Members of my family waited at the end of the line, holding a place for me inside their tent at the makeshift refugee camp—our God and angels were all we had between us now.
Listless, I drifted the cruel hours away, vacant under my sagging skin.
What’s the word in Kurmanji for hot? I heard Sergeant White call out.
White had been dead as long as my boyhood, but I saw him clear as day, lounging in a beach chair way out over the sand, dark leg propped over one knee, huge grin widening under his Ray-Bans.
“Sekir,” I whispered. “Sort of like sugar.”
Well, it is damn sekir out here, Shaker—run and get us a couple of cold sodas. You look like you could use one.
“Yes, sir—OK.”
What about me? Dil-Mir said into my ear, and I felt her hair brush past.
“I’m coming for you,” I told her, holding out a hand into the fathomless shine.
THE SOUNDS OF wind filling canvas sails like huge lungs came to me; I breathed in heavy air that no longer reeked of death. Though I’d never been to the sea, I thought I smelled an ocean. An IV line dripped into my vein, and I tugged at it.
“Shaker? They found you outside the gates,” a woman said, palms cradling my face. How soft her hands still were, and I didn’t need to open my eyes, or hear that birdsong voice to know the healing touch of my mother. How to find a word for a gratitude so immense that it tore away the seams of my heart—I let out a feeble sob.
“Where are the others?” I rasped, my open eyes seeing only a great blur as though we were floating underwater.
“We are here in Syria, in the camp,” Naïf said, touching my leg. “Not all of us. We haven’t located Dapîra yet. Some cousins are missing—and others. Khairi and most of his family made it to the KRG. Everyone is scattered. It’s a miracle we have all found each other. You’re all bones, brako—dried up as leather.”
“But alive, alive, alive,” Daki laughed, and kissed my forehead. “Soon we’ll go to a camp in the KRG and then another one in Turkey—and from there you’ll go to Germany.”
“Germany,” I said, still coming to terms with where I was—among more than one of my own, and living. “How?”
I squinted at the smudged forms of other people gathered all around my cot.
“Smugglers,” Samir said. “We put all the family money together. We have enough to pay for one person—you don’t have a wife and kids. We need you to go where it’s safe, Shaker, they’re still assassinating terps. From what I’ve heard, you’ve moved way up on their list.”
I only nodded, the sensation of my mother’s fingers dancing in my hair, lulling me. The others were all jabbering away. I heard the word miracle again—and fell deep down into the longest sleep of my life.
Have you spent your packet yet, boy? Babo breathed into my slumber.
No, Babo, not yet. Not yet.
When I woke up, we joined the long transport caravans that ferried survivors under the full protection of Syrian Kurdish forces into the KRG. More evacuation routes were opening up along Shingal. Together with what was left of my people, we stayed there in a refugee camp many months until we would move on into Turkey. Our country and our homes were lost to us.
ON MARCH 26, 2015, in a river valley of soft blowing grass tucked between Turkey and Bulgaria, where poppies flourished and families took weekend picnics, I was with a group of ten other Yazidi men and women when I met “Rasho,” the first of many smugglers I would come to know.
“We go in through the wilderness at night,” he said, licking his finger as he thumbed through our cash. A weeping crust sat over his face like a fungus and his nails were grooved and yellow. Right away, I could tell he was doped up.
“First rule: don’t talk, and never tell me your name. Any of you make trouble, I leave you behind for the border police. They aren’t your friends, believe me.”
THROUGH REEFS OF fog, we could see the glow of lights spread along the frontier. There was a lot of traffic still on the roads: delivery trucks, farm vehicles, other refugees betting their lives on luck. Seven hours straight through forests of oak and beech, over streams, under bridges, and no one spoke a word. The plan was to meet up with vans that would take us into Sofia, the Bulgarian capital. This was just the first leg of a long trip, straight through the Balkans.
We were on a wooded path straddling the winding tongue of road when a figure grabbed me from behind and shined a light into my eyes—ISIS fighters, I thought, and went numb. They shoved the women into cars and lined up the men in gutters, before leading us one at a time into the bowels of the forest.
When my turn came, I stood head down, hoping it would be a single bullet, fast, and I waited for it. Nothing. And then I fell right into frantic English, only to feel the smack of brass knuckles against my mouth, loosening a tooth. It was the first of many blows I would take. A man tore off my clothes and strapped me to a tree.
“Why are you doing this?” I said, but it didn’t matter.
“We have to check your body for contraband,” a silhouette muttered, as he took a swig from a bottle.
All the men in my group were beaten in their turn—our phones and wallets stolen, our dignity vandalized. I thought they were a gang of criminals marauding the border until they put us into their cars to shuttle us back to where we came from, and turned on their sirens.
It took three attempts to get out of Turkey. By the time we made it into Sofia, we’d been beaten twice more. Days passed and we continued, mostly on foot and without much to eat, but hunger had become a postscript to all the pains that plagued me. At prearranged points along the migrant route, we encountered several smugglers—all of them addicts, one just like the other.
Once in the capital, we were afforded the reprieve of a cold shower and some bread in the squalid flat of another runner. This one with arms and legs like clubs, he snorted pinches of cocaine off his wrists, in between pounding energy drinks that littered the footwells.
“I’m sorry for my temper,” he kept saying in between bursts of rage, as we sped toward Serbia in the back of his dilapidated van. “I have troubles.”
Left to wait for the arrival of the next runner in an abandoned house, we sat against the crumbling walls, staring at one another, still afraid to speak.
“I don’t know about you all,” I said finally. “But if I don’t have some water soon, I won’t be able to go on.”
“What do we do?” An old man said, releasing a steady fog of cigarette smoke. “It’s been eight hours in here pissing in a bucket. He’s not coming, I tell you.”
“We don’t even know where we are,” a young woman whispered from the depths of her chador.
WHEN THE POLICE showed up, I tried out my English again, and this time it seemed to subdue them.
“You have language—that’s good,” the Serbian officer said, nodding as he took down our names. None of us gave our true identities.
“I worked for the Americans,” I offered. “During the war.”
“Then why don’t you go there?”
FOR THE NEXT three days in the pouring rain, we all stayed locked inside a razor-wired and overcrowded detention camp that was nothing more than an elaborate garbage dump. Everything in there existed in a foul state of decay: the mildew-covered tarps set up over islands of mud; the moldy bread and gray stews they gave us to eat; even the refugees, scurrying between the derelict tents with battered tin bowls held to their hollowed-out bodies, fleas sucking away at their scalps.
“This is still better than ISIS,” a woman said to me as we stood in the registration line, waiting our turn to get out.
And I nodded—it was true.
The Serbians registered my details, put me into a police car, and then transferred me to a jailhouse up the road.
“You got any weed—or some coke?” one of my cell mates asked, jutting out his chin. His sweat stank of rot, or maybe it was just the cell. There were more than two dozen different versions of the same scuffed-up hooligan in the
re.
“I got nothing,” I said, and I held out my hands.
“What the fuck are you good for then?” another one said, and threw a hard shove into my shoulder, testing things out.
By now, I’d sat in rooms facing rabid militants who would have grabbed any chance to slit my throat. I’d climbed out of a mile-high purgatory in the sky, down into a nest of terrorists—these thugs were nothing to me. Maybe they could see it in the way I took over one darkened corner, and just sat there, staring out.
A few days later, an officer slid back the bars.
“OK, you’re done,” he said. “We have to make space.” He handed me a train pass and pointed to the doors. “Go to the station and get on the train to Budapest.”
Outside the jailhouse, I wandered across the street into a public park, where I encountered my fellow Yazidi travelers lying around on the benches.
“You guys get train passes?” I said.
“Yes, to Budapest. There’s another camp. I’ve heard it’s the worst one.”
“No, I’m not doing that. Let’s go to Munich instead,” I said. “That’s where our people are waiting for us.”
Start to finish, the journey took thirty-three days.
THE ARRIVAL CENTER for asylum seekers was in a large pristine building, in which legions of the weary and war-torn from around the world waited. I sat in a brown leather chair holding my ticket—number 634. I’d borrowed the dress shirt and pants from another Yazidi. To look at me you’d never have guessed the horrors that lurked behind my eyelids—and I was so grateful. On that cool spring day of April 15, 2015, Germany gave me and every frayed soul in that place the chance to be a human being again.
“I have evidence,” I told the man at the wicket. “And I can get much more.”
“Of what?” he asked, looking up from the screen on which my pertinent details appeared, gleaming over his round spectacles.
“A genocide,” I said. “I need to know where to go—to document what happened.”
Then he sat back, took off his glasses, and rubbed his face. When he looked at me again, I saw myself in his eyes, and he held me there a long time before speaking.
“Look behind you, Mr. Jeffrey,” he said. “That room is full of evidence of many terrible things people have done to each other. All we can do here is help you be free.”
So I did look behind me at all of them, and then back to him again and nodded. All right, I thought—free, that’s a good start.
Chapter Twenty
Nadia and the Warehouse of Souls
RAIN POLISHED THE COBBLESTONES AND I STOOD IN THE hypnotic downpour—head tilted, mouth wide open—transported back to the mountain, among the scores diminishing from thirst. A passerby glanced once and disappeared into the lit-up city, but I just stayed on the sidewalk until I was soaked to the bone.
Those first weeks in Germany, so much as turning on a tap meant weeping for hours. The comfort of a mattress shamed me to the floor. I was wedged between worlds that were impossible to reconcile: the smell of coffee in the cafés; the scent of decay on the hillsides. Laughter in the markets; shrieks of terror across the sands. Children playing in a park; children bleeding over stones.
Even Facebook was a pilgrimage into a hollow of losses—husbands, sons, wives, daughters. Cousins, neighbors, friends.
Dil-Mir.
No end in sight.
“EVERY MASS GRAVE has to be documented,” Brownsword told me. Soon after I entered Germany, we reconnected and got right back to it. “Numbers. Identities. Precise locations. Eventually, elements destroy evidence.”
I soon found out that Interpol, the UN, and the Red Cross were already aware of the mass killings and graves. Germany was crowded with people like me, and they’d heard our stories a thousand times. I didn’t know how much more I could do. My people were scattered: in rubber boats over the Aegean Sea, on foot crossing the Balkans, huddled in train stations under tarps, sleeping in forests and public parks. Lost. Captured. Enslaved. No one knew how many of us were left, or was even bothering to try and tally the numbers. Brownsword told me I was a member of an endangered species, and I felt those words bore into me like rusty nails.
“You’ve got to mobilize,” he said. “Concentrate on the living for now—the taken. Survivors. All those you can get to.”
THE RESCUE GROUP started out virtual and nameless, consisting of fourteen close Yazidis and me. I set up our main page and sent out an appeal like a searchlight into the void. By the end of the first day, it had already illuminated a multitude—that cheap Android phone transformed into an army in my palm:
First, Yazidis looking for other Yazidis.
Then people from everywhere who could put them together.
Soon, legions in peril found us:
My daughter Almas escaped on a boat to Lesvos and vanished.
My sister has a friend in the camp there and has found her. Here is the number.
We are lost in the woods of Hungary with no food. Our smuggler has left us.
I know a police officer in Budapest, he will come get you.
My neighbor is holding Yazidis in his home outside Mosul.
Tell us when he leaves the house.
I’m pregnant and in labor under a bridge outside of Sofia.
My brother’s friend is a doctor at a hospital in the city. We will send him.
I’m a twelve-year-old girl named Sibi, from Kocho. I got away from my captor.
Stay where you are, we will try to trace your signal.
At first, our rules were simple: to join the group you had to have a connection to a core member, most always a Yazidi. Core members had proven their intent—saved a life.
The Android became as all-consuming as heroin. I was tethered to it seventeen hours a day, coordinating the constant stream of rescues—I could not let it go. Entreaties from the taken, orphans, and the adrift were coming in constantly. And with every plea, I released a prayer for the one girl whose lost voice haunted me. At first, we got people out using crowd-funding to pay smuggling fees, which ran into the thousands.
Soon our web of volunteers from all over the Middle East and Europe mobilized into an extensive underground railroad, made up of a series of safe houses and runners linked like stations. Some girls were shuttled back to their parents in Iraq. Many came to Germany, where they cloistered in shelters designed to treat the devastating traumas particular to survivors of slavery.
As often as I could I escorted them, returning frequently to check on their progress. Other times, especially when speed was of the essence, I’d have to go find a captive myself. When a Yazidi mother reached out about her fourteen-year-old daughter, who’d been abducted in a camp near Ioannina, in northwestern Greece, I crammed into the back of a runner’s van by nightfall.
A THOUSAND EYES watched me as I crossed a purgatory of cold mud and raw sewage to a sea of rundown army tents. Five miles from a picturesque lakeside mountain village, the camp sprawled like a giant pustule. Right away, the group of Yazidis I’d made contact with broke from the lingering masses and approached me clutching torn-up plastic bags full of old clothes.
“Nisreen is way over there,” a woman said, pointing from her cocoon of rags. “In the very last tents before the hills.”
“Where is the security?” I said, my shoes sinking into the slop.
“They’re just volunteers and come when they can—which is hardly at all.”
“How will I know which tent she’s in?”
I looked out through the bank of fog.
“You just will.”
A MOB OF men clustered outside a large tent that served as an improvised mosque, smoking rolled cigarettes and warming scabrous hands over a small fire pit. On a makeshift table outside the door sat a bowl of water and bars of soap. The sounds of an imam droned through the canvas.
“You here for the girl?” One of the men said, giving me a once-over.
“I’m her brother,” I said. “Our family has not given permission.”
“You’re a pig with no rights. She will convert and belong to Allah.”
“I thought you weren’t allowed to smoke,” I said, pulling back the canvas flap.
“I thought we cut off all your heads,” another one laughed, and spat at my shoes.
Inside, over a patchwork of threadbare rugs, stood the imam, caressing his beard like a pelt. Concealed in a burqa, a frail figure stood before him, hands fidgeting.
“Take off your shoes,” the imam barked. “She’s about to give the Shahada.”
“Shut up,” I said, and went straight for him. Without another word, I jacked a balled fist into his open mouth. I felt the bones in my hand snap, and the stunned holy man fell back, stumbling over crates of bread and soda cans.
Immediately, the men from outside came into the tent. Then others, who’d come from the village as a ragtag security detail, filed in after them and an all-out brawl erupted.
The girl cowered in a flimsy corner. She fixed her blue eyes on me, wide and unblinking as I fought my way through the scrimmage. Someone smashed the back of my head with something, but I kept moving forward. Finally, one of the Greeks fired a handgun into the roof and the lecherous crew disbanded.
“I knew you were one of mine, as soon as I saw you,” Nisreen said, tearing off her dark shawl and breathing hard as we rushed along the muddy paths out of the camp.
Back in the van, I gave Nisreen my phone—her mother in Germany was on the line.
“You do this a lot?” the driver said, over the girl’s elated sobs.
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