, and Nisreen urged me to keep it simple. “Tell your own story,” she said, sipping tea in my apartment. That was a terrifying idea. I knew that if my story were to have any impact, I would have to be as honest as I could stand to be. I would have to tell the audience about Hajji Salman and the times he raped me, the terrifying night at the Mosul checkpoint, and all the abuse I witnessed. Deciding to be honest was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made, and also the most important.

  I shook as I read my speech. As calmly as I could, I talked about how Kocho had been taken over and girls like me had been taken as sabaya. I told them about how I had been raped and beaten repeatedly and how I eventually escaped. I told them about my brothers who had been killed. They listened quietly, and afterward a Turkish woman came up to me. She was crying. “My brother Ali was killed,” she told me. “Our whole family is in shock because of it. I don’t know how someone can handle losing six brothers all at once.”

  “It is very hard,” I said. “But there are families who lost even more than us.”

  When I returned to Germany I told Nisreen that any time they needed me, I would go anywhere and do anything I could to help. I had no idea that soon I would partner with the Yazidi activists running Yazda, and begin a new life. I know now that I was born in the heart of the crimes committed against me.

  At first our new lives in Germany felt insignificant compared to those of the people living through war in Iraq. Dimal and I moved into a small two-bedroom apartment with two of our cousins, decorating it with photos of the people we had lost or left behind. At night I slept beneath large color photos of my mother and Kathrine. We wore necklaces that spelled out the names of the dead and each day came together to weep for them and to pray to Tawusi Melek for the safe return of the missing. Every night I dreamed about Kocho, and every morning I woke up and remembered that Kocho, as I knew it, no longer existed. It’s a strange, hollow feeling. Longing for a lost place makes you feel like you have also disappeared. I have seen many beautiful countries in my travels as an activist, but nowhere I wanted to live more than Iraq.

  We went to German classes and to the hospital to make sure we were healthy. Some of us tried the therapy sessions they offered, which were almost impossible to endure. We cooked our food and did the chores we had grown up doing, cleaning and baking bread, this time in a small portable metal oven that Dimal set up in the living room. But without the truly time-consuming tasks like milking sheep or farming, or the social lives that come with living in a small, tight-knit village or school, we had too many empty hours. When I first got to Germany, I begged Hezni all the time to let me come back, but he told me to give Germany a chance. He said I had to stay, that eventually I would have a life there, but I wasn’t sure I believed him.

  Soon enough, I met Murad Ismael. Along with a group of Yazidis living around the world—including Hadi Pir, Ahmed Khudida, Abid Shamdeen, and Haider Elias, the former translator for the U.S. military who had stayed on the phone with my brother, Jalo, almost until the moment of his death—Murad had cofounded Yazda, a group fighting tirelessly for Yazidis. When I first met him I was still uncertain about what my new life would be like. I wanted to help, and to feel useful, but I didn’t know how. But when Murad told me about Yazda and the work they were doing—particularly helping to free and then advocate for women and girls who had been enslaved by ISIS—I could see my future more clearly.

  As soon as these Yazidis heard that ISIS had come into Sinjar they left their normal lives to help us back in Iraq. Murad had been studying geophysics in Houston when the genocide started; others were teachers or social workers who dropped everything to help us. He told me about a sleepless two weeks spent in a small hotel room near Washington, D.C., where he and a group including Haider and Hadi spent every moment fielding calls from Yazidis in Iraq, trying to help them to safety. Often, they succeeded. Sometimes they didn’t. They had tried to save Kocho, he told me. They had called everyone they could think of in Erbil and Baghdad. They made suggestions based on their time working with the American military (Murad and Hadi has also been translators during the occupation) and tracked ISIS on every road and through every village. When they failed to save us they vowed to do whatever they could to help anyone who survived and to get us justice. They wore their sorrows on their bodies—Haider’s back aches constantly and Murad’s face is lined with exhaustion—and in spite of that, I wanted to be just like them. After I met Murad, I started to become the person I am today. Although the mourning never stopped, our lives in Germany began to feel significant again.

  When I was with ISIS, I felt powerless. If I had possessed any strength at all when my mother was torn from me, I would have protected her. If I could have stopped the terrorists from selling me or raping me, I would have. When I think back to my own escape—the unlocked door, the quiet yard, Nasser and his family in the neighborhood full of Islamic State sympathizers—I shiver at how easily it could have gone wrong. I think there was a reason God helped me escape, and a reason I met the activists with Yazda, and I don’t take my freedom for granted. The terrorists didn’t think that Yazidi girls would be able to leave them, or that we would have the courage to tell the world every detail of what they did to us. We defy them by not letting their crimes go unanswered. Every time I tell my story, I feel that I am taking some power away from the terrorists.

  Since that first trip to Geneva, I have told my story to thousands of people—politicians and diplomats, filmmakers and journalists, and countless ordinary people who became interested in Iraq after ISIS took over. I have begged Sunni leaders to more strongly denounce ISIS publicly; they have so much power to stop the violence. I have worked alongside all the men and women with Yazda to help survivors like me who have to live every day with what we have been through, as well as to convince the world to recognize what happened to the Yazidis as a genocide and to bring ISIS to justice.

  Other Yazidis have done the same with the same mission: to ease our suffering and keep what is left of our community alive. Our stories, as hard as they are to hear, have made a difference. Over the past few years, Canada has decided to let in more Yazidi refugees; the UN officially recognized what ISIS did to the Yazidis as a genocide; governments have begun discussing whether to establish a safe zone for religious minorities in Iraq; and most important, we have lawyers determined to help us. Justice is all Yazidis have now, and every Yazidi is part of the struggle.

  Back in Iraq, Adkee, Hezni, Saoud, and Saeed fight in their own ways. They stayed in the camp—Adkee refused to go to Germany with the other women—and when I talk to them, I miss them so much I can barely stand. Every day is a struggle for the Yazidis in the camps, and still they do whatever they can to help the whole community. They hold demonstrations against ISIS and petition the Kurds and Baghdad to do more. When a mass grave is uncovered or a girl dies trying to escape, it is the refugees in the camp who bear the burden of the news first and arrange the funeral. Each container home is full of people praying for loved ones to be returned to them.

  Every Yazidi refugee tries to cope with the mental and physical trauma of what they have been through and works to keep our community intact. People who, just a few years ago, were farmers, students, merchants, and housewi
ves have become religious scholars determined to spread knowledge about Yazidism, teachers working in the small container homes used as camp classrooms, and human rights activists like me. All we want is to keep our culture and religion alive and to bring ISIS to justice for their crimes. I am proud of all we have done as a community to fight back. I have always been proud to be Yazidi.

  As lucky as I am to be safe in Germany, I can’t help but envy those who stayed behind in Iraq. My siblings are closer to home, eating the Iraqi food I miss so much and living next to people they know, not strangers. If they go to town, they can speak to shopkeepers and minivan drivers in Kurdish. When the peshmerga allow us into Solagh, they will be able to visit my mother’s grave. We call one another on the phone and leave messages all day. Hezni tells me about his work helping girls escape, and Adkee tells me about life in the camp. Most of the stories are bitter and sad, but sometimes my lively sister makes me laugh so hard that I roll off my couch. I ache for Iraq.

  In late May 2017, I received news from the camp that Kocho had been liberated from ISIS. Saeed had been among the members of the Yazidi unit of the Hashd al-Shaabi, a group of Iraqi armed militias, who had gone in, and I was happy for him that he had gotten his wish and become a fighter. Kocho was not safe; there were still Islamic State militants there, fighting, and those who left had planted IEDs everywhere before they ran, but I was determined to go back. Hezni agreed, and I flew from Germany to Erbil and then traveled to the camp.

  I didn’t know what it would feel like to see Kocho, the place where we were separated and where my brothers were killed. I was with some family, including Dimal, and Murad (by now, he and others from Yazda were like family) and when it was safe enough to go, we traveled as a group, taking a long route to avoid the fighting. The village was empty. The windows in the school had been broken and, inside, we saw what was left of a dead body. My house had been looted—even the wood had been stripped off the roof—and anything left behind was burned. The album of bridal photos was a pile of ashes. We cried so hard we fell onto the floor. Still, in spite of the destruction, the moment I walked through my front door I knew it was my home. For a moment I felt the way I had before ISIS came, and when they told me it was time to leave I begged them to let me stay just an hour more. I vowed to myself that no matter what, when December comes and it is time for Yazidis to fast in order to draw closer to God and Tawusi Melek, who gave us all life, I will be in Kocho.

  A little less than a year since giving that first speech in Geneva—and about a year before returning to Kocho—I went to New York with some members of Yazda, including Abid, Murad, Ahmed, Haider, Hadi, and Maher Ghanem, where the United Nations named me a Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking. Again, I would be expected to talk about what happened to me in front of a large group of people. It never gets easier to tell your story. Each time you speak it, you relive it. When I tell someone about the checkpoint where the men raped me, or the feeling of Hajji Salman’s whip across the blanket as I lay under it, or the darkening Mosul sky while I searched the neighborhood for some sign of help, I am transported back to those moments and all their terror. Other Yazidis are pulled back into these memories, too. Sometimes even the Yazda members who have listened to my story countless times weep when I tell it; it’s their story, too.

  Still, I have become used to giving speeches, and large audiences no longer intimidate me. My story, told honestly and matter-of-factly, is the best weapon I have against terrorism, and I plan on using it until those terrorists are put on trial. There is still so much that needs to be done. World leaders and particularly Muslim religious leaders need to stand up and protect the oppressed.

  I gave my brief address. When I finished telling my story, I continued to talk. I told them I wasn’t raised to give speeches. I told them that every Yazidi wants ISIS prosecuted for genocide, and that it was in their power to help protect vulnerable people all over the world. I told them that I wanted to look the men who raped me in the eye and see them brought to justice. More than anything else, I said, I want to be the last girl in the world with a story like mine.

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