“Better not upset her,” Evin agreed.
We left the television on in the sitting room and went back to the kitchen to wash and stone the apricots. Some we cut into small pieces, sprinkling them with sugar and putting them into the fridge to have later for dessert. But most of them ended up in a large cooking pot, which we heated on a gas flame with cups of sugar. The combination gave off a tantalizingly sweet and fruity smell, which became more intense the longer it simmered away. It was going to be a wonderful jam.
On television they reported the latest developments. In Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, a car bomb had exploded. And in Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar province, where ISIS was already well established, their fighters had occupied the university campus. Although the newsreader tried not to make the events sound too dramatic, the fact was that the terrorists had taken hundreds of students hostage.
“That’s unbelievable,” I said to Evin—and decided there and then that, if the grant worked out, I wouldn’t study math anywhere but in the Kurdish area. Maybe in Sinjar or Dohuk, where distant relations of ours lived. The Sunni south was definitely too unsafe for me. I could see that now.
Over the course of the afternoon—we were already filling preserving jars with our jam—the situation eased somewhat. The students in Ramadi were set free. And the army was able to take back Samarra. We gave a sigh of relief. At least the jihadis wouldn’t be able to establish themselves permanently in that city as well. But I still found it worrying enough that they’d managed to take possession of it so quickly. I was anxious to find out what my father thought of this development and I made a mental note to ask him as soon as he got home. Clearly the terrorists had set out from Syria and somehow they’d been able to cross the border. Had the security provisions been tightened even further there now? Would he be burdened with even more extra shifts? I just hoped that his assignments were not too dangerous. But I also knew that he’d never tell me as much.
Early in the evening Nura and Evin packed their baskets with full jam jars and set off for home. I decided to accompany them and take the opportunity to have a bit of a walk myself. After all, we lived relatively close to one another. Everywhere in the village people had gathered in small groups and were discussing the events of the day. Unsurprisingly, the attacks in the south were the main topic of conversation. But people were talking about what had happened in a strangely detached way, as if it were a natural catastrophe that had taken place in another country altogether. The general feeling was that terrorism was a problem of Shias and Sunnis, who were at war with each other. Nothing like that could ever happen in our neck of the woods. At most, people felt sorry for the Yazidi members of the army, who had to take the blame for the whole affair.
Nura’s mother, my aunt, was standing in the doorway to her house with a neighbor. The expression on her face looked serious, but she was delighted by the jam we brought her. “What a lovely surprise, Farida!” she said, kissing me on the head. “Is it from the trees in your garden? Please give my thanks to your mother!”
Then she told us that Nura’s cousin Ibrahim had contacted his family. Just as we had feared, he had been involved in the fighting in Samarra, and had been shot at too. A bullet had hit his thigh and shattered the bone. Now he was in a military hospital. “He says it’s not so bad and he’s being well looked after,” Nura’s mother told us. She’d just been speaking with the boy’s mother, who naturally was very worried.
“Wouldn’t it be better if he came home?” Evin asked.
“They won’t let him go,” her neighbor replied sadly. As too many soldiers were looking for opportunities to absent themselves from military service, the army had strict rules, particularly for the lowest ranks and for those with no connections to the leadership. “Let’s just hope they really have driven the jihadis from Samarra and that the situation will stay calm there now,” Nura’s mother said, ending the conversation.
SAMARRA, BAQUBA, AND Ramadi were calm the following day, and the attacks almost seemed like a dreadful nightmare. The jihadis seemed to vanish from the face of the earth just as mysteriously as they had appeared. Special forces of the Iraqi army and police secured the three cities. But it would turn out that ISIS had ingeniously distracted the Iraqi military elite from its true target, deliberately diverting our forces.
The next day, June 6, 2014, the first car bomb exploded in Mosul. My younger brothers, who had spent the entire previous day in front of the television, sounded the alarm at once. “Mama! There’s been another explosion!” twelve-year-old Keniwar screamed through the whole house.
My mother and I were just hanging up the washing. We hurried to the television in the sitting room with a mixture of curiosity and foreboding. We would stay there glued to the screen all morning. It wasn’t long before there were four more explosions in Mosul. All five explosive devices had been hidden in cars and detonated right next to the checkpoints the army had set up to protect the city from possible attacks. The explosions were a clear statement of ISIS’s superiority. “You’ve got no defense against us!” they were virtually screaming in our faces.
The poor people of Mosul were screaming too—with pain and fear. The camera showed images of weeping women, shell-shocked inhabitants, emergency medics attending to the injured, and clouds of black smoke above the sites of destruction. They billowed through the busy streets of the metropolis, where chaos appeared to be reigning. Everyone was trying to get to safety. For nobody knew when or where the next detonation would take place.
The newsreader from state television tried to sound calm. “The injured were taken to nearby hospitals,” said the man from Baghdad with the slicked-back hair and gray-and-white-striped tie. “There is no reason to panic. Long diversions are in place for traffic. The police and security forces have brought the city of Mosul completely under their control again.”
I didn’t like the way he tried to emphasize that everything in Mosul was absolutely fine. Nor how he smiled confidently into the camera. I doubted that he believed the words he was reading from his piece of paper. Yesterday Samarra, today Mosul, I thought. And tomorrow? What would happen tomorrow? If the country’s second most important city was such an easy target, then probably nowhere in Iraq was really safe anymore.
From the corner of my eye I could see that my mother was chewing her bottom lip. She didn’t comment on what was happening. But she was quite evidently worried too. Suddenly she got up and went into the garden. Through the window I could see her on the cell phone; I suspected she was calling my father. She gesticulated wildly as she spoke to him. Was she perhaps asking him to come home? These were the moments when we missed him dreadfully. But it was precisely because the situation was so explosive that every man was urgently needed on the border.
When the car bombs went off that morning, we assumed it was an extension of the series of attacks from the day before. And we were shocked by how quickly this metropolis, which was only about one hundred kilometers from our village, had sunk into such chaos. But we had no idea that the situation in Mosul was far more serious. In Samarra, Baquba, and Ramadi the terror had lasted for a day, and we expected it would be similar in Mosul. But we were sorely mistaken.
The systematic seizure of Mosul began the next day. In the early hours a Kurdish broadcaster reported that a huge convoy of vehicles was heading toward Mosul from the Syrian border, each of these packed full of ISIS fighters. The pickups were transporting hundreds of terrorists and were equipped with mounted machine guns. They overran the blockades on the entry routes into Mosul and drove straight into the city center. Suicide bombers attacked police and army buildings in a parallel assault. Street fighting ensued. State television ran special programs all day, which we watched, paralyzed.
Mom no longer made any effort to hide her concern from us. “They’re trying to take the whole city!” she said shrilly the next time she spoke to my father on the phone. She even put it on speakerphone so we could all hear.
“Twenty-five tho
usand of my fellow soldiers are stationed in Mosul. Do you believe they’d let that happen?” Dad’s distorted telephone voice clanged from the cell phone. “We’ve got many times more soldiers than they have, which means the terrorists can’t possibly take Mosul.”
“Do you believe that?” I whispered to Delan. He shook his head. Mom gave us a severe look and we shut up.
“The nightmare will be over tomorrow,” Dad promised us from his border post. Behind him we could hear a muffled rumbling. “I’m afraid I’ve got to go now,” he said. “Don’t worry and see you soon!”
But he would be proven wrong. The fighting continued. And even though the newsreader tried his best to sound as reassuring as my father, on the second day after the attack it no longer looked as if the army would rapidly get a grip of the situation and drive the terrorists from the city. Soon, on roof after roof, black flags with quotations from the Quran appeared, which the ISIS men had hoisted as a sign of their conquest. The television camera showed us a whole sea of such flags.
The president of Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, made an offer to the central government to send his troops to defend Mosul. But in Baghdad they clearly still thought they could handle the problem themselves. The government declined the offer with polite expressions of thanks. “These Arabs are crazy,” Delan groaned. Until recently he too had been contemplating a career in the army. But because of the internal tensions in Iraq that had flared up again, he had decided against it. “They’d rather risk letting Mosul fall into the hands of terrorists than trust a Kurd!”
This decision would come home to roost, and bitterly. On the third day after the onslaught, the chiefs of the Iraqi armed forces climbed aboard a helicopter and fled Mosul, a disastrous signal to the forces on the ground. In a panic, the men who were supposed to be defending and protecting the city got rid of their uniforms and weapons, and tried to escape to the south. Those who fell into the hands of ISIS were brutally slaughtered.
In Kocho we were in shock that Mosul had fallen so quickly. One day after the army had so shamefully abandoned the city, the government gave the Kurdish president, Barzani, official permission to defend Mosul with his Peshmerga, the Kurdish fighters whose name translates as “those who face death.” But there wasn’t anything left to defend. Barzani was able, however, to position the Peshmerga further south to defend against future attacks. The government declared its support for this, because it wanted to prevent ISIS from advancing further northward at any cost. For us too it meant that the Sinjar region was now under the protection of the Kurdish fighters. The Sinjar region is on the edge of Kurdistan, on the border with Arab Iraq. And our village, which lies twenty kilometers south of the mountains, is quite a way into the Arab area. We would far rather be protected by Kurds than Arabs, who historically never proved very loyal to their Kurdish brothers. We’d had quite a lot of quarrels with them in the past. For centuries, Kurds had been suppressed by Arabs, and were always seeking to gain more independence. Just recently, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, they had been able to move closer to their dream of being a separate state. As a first step in this direction, they run the militia, the Peshmerga, as an independent army that is not part of the Iraqi forces. That’s why our mayor immediately provided a house for the four Peshmerga soldiers who arrived soon afterward in Kocho.
WHEN MY FATHER finally returned from his border duty after these eventful days, my brothers and I ran and hugged him furiously. Even my mother, who is usually unsentimental, furtively wiped away a tear, such was her relief at seeing him again, unscathed.
Dad was so ashamed of his fellow soldiers’ failure and cowardly flight that he could barely look us in the eye. “I don’t understand it,” he said over and over again. “They let themselves get chased off by a paltry bunch of terrorists.” In their defense, however, he added that the citizens of Mosul hadn’t made it easy for the soldiers. The majority Sunni city had always regarded the army as an alien element, as it followed the orders of the Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki, a president they hated and regarded as Tehran’s puppet. ISIS had taken perfect advantage of this.
“Do the people of Mosul prefer the jihadis?” I asked him, nonplussed.
He shrugged. “These feuds have no logic. Sometimes people need to experience the greater evil to understand which is the lesser evil.”
Dad went out onto the terrace, sat on a chair, and rolled up the sleeves of his uniform, revealing his muscular, suntanned arms. I loved seeing just what a handsome and powerful man he was. As a little child I’d always felt safe and secure in those arms of his. And even now, on the threshold of becoming an adult, I wished for nothing more than to be held tightly by him while somewhere in the distance the world outside was falling apart.
I brought Dad his water pipe that he loved puffing away at in the evenings, and sat beside him. He filled it with his favorite apple-flavored tobacco. Taking the first drag with relish, he then blew out the sweet smoke.
“I don’t want you to go back to the border,” I told him. “I’d much rather you stayed with us.”
“But, Farida, I have to go back. Who else is going to earn the money so we can all eat?”
“But it’s too dangerous! These people don’t respect any borders. Didn’t you see how quickly they got to Mosul?”
“That’s precisely why we need men to protect the country,” he argued. “Brave men. Not cowards who run away when it gets too risky.”
“Who’s going to protect us here?” I demanded vehemently.
For a moment Dad appeared to be stumped. But then he recovered. “You,” he said, giving me a hard stare. “Or do you think teaching you how to shoot was a waste of time?”
“No, Papa.” I wasn’t sure whether he was being serious or joking. At any rate I didn’t want to disappoint him.
“You, Delan, and Serhad. You’re the older ones. You have to look after the rest of the family while I’m away. Do you promise me you will, my daughter?”
I gave a shy nod of the head. He pinched my cheek affectionately. “Don’t be afraid, Farida,” he said. “They certainly won’t get this far. We’ll all be on the lookout together: you, me, and the Peshmerga.” Turning his face to the setting sun, he put his hands together solemnly. “And of course our Lord, Melek Taus. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” I mumbled, partially reassured.
Even the advancing jihadis were powerless against my father’s optimism.
But that would soon change.
{ Three }
The Catastrophe
I spent the following days numb in front of the television, watching what was playing out before my eyes. The terrorists were drunk on their success in Mosul. While the inhabitants fled the city in hordes, the terrorists looted banks, museums, and government buildings. They freed all the Sunnis who had been imprisoned because of terrorist acts or their affinity to al Qaeda and made them swear allegiance, thereby doubling the number of their fighters in one fell swoop. It was reported that their next move was to take the capital. Their spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, told the cameras, “Rather than indulging your egos, head for Baghdad.” To the rejoicing of their supporters, his soldiers broke through the earthwork, which till then had marked the border between Syria and Iraq. An ISIS fighter said that the “grandsons of monkeys” had drawn the border and that it was no longer valid. The division of Muslims into separate national states belonged to the past, he said.
The politicians whose speeches I also watched on the television repeated over and over again that the capital was secure. But hadn’t they said the same about Mosul? Although the Sunnis were in the minority in Baghdad compared to the Shias, they would doubtless fight on the side of ISIS if it came to a conflict. For this reason some voiced the fear that Baghdad could be overthrown from inside. What would happen next? Would the terrorists conquer the entire country? Thank goodness, I thought, that the ISIS fighters didn’t have a foothold in the Kurdish north and the Shia south.
At the beginning of July, a m
an around forty years old, with closely knit, bushy eyebrows and a long gray beard, appeared in front of the cameras. This man, wearing a turban and dark preacher’s robes, announced that he was the new legitimate ruler of Iraq and Syria. He called himself “caliph,” by which—as I knew from school—he claimed to be both the spiritual and political leader of the Muslims. Not just the Muslims in Iraq and Syria, mind you, but all the Muslims in the world. The title caliph, which Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had selected for himself, implied nothing less than that he considered himself to be the successor of the Prophet Muhammad.
Of course, state television declined to show scenes of propaganda like this. But a friend of my brother Delan had sent him a YouTube link of the clip, which meant he could view it on his cell phone. “You’ve got to see this, Farida,” he said. “This guy founds a new state just like that.” And so together the two of us watched the “caliph’s” inaugural speech.
“Rejoice, await good things, and hold your heads high,” Baghdadi said in a mosque in Mosul, reminding his followers of how the Muslim world was humiliated during colonial rule. That era has never been forgotten in this region, and the sting of indignity continues to be deeply felt. “For today, thanks to the grace of God, you have a state and caliphate which will restore your dignity and greatness, and win back your rights and sovereignty. A state in which the Persian and the Aryan, the white man and black man, the Easterner and Westerner live together as brothers. A caliphate which unites the Caucasian, the Indian and the Chinese, the Syrian, Iraqi, and Yemeni, the Egyptian, Moroccan, and American, the French, German, and Australian.”
“German and Australian?” I asked Delan, confused. Since when did Muslims live there? What was this man talking about?
“I think he’s inviting all the butchers of the world to come to his self-styled Islamic State,” my brother said.
The Girl Who Escaped ISIS Page 3
