by Susan Kuklin
Throughout the Yazidis’ history, Mount Sinjar has been their shelter. ISIS already controlled much of the surrounding area.
I prepared food and other necessities to take with us. I baked bread and placed it in a bag. Then I locked our front door from the inside and jumped over the wall. At this point, we didn’t know what ISIS would do to us, but I heard rumors that they were taking girls and women to be sold as sex slaves. I asked my brother Ali to kill me and my sisters before anyone could ever touch us. Ali thought I was crazy and told me to stop saying such things. We got in our little pickup truck and headed toward Sinjar Mountain. By the time we arrived at the foothills of the mountain, our car broke down. Ali told the rest of us to start walking up the mountain and that he and his family would follow us later.
My two youngest brothers, Qahtan and Adnam, tried to take our sheep to the mountain. ISIS appeared and shot some rounds to scare them. The militants said, “Don’t go anywhere. We’re not going to hurt you.” My brothers hid among the sheep and then ran away. ISIS captured them, but that was later.
A lot of our men were with us, but they did not have guns. It wouldn’t have been so easy to capture us if the men had arms. Some of the men had guns, but they spent all their ammunition earlier, fighting in the town. I was captured with my brothers Dakhil, Hadi, Hadi’s son Delhat, and three of my sisters — Nerges and her four children, Khefshe, and Sahera. We were terrified. I called my brother Ali on my cell. He said he couldn’t make it to the mountain any faster. We thought that Ali would be captured. He was. Ali, his wife, and his daughter Laila were caught by ISIS at the root of the mountain.
Our family tried to stay in touch with each other. One of my uncles called another uncle on his cell. “Where are you?” While they were speaking, three trucks, each carrying three ISIS men, arrived at the bottom of the mountain. Everything happened quickly. There was chaos as we tried to stay together and seek safety on Mount Sinjar. These men were very dirty. They had black clothes and long hair. Some of them were wearing a sort of sandal. One of the militants had only one eye and a long beard.
They demanded our cell phones, our jewelry, and our weapons. They said they would torture anyone who refused to give them their stuff. I turned off my cell phone and put it in my sock. My sister also turned off her phone and placed it in between her clothes.
The militants ordered the men to take out their personal identification cards from their wallets. My cousin had two phones; he broke one because he did not want ISIS to have access to our phone numbers and the names of our family.
They forced us into their vehicles and drove to a wedding hall in Sinjar, at the bottom of the mountain. There were so many of us. It was very hot, and people suffered from thirst and hunger. Later I heard that a lot of kids died on the mountain because of dehydration and lack of milk and food.
Men and women were separated. Boys older than twelve years were put with the men. I was with my sisters and other family members. My uncle told them, “My family doesn’t speak Arabic. I want them with me.” One of the ISIS militants put his gun to my uncle’s head and said, “I will kill you if you speak any more words.” Another man cried, “I want my family.” They ordered him to kneel, and they shot him from the back and threw him over a cliff. They did this right in front of us, right in front of his mom and his family.
We started crying, and they told us, “If you cry, we will kill you. Anyone who cries or screams, we will kill you.”
My uncle whispered, “Just calm down.” There were hundreds of ISIS members threatening to kill anyone who had phones with them. The ISIS fighter, who killed the man, gave his gun to another fighter, who had long hair and was barefoot. The militant was about to kill all the men, but his phone rang. After the call, he said that he was not going to kill any more at this moment.
We were all in a government office inside the city of Sinjar. All the men were put in rooms, and the women stayed in the corridor. At night, they came to take women. My sister Sahera was fifteen years old. She hid behind me and started to vomit because she was so frightened. They took her anyway. I held tight to her hand and begged them not to take her. One of the ISIS militants hit me on my shoulder with the back of his gun and took her. She was a child. I raised her when our parents died, and it was so hard to let her go. She was wearing a dress I had made for her. I thought I must die because I could not bear losing my sister.
A master is prohibited from having intercourse with his female slave who is married to someone else; instead, the master receives her service, [while] the husband [gets to] enjoy her [sexually].
— ISIS pamphlet on the treatment of female slaves
When they started taking all the single women, I put my three-year-old nephew, Delhat, on my bosom. “I’m married, and this is my son!” They left me. But then they came again to take me. I begged them to leave me, and they did. They tried to take my brother’s wife, who has a baby. She was crying, “I’m married! I’m married!”
After some days, ISIS took all us women to Mosul. I begged them to take me to my sister Sahera. They just laughed at me.
ISIS used a government facility to distribute the Yazidi women to their fighters. ISIS men came and bought women and girls. We were given black clothes, long dresses, and head covers [hijabs]. I was able to stay with my family because I claimed I was married to my cousin, Khairy, and that my nephew Delhat, my brother Hadi’s child, was my son. [ISIS had separated Hadi’s wife from the rest of the family.]
The next day, the ISIS militants walked us back to the PDK [Barzani Party] headquarters. They put the Kurdistan and PKK flags on the ground and made everybody step on them. [The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê in Kurdish), is a leftist organization based in Turkey and Iraq.]
Airplanes overhead were bombing all around the building, and glass from the windows started to fly at us. The bombs were too close. Pieces of glass injured two sides of my nephew’s head. We all tried to run through a small door. Once we were outside, we didn’t see any ISIS fighters. It was a chance to escape, but after a moment, they came at us from all sides and we were abducted again.
They put us in trucks and moved us to an area close to the Mosul city called Badoosh. There was a huge prison there that had been run by the Iraqi government before ISIS came. It smelled terrible. Much of Badoosh was burned and we saw blood on the ground. We thought that ISIS killed people there.
My nephew was still with me. We stayed in the Badoosh prison for about seven days. We were given food once a day, one samon [Iraqi bread roll] for each person, and one piece of cheese. Because we were so frightened and scared, and worried about the kids, we didn’t eat that food at all. We gave it to the kids.
There was no drinking water for two days. Kids were crying for water. I think some of the kids died of thirst.
My uncle’s wife, Junay, my brother Ali’s wife, Layla, and my sister Khefshe were with me. We didn’t know about anyone else in the family. My sister and I scratched ashes from the wall and put them on our faces so that we wouldn’t look pretty and would not be selected by ISIS fighters.
The ISIS fighters brought us the dirty water that they used to wash their bodies. They made us abducted people drink that dirty body water. Because of the thirst, some people were obligated to drink. I could not drink. They brought us rotten grapes to eat. The smell all around us grew worse because there were no restrooms; there were feces everywhere.
In the morning, they brought a girl that was covered all in black clothes. She could barely walk. I ran toward her and asked her about Sahera. She said she had not heard Sahera’s name. The girl was telling us that the ISIS militants raped her and that they had been raping all the girls, especially those who resisted reading the Quran.
Then the ISIS fighters took all the kids and put them in a pen outside. They laughed and told us that they were going to kill the kids. Women and girls started crying and screaming. “We’re not going to kill them.” The ISIS fighters laughed at us more
. They said that it was time to give the kids an Islamic education, teachings from Islamic religious texts from the Quran. We stayed in that terrible prison for about a week.
When an airplane flew overhead, the abductors brought the kids back inside the building. The next day, the ISIS headquarters that was close to where we were staying was hit by a bomb. Bombs fell all around us. The militants got buses to move us to another place. As we were taken outside, airplanes appeared to drop more bombs. All the ISIS militants disappeared again. They just left us there, out in the open. We couldn’t tell who was bombing the area, the Iraqi forces or the U.S. We wanted to hide, but where could we go? Once the airplanes left, the militants came back and started loading us into buses. They moved us to a city close to Sinjar called Tal Afar.
Just before we reached Tal Afar, the ISIS militants separated all the old women from the younger ones. If a woman had gray hair, they took her away. We thought that they killed them all, but once we reached Tal Afar, they were all there.
In Tal Afar, there was another building, like a jail, where they put us. Five ISIS fighters were at the door to the prison. They asked again if we had cell phones, money, and jewelry. They said that they would punish and harm anyone who didn’t give them those things. I hid my cell phone in my nephew’s diaper. As each woman went inside, they put a light on her face because it was nighttime. They picked women who were pretty and young. One of them wanted to take me, but his colleague said, “Leave this one. She’s married.”
An ISIS militant said to me, “Are you married?”
I replied, “Yes.”
“Is your husband among the men that we abducted?”
“Yes.”
Because I claimed I married my cousin and he was among the abducted men, they left me alone.
They took a lot of women that night. They took anyone unmarried, including my sister Khefshe. I was crying. I wanted to beg them to bring my sister back, but my uncle’s wife said, “Calm down, or they will take you too. They will separate you from us.”
The women and girls taken by the ISIS fighters were sold and used as sex slaves. I’ve seen women sold for as little as one dollar. I later became one of the women. I was sold five times.
After seven days, ISIS was getting ready to move us again. We were told that if we converted to Islam, they would bring back our men, and we could live free. They asked me again if I was married.
“Yes, I’m married.”
“Who are you married to?”
“I married my cousin.” They asked me to swear in God’s name that I married my cousin. I swore.
At this point, Layla, my uncle’s wife, stood up to them. “We don’t want to move to another town. We don’t believe you will take us to our men.” To persuade us, the ISIS militants took out a phone and called the place where my uncle was being held. They gave him a phone. My uncle told his wife that it’s okay to convert to Islam under threat and pressure, because they killed many people who refused to convert. He said, “Do whatever they ask you to do. Say you will convert to Islam to protect yourself. In the bottom of our hearts, we know that God will forgive us because He knows what’s going on. You will remain Yazidi in your soul.”
We still didn’t believe our abductors. The militants brought my brother Dakhil to us to prove that they did not kill the men. Dakhil was in a jail in the same town that we were in. It had been twelve days since I saw my brother. I didn’t believe that he was alive. When I saw him, I fainted. I did not recognize him.
Dakhil told us, “If we do not convert, they will kill us all.” Then they brought all the men to us. Our men were so dirty. Their hair was dirty. Their beards had become long.
During this whole time, we could hear bombs falling from the airplanes. They ordered everyone outside to a trench wall, where we hid. There were hundreds of us hiding behind a wall made of soil. Giant ants started eating off the babies and young children. Once the airplanes left, they put all of us, men and women, in buses and took us to two tiny villages called Kaser al-Muhrad and Qizlel Qelo. They put us in a house that had five dead cows, dead chickens, and many dirty things. The smell was filthy, and we had a hard time breathing. I believe that these two villages were once Shiite towns; all the people had run away or were killed.
All our men had been taken there and used as slave laborers to build mosques. The reason why they were building the mosques was because they were converting us to Islam, and they needed a place to teach Islam and the Quran. We stayed here for three months.
I still insisted that I was married to my cousin Khairy. He stayed with me at night, but they would take him away every day to work and receive Islamic teaching.
From mid-August to mid-December, Shireen held tight to her phone. The phone, along with a wedding band her grandmother had once given her, were her lifelines.
ISIS militants were constantly checking us for cell phones because they knew that some people were contacting the outside. When my cousin went to the mosque, I left my nephew with his mother and hid in a hole. It was a big hole that was a good hiding spot. I hid because I was afraid that they would search me, and I still had my phone. Remember I had turned it off and hid it in my shoe. We did not have chargers and there was little battery life left, but still, I would not let go of my phone.
One day, one of the men tried to escape. ISIS militants shot and killed him and brought his dead body back to us. “If anyone tries to escape, we will do the same thing we did to this man.” My uncle said that nobody should try to escape, because we had a lot of kids with us. “These people have no mercy,” my uncle told us. There was no escape.
One night, my uncle’s daughter, Parween, was taken away by an ISIS militant. She was forced to marry this militant under Sharia law [the term for law based on the Quran]. A few days later, the militant brought her back to visit us. The ISIS militant wrote a note to my uncle that said, “We just bring your daughter for a visit, and we give you this note to let you know that we know she is with you. If she escapes and tries to run away, we will punish you. We will kill you.”
Another night, I was with my uncle when they came to search his house. His wife was somewhere else. They asked my uncle, “Who is this one?”
My uncle said, “No, no, this is my wife.” Because they didn’t know my uncle’s wife, they believed him for some reason. They left.
During the Roji and Eda Rojiet Ezi holiday, we secretly fasted for three days. The militants forced the men to drink water and say the Muslim prayers. They tried to make us eat rotten food. I did not have the appetite to eat anything.
After our fasting holiday, they crammed us into buses with no windows. It was very dark. People were standing on top of one another and walking on each other. It was hard to breathe, and people were vomiting. At night, we arrived in Mosul. There were three-story buildings in Mosul, and they gave a room to each family. I still claimed that my nephew Delhat was my son, so they left him with me. They gave another room to my brother Hadi, Delhat’s real father. Hadi had claimed that our sister Nerges was his wife. Sometimes Delhat, who was only three years old, would cry for his parents, but I managed to keep him quiet when ISIS members came around.
Once we were in this building, the militants brought ISIS women to search our bodies, our hair, our clothes, and everywhere. They were again looking for cell phones, jewelry, and money. The focus was cell phones. They found some religious stuff on some of the Yazidi women. When we Yazidis go to our holy place, the Lalish Temple, we take some of the earth to keep with us — all Yazidi families have soil from Lalish Temple — so they found some of those things on the old Yazidi women and men. They took the women and a couple of the men away. We thought they would kill them, and I think probably they did. They searched us again, even our bodies, looking for anything that belonged to the Yazidi religion.
I asked my cousin Khairy to write my name on my arm in English letters with a needle, like a tattoo. If I was able to commit suicide, I wanted my family to know it was me. I told my broth
ers and my uncles that if the militants came back to take me, I was going to kill myself. I would not allow them to rape me and bring me back to visit my family like they did the other girls. My uncle told me that if they took me, it was against my will, so it didn’t count as a sin. My brothers told me that if I tried to kill myself, they would never forgive me.
Then the ISIS militants brought a Quran and asked all the families to swear on it that we are a family. For example, they asked my uncle if these two women — me and his real wife — are his wives. My uncle swore that we were his wives. Another group asked my cousin to swear that I was his wife. He swore. Everybody was swearing.
One of my cousins spoke Arabic. He went to the militants and said, “Okay, we’ve done everything you’ve asked us to do. What else do you want? Yes, we swear, these people are our family.” But the ISIS militants did not believe him, and they took the men away to a different place.
The next morning, I had a terrible headache because I had not slept the night before. Delhat was on my lap when the militants came rushing into our room. They took Delhat from me and forced me and Khairy down stairs along with others who pretended that they were married. About fourteen of us were pretending to be couples. They separated the men from the women and brought the Quran for us to swear that the Yazidi men were truly our husbands. Khairy begged them and cried. He told the militants that I was his wife and that they should leave us alone. The militants laughed and said that we could not fool them with our tricks.
We were taken in buses again. I was sure that they were going to separate us from our family. I kissed the barrel of ISIS pistols, begging them not to take us. But they did not listen.