The agent who met me at the end of our block stroked his dark goatee and smiled thinly as he spoke.
“We’re conducting a search for illegal weapons,” he said.
It didn’t seem to matter that the Constitution allowed registered residents of Shingal to defend themselves—every family was permitted one firearm. Regardless, up and down the lane, officers pushed into homes and hauled out old rifles, AK-47s, and handguns; the armaments were piled like kindling into crates. Residents looked on stone-faced from their thresholds.
The officer watched and nodded. “Right,” he said, and then gave me his sweat-stained back. “We’ve been getting reports of illegal weapons caches.”
“ISIS is just down the road,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “They could come here any day. You know this. You can’t leave us here helpless. We have the right to defend our own lives and our community.”
“You have the Peshmerga to defend you. It’s your right to exist under their protection. They are trained for what’s coming—if anything is coming at all.”
By sundown, and just before we sat around the floor cloth to eat meager bowls of couscous and plates of stale naan, most all the weapons in Shingal were gone, dumped into vans and carted away. The Peshmerga soldiers smoking cigarettes and holding sentry along the rim of town remained mute, allaying our uncertainties with casual smiles and pointing out their own heavy arsenal. The Iraqi army is full of chickens, we were told.
Naïf still had an AK in the back of the car, and I still had my Glock. For some reason, they never searched our house. They had lists of who had what—I guess we weren’t on it.
“What the hell is going on, Shaker?” Naïf said.
“I don’t know. I’ll make more calls.”
IN THE HIGH heat of late morning, a great horde of bedraggled Shiite refugees came drifting in a smog of stirred up dust down the long road from Tal Afar. Some rode on horses or donkeys, but many were crammed tight into slowly moving cars, small children sitting way back, legs hanging from the open trunks. Each face stared out vacant and covered in a thick film of grime, the full whites of their eyes showing the horrors they’d just escaped by a hair. Hours later, more stragglers arrived on foot, their dragging feet bleeding and covered in a dry paste of red mud. They’d fled fifty miles west over the open desert, leaving all they owned behind, as ISIS contingents trampled through their neighborhoods, some firing machine guns into homes, others grabbing occupants and beating them one at a time in the streets. After two days of bloodshed and havoc, the Turkoman city known as the home of the children of Eden fell hard on the sword of the Islamic State.
Immediately, Yazidis in every village opened their houses, and we set up receiving centers in the schools and public buildings. Anyone who had anything to give—blankets, mattresses, and food—brought it fast. We fed and clothed whole terror-stricken families, and listened stunned to the breathless tales they had to tell.
“They are not human,” an old man told me, his bony hands shaking as he clasped a tin cup. “Get out if you want to live.”
“Where can we go from here?” I asked him and pointed out the open double doors and into the sea of night.
“South,” he said. “All the Shia must go south. Tomorrow, at first light if we can.”
“We aren’t Shia,” I said, carefully dressing the open wounds on his old callused feet.
“Ah, Yazidi, Yazidi,” he said, and took in a tired breath. “They will come this way, believe me.”
“We have the Peshmerga here now. Didn’t you see them out there?”
When he said nothing, I looked up to see his gaze gust over me, pupils staring out dark and sober.
I went on: “There are thousands of them, patrolling all over Shingal.”
“Ha,” was all he said, and looked down into his cup. Then his shoulders rose once and fell back again as he sipped the last of his drink. “Good luck to you, boy.”
ALL ACROSS SHINGAL, families gathered at street corners, in courtyards and kitchens, under awnings in the market districts, and outside the doors of our temples while waiting their turn to pray. Casual conversations no longer existed in Khanasor; the exchange of malignant rumors had replaced every former pleasantry. Under the spindly mulberry trees in the foothills, our elders sat on grass mats slowly sipping chai, boiling the water in small kettles over the dug-out fire pits. Fanning the embers, they spoke in hushed warnings, citing the more than seventy genocides that had plagued Yazidis over centuries.
Higher up along the serrated slopes, past our burial grounds, thin reefs of war smog slid westward. Some people told themselves all the talk was merely paranoia and went about their business, herding sheep and hoeing the furrows. Others packed up cars and tried to get to the KRG, only to see the Peshmerga round them up and turn them back time and time again. A handful of people sneaked through the lines on foot under the cover of night, met up, and hid themselves away among relatives already living there.
I watched neighbors load hauls of cucumbers, tomatoes, and bread into cars and ferry them in large baskets to the network of caves cut like ancient secrets into the slopes of our holy mountain. My own family simply waited, watching the news, as I checked in with the Peshmerga units. There wasn’t much more we could do. Living out in the great open plains of Shingal, hundreds of thousands of Yazidis were cornered; closed borders and enemy territory surrounded us on all sides like impenetrable walls.
At night I got into my car, lights off, and made covert excursions out into the foothills to look over the south-facing terrain, past which the enemy lay in wait. Always I thought of Dil-Mir in her house across the dry valley, and often called her from up there on my solitary shelf in the sky. She’d go out and we’d gaze at the moon awhile together, whispering sweet nothings into the wind, and wish each other a good night.
Near the end of July and from a perch of rock, I pulled out a set of binoculars and methodically scanned the slopes. Past the main road and out over the distant southern badlands, I spied unfamiliar convoys of vehicles and tracked their paths. Coming and going in tight formation from the direction of Anbar, they crawled steadily over the sands. From miles away, you could see the taillights from their vehicles dance over the ground. Occasionally, I’d lose sight of the caravans as they snaked into the low buttes and I’d have to wait, sometimes over an hour, before they came back down, and disappeared again into the pitch.
“You get any numbers?” Brownsword asked me.
I could hear his fingers tapping fast against a keyboard.
“They ride in groups of half a dozen or more,” I said. “All around, and always south of the mountain. And there’s steady traffic moving in from Syria, all the time now.”
Migone was in on the call; I could hear the slow hiss of his breath, and every so often the clanking of ice as he brought a drink to his lips. There was no border anymore, he explained—just big open territory. When ISIS had Mosul in its teeth, their commanders had called for reinforcements from Syria to help finish the job. Now my people were right in their way—we had to be ready to run.
Brownsword and Migone were getting a contingent together to beat down doors in DC and to lobby for support. For now, we just planned: Iraqi Kurdistan was out—Assayish were everywhere, crawling all over the line. The only safe haven left was the mountain. I was to stay in tight with Yazidi contacts in the Peshmerga; keep reporting traffic patterns; acquire extra batteries for my cell; check in daily.
“How about morning, noon, and night,” Migone added. Then he said to keep the phone and the Glock on me at all times.
SKY AND LAND stood so calm as time carried us into August. The air redolent, wheat cut on the rolling farmland, crops all harvested, tilled fields bare under a clear blue sky. In town, laundry hung from lines and cooking smoke drifted as lambs and goats stood lined up along laneways and we prepared for the summer slaughter. Looking out over Khanasor, you could almost imagine that an everlasting peace cloaked our part of the world, keeping us well
away from any danger. And yet, tension reverberated everywhere; in those dog days we lived strapped to a huge pyre, drenched in petrol, waiting for someone to strike a match.
It was the early morning of our seasonal feast, when the holy men ended their forty days of solitary prayer and fasting. Daughters and sons and extended kin from every corner of Nineveh and beyond journeyed where they could, from the nearby cities where they worked the construction sites or went to school, and gathered to celebrate in the villages tucked all around the sacred mountain.
People dressed in traditional clean white garb handed out colorful sweets and cool drinks, as neighbors strolled up and down the thoroughfares greeting one another. All of us were trying hard to set aside thoughts of what was really happening in villages just forty miles to the east that had become the edge of the earth, where homes burned and men in black balaclavas ripped their rivals limb from limb. Only the oblivious children played carefree in the shock of midday sunshine, sugar coating their glistening lips and fingers, no notion yet that their whole world teetered on a blade.
Everywhere I went, people spoke only of ISIS and what they might do to us. We were the placid children of Adam; they were fanatics from a fallen world. So we crowded into hot kitchens and under sweltering tents, ate and drank, and feasted some more until our bellies stretched like the skins over drums. As soon as I could, I found a quiet place and called my Dil-Mir to tell her I loved her.
“For how long?” she whispered and laughed.
“Until the end of the world, and ever after.”
PAST MIDNIGHT, THE tambours still strumming, I languished on the roof. I heard the low whine of one man singing several houses away; his wife hushed him fast and he went silent. Under the blanket of warm air my body felt heavy, and I stared up into the pitch of night, a single star shining in the east. Wine and moonlight soaking my mind, I traveled lazy and only half-aware through a lull of waking dreams. Thoughts of Dil-Mir’s hair the first time I touched it, reaching out like a starving man as she passed by. Wind moved across me, and I drifted out of my own skin, lids heavy as silver coins over my eyes. I smelled warm shisha; heard Brownsword cackle and Migone call out my name:
Mikey, Mikey, sing us a song.
And I answered: I have to sleep now, sir, we ate so well.
By now, the whole village was slumbering in their small gray houses—it was the dead hour just before dawn. Sky and ground merging, we might have all been lying at the bottom of an ocean. Within that deep soporific quiet, the air around me began to vibrate. I sat up on my mat, stared out into nothing, and listened.
Moments later, I was in the far beyond outside of Khanasor, wandering the empty plains at night. Sounds were closing in fast—heavy and hell-bent. The grind of armored metal rumbled through my chest. Then, out of nowhere, the earth buckled under me as I stood staring into the horizon. Before the just-rising sun, a dark band of trucks appeared, hurtling across the ground and sending up a tidal wave of exploding dirt.
From somewhere far behind me, people started jabbering, and I heard my father call out: Tell the others to come.
The man in the first vehicle looked over as they closed in, his shawl falling to one side. I knew those eyes set in a dough of pockmarked skin—RPG just laughed and pointed as his shrieking brethren of the apocalypse pulled out their machine guns and assaulted the heavens.
They were coming straight for us, and I hollered back at the shadowed village. Run, run, run!—but my limbs stood frozen.
Then I snapped up, eyes bulging, my cold hands shook. I got to my feet on the roof, still in a heart-stopping stupor, and stared way out. Heat lightning flashed along the hills and a distant roll of mountain thunder rumbled over Shingal. On the ground, my cell phone was stirring, and I grabbed it fast.
No voices—just the thud-thud of artillery fire and then dead air.
“Hello. Who is this?” I said again and again, but the signal cut out.
I raced down into the house, where the others were already gathering. All the children were fast asleep in beds and on floor mats, crowded in the rooms around the courtyard. When Daki saw me, she grabbed my hand and didn’t let go.
“Did you hear all the trucks? There’s trouble,” she whispered. “On the south side. Most of the people there are still asleep, and we can’t get through on the phones.”
“I know,” was all I could say, hearing my own strained voice as though from the other side of the room.
I went to get Naïf’s hookah from the shelf, put in a ball of tobacco, and sucked down a hot drag. For the next two hours all I would do was smoke and make calls, hundreds of them, to units hunkered down all over the region. It could all be a mistake, easily enough—someone heard a gunshot and started firing, setting off a violent chain reaction. Such things often happened in the fog of war. I had my laptop open and cell phone ready, scrolling down my contact list. I tried Dil-Mir first and several times, but there was no answer.
Meanwhile, the others were packing up the car, loading in food, water, and blankets. We already had things ready and had rehearsed our exodus down to the minute. First sign of trouble, we were gone. Naïf brought out his rifle and checked the magazine. In other rooms, and from the adjacent houses, I could hear drawers and cupboard doors opening and shutting.
“Just take the pictures, forget the rest,” I heard my sister-in-law say.
“We will drive the car through Rabia,” Naïf said. “If there’s an invasion, they have to let us in. I don’t care what they do, we are crossing the border.”
“All right, take your car with your family and Daki as planned,” I said. “Where is Dapîra?” My grandmother had gone to a cousin’s house to celebrate and hadn’t returned.
“We told her to stay where she was, and that you would come get her if they haven’t got room for everyone.”
“OK, I will. The others have their vehicles, and anyone left over can go in the next-door neighbor’s delivery truck. You can fit fifty people in there if you have to. He’s in Dohuk and left the keys in the glove compartment just in case. I already talked to him.”
“What about you, Shaker—you have your car all gassed up? The plan was to leave together.”
“I’ll come later. The Peshmerga are out there, I have to drive to the checkpoints, find out what’s happening.”
“Daki won’t leave without you.”
“She has to. You tell her I’ll go find Dapîra and bring her with me if I can.”
“But you’re not going all the way to your girlfriend. You can’t.”
“No, I’m going to tell her to get out, but I think they’re still sleeping over there.”
Children wrapped in blankets paraded through the front door in a daze of half sleep. No one spoke, not a word as they filed out, blinking. I watched them go, the cell phone next to my ear. Military reflexes returned to me as though doors were opening in another hemisphere of my brain. Suddenly, I was back out on the bases, in the MRAP just leaving the wire.
Soon, several Peshmerga officers were giving me the rundown—there were enemy forces approaching. Several times the air went dead, and I could barely hear a thing over the torrents of static.
“ISIS is using an electronic signal-jamming system to scramble the lines, probably lifted it off the IA,” I told Naïf. “It’s hopeless right now. Just hurry and go. There’s no doubt—this is it.”
AFTER THE OTHERS left, I got my handgun and went back up onto the roof. I could see the shadow of the mountain stretched over the desert like a slumbering beast. Something was happening on the other side, but that was over sixty miles away. The atmosphere over Khanasor was as still as a snapshot. Then my cell phone chimed.
“Dil-Mir?” I said.
“No, it’s Alyas, Shaker. You must send for help.”
The voice of my old schoolmate was hollow and made of air. It was hard to hear him; he might as well have been a ghost calling out from another world.
“Where are you, what’s happening?”
�
��In my parents’ house in Sabaye. We can’t get out right now. Just listen to me. Hold on…”
Then I heard a shot crack over the line like a streak of lighting. Seconds later, the deep hiss and thud of falling mortar shells. In the background, a woman howled like a gale of wind and I heard him tell her to stop.
“Alyas, talk to me,” I said.
Every cell in my body quickened to a gallop and the atmosphere seemed to thin. I crouched low, holding a hand over my other ear. Guns boomed again over the line and I heard my friend gulp down air. Part of me knew I might be speaking to a dead man giving his last living testament.
“Okay, I’m here,” he whispered.
“What’s happening?”
“They came for us before daybreak,” he began. “From the road to Tal Afar, in a long line of beat-up trucks, dark scarves shrouding their faces. They had guns hidden in the two hills behind the village.”
“You must get out.”
“Not yet, we have to wait.”
“What kind of arsenal do they have?”
“Not much. I don’t know. A few mortars. It didn’t take much more than that. We knew right away who they were and what they wanted. People hid in their homes, under tables, inside empty grain bins, anywhere. We did everything we could to keep the children quiet.”
Another explosion, and the line cut out for a moment.
All over Khanasor, others were waking to their phones and getting out of beds. I could see their panicked forms moving to windows and staring out.
“What are the Peshmerga doing? They need to hold the lines and evacuate the village.”
“They left us, Shaker. Before it even started.”
“What—all of them?”
“Not the Yazidi officers, but all the rest. Every last one of them. Didn’t even fire a single shot. It’s not good.”
Shadow on the Mountain Page 16
