The Girl Who Escaped ISIS

by Farida Khalaf

I HAD AN attack that same night. It developed from a dream in which Amjed pointed his fat, fleshy fingers at me. These fingers had soon grown huge and surrounded me on all sides. I felt unable to breathe. In my dream—but in real life too—the very familiar twitching and jerking began. My racket must have woken the other girls and Evin, who lay beside me. But I have no recollection of this.

  When I came to, the light in the container was on and all the girls were standing around me. There was a look of horror on their faces. Evin was holding my torso tightly and pressing me onto the mattress. “Farida!” she called out. “Can you hear me? Please wake up, Farida!”

  “Yes,” I replied weakly. Evin stroked my face. The sight of my friend comforted me a little. I soon realized what had happened.

  “Everything’s all right,” Evin said to me. “You mustn’t worry.”

  “Yes, Evin,” I said politely.

  “It’s all over now,” she reassured me. “Come on, let’s go back to sleep. You’ll have forgotten everything by the morning.”

  I started to cry. No, there was one thing I knew I’d never forget. If I ever regained my freedom, I’d scream out this injustice to the whole world.

  Subsequently Amjed forced me into his container on a number of occasions. Each time I fought with him: I screamed, bit him, thrashed around, and used all my strength to spoil his fun. I had no desire to be an easy victim; I wanted him to tire himself out and lose the urge before it happened. But in the end he always got the upper hand because he was physically stronger. He had no regard any longer for the state of my health, which continued to be precarious.

  Each time he would carry out his religious ritual beforehand. This I found especially repellent. How could these oh-so-pious people pass the responsibility for their sordid acts on to their God? These people believed Hell existed, so did they harbor no concerns about being dragged down there and called to account? I couldn’t understand how they could view what they did as their religious right. Couldn’t they see that by making such claims, they were lying to themselves first and foremost? Their behavior was not in the least God-fearing; it was inhumane and a disgrace to their religion, which they thereby dishonored.

  Now that I was regarded as healthy again, the men also forced me to take part in the daily prayers. I resisted, of course. The first morning they requested me to join, I got Evin to tell them that the doctor had forbidden me to carry out the movements, because I had to protect my back.

  “You say to her that if she doesn’t stop telling lies, we’ll force her along,” came their aggressive reply. “When she’s healthy it’s her ‘owner’ who decides what happens, not the doctor.” Before Evin could finish translating they had already grabbed my arms and were lugging me outside. “Get up!” they ordered. “Pray!”

  “Tell them I can’t,” I said to Evin, as I sat motionless on the prayer mat. Soon they started hitting me with the butts of their rifles.

  “If you don’t start showing respect for the one true God, we’ll see to it that you really won’t be able to get up.”

  “Tell them that their God will be ashamed of them,” I told Evin, painstakingly imitating a genuflection so that they would finally leave me in peace. “Tell them they’re committing a great sin and that they’ll burn in hell for it!”

  These altercations were almost a daily occurrence. The other girls and I did our best to provoke the men when we were forced to pray. Sometimes we recited the surahs wrongly, or we’d only make halfhearted attempts at the movements. But we always ensured that these displays of resistance were barely noticeable, for open rebellion was punished severely. Once I was even shot at by a soldier, because supposedly I hadn’t been praying correctly. I screamed in horror. In truth, however, I’m sure he deliberately aimed away from my body; he was just out to terrify me.

  On another occasion I managed to convince the girls to turn up to prayer unveiled. Alarmed, the pious men covered their eyes with their hands when we stepped out of the container. Some, especially the younger men among them, took the ISIS ideology very seriously. They really believed they’d joined a God-fearing outfit and were fighting for a just cause. As they regarded Islam—or their interpretation of it—as a panacea, they thought it capable of solving all problems. These young boys were utterly naive and blinded. Even when they beat us after such shows of defiance, so we wouldn’t dare repeat them, they believed they were serving their God and doing good. When will they finally wake up, I wondered.

  They were very serious about trying to make us convert to Islam, which is why they weren’t just content to force their prayers on us. They took great pains to turn us into Muslim women, giving us religious education twice a week. This basically consisted of two bearded men coming into the container to read the Quran with us. They claimed to be imams. But as far as I know they weren’t real clerics with proper training, just self-appointed Quran specialists. Evin, who spoke the best Arabic among us, had to translate for these “teachers,” and soon earned the nickname “Imam” from us.

  Once during a lesson we were interrogated. One of the guards must have caught us turning to the sun on the steps of our container and told the “teachers” about it. “Did you pray to the sun?” they asked us severely.

  “Not at all,” Evin affirmed without hesitation.

  But I saw it as a challenge. Surely this was the perfect opportunity to engage in a debate with our tormentors. Their objective was to proselytize us; mine was to sow doubt in their minds about whether they really knew their religion, by confronting them with the same religious texts they were serving up to us.

  “Your religion does not permit you to impose your faith on us,” I told them through Evin, as we were still pretending that I didn’t understand their language. “The second surah says: ‘There shall be no compulsion in the religion.’ Are we supposed to learn this by heart but ignore its meaning? What kind of ridiculous piety is that?”

  The men seemed slightly rattled. Evin backed me up, citing another place in their holy book. Right at the end, in the 109th surah, it says, “For you is your religion and for me is my religion.” Pointing to the sentence, she said, “Here it is in black and white! What gives you the right to assume your religion is the only true one when your prophet says otherwise?”

  “There’s something you haven’t understood,” the men said. “Here the Prophet is referring to other religions with holy scriptures; so long as they pay the head tax, Jews and Christians enjoy our protection. But you don’t. You are idolaters, devil worshippers even.”

  “No we’re not!”

  “Be quiet, girl. What do you lot understand of Islam?” This is how it always went. Whenever they were at a loss they’d insult us, say we were “infidels,” and forbid us to talk because they’d run out of arguments.

  Sometimes we’d go at them personally. “Why did you desert your families?” we said provocatively. “Why did you go to war to kill people? Doesn’t your religion command that you look after your fathers and mothers?”

  “Our parents weren’t proper Muslims, so we had to leave them,” they responded, and probably meant it too. “We’re fighting for a caliphate in which justice will prevail and everyone will live according to God’s laws.”

  “They’re not God’s laws, they’re not even the laws of Islam. You’ve made them up!”

  “Quiet!” they shouted, threatening us with the cane, their secret educational weapon. “By next time you’ll have learned the ten verses of the second surah by heart. All of them, do you understand? Woe betide anyone who can’t recite them.”

  This was always our “homework.” We had to learn by heart the sections of text we’d read together. At the next session the teachers would test us, caning anyone who couldn’t recite the verses. Usually everyone was beaten, because none of us had any desire to adopt their faith. Given all that we’d had to endure, that really was asking too much.

  But the ISIS men were genuine fanatics; they actually believed that they could summon magical powers j
ust by uttering the surahs, somehow mysteriously drawing us over to their side. Oh, how wrong they were! With everything they tried to funnel into our minds, they were merely fueling our rejection and contempt.

  From week to week the instruction became more onerous, and we were permanently threatened with the cane. “You’re so stupid it’s exasperating,” they bellowed. “Your heads are empty!”

  One of them took things too far. As he told us, his motive was personal. The man had accidentally run over two Muslims in his car, and in a fit of repentance he’d promised his God that he’d compensate for the deaths by creating two new Muslims. And so two of us girls were to learn the entire Quran by heart. He was particularly set on twelve-year-old Besma, as he considered her the most malleable on account of her tender age. He’d administer an especially violent beating if she failed to learn anything.

  The only time we had any peace in the camp was when the men were caught up in battle. They’d lock us in our container and leave us in the camp, deserted save for a handful of guards. We’d breathe a sigh of relief: no prayers, no forced visits to other containers, no beatings, no indoctrination.

  On the other hand there was nothing to eat during these periods either, which often lasted several days. When Azzad, the young man I’d first belonged to, wasn’t in the camp, nobody thought of providing for us. We would have to drink the dirty tap water and also use it to soften the dried slices of bread we’d collected and kept for such an eventuality. The door remained locked until our “owners” returned and demanded our company once more.

  ALTHOUGH EACH OF us belonged to one man, these could change over time. If he became tired of his girl, didn’t like her anymore, or she’d started to bore him, he’d sell her to another ISIS soldier.

  Evin was one of the first this happened to. One day Mahmudi came to our container and told her that she was now the “property” of his friend Abu Muzaffar. Mahmudi had been an extremely brutal individual, who had beaten her regularly because it excited him sexually, so Evin wasn’t sad to be rid of him. But when she heard that her new “owner” was already waiting outside to enjoy her, she was shocked. Her face was ashen when the guards took her outside. At that moment I felt deeply sorry for my friend.

  And yet I was pleased that Mahmudi had “only” sold her to another man in the camp, as at least it meant she would stay with me. I knew that without Evin I would go mad here.

  Besma too soon found out that her “owner” had changed. The Libyan Jamal had sold her to a compatriot. “Go to Fahed,” Jamal told her. “You belong to him now.”

  But she refused. “I don’t belong to him and I never belonged to you either,” she protested bravely. “You’ve got no right to sell me.”

  “Oh really?” he said, amused. He offered her his rifle. “Take it. Kill yourself if you don’t want to go to him.”

  Besma took the gun and chucked it on the floor. She knew he was just teasing her and that the gun wasn’t loaded, which is why she didn’t bother trying to use it. In any case, our desire to take our own lives had passed by this stage. The worst thing they could do to us had already occurred long ago. There was only one thing we wanted now: to survive this nightmare and bear witness. “Why should I do that? Kill yourself instead!” Besma said.

  “Goodness me! I’ve never seen you so feisty!” Jamal laughed. Then he beat her until she was lying on the floor, groaning in pain. Besma still had to go to Fahed afterward.

  One day Amjed told me that he was leaving the camp to go and fight with another ISIS unit in Raqqa. It was obvious that he felt like a stranger among all the Libyans here. At first I thought I’d be rid of him, and was already secretly celebrating. But then it dawned on me that, as his “property,” of course I’d be moving with him. “No!” I screamed, kneeling before him.

  Through Evin, who continued to act as my translator, I let him know that I couldn’t under any circumstances go without her. “You know better than all the others that my sister is seriously ill,” Evin implored him. “Please let me stay with her. Farida won’t survive without me.”

  “I’m not that keen on taking her anyway,” Amjed said bad-temperedly. “This girl is really no fun at all; she’d just be a millstone around my neck.”

  “Then ask around the camp to see if someone wants to buy her,” Evin suggested. Although supposedly I didn’t understand a word of Arabic, I gave my friend an angry look when she said this. But then I realized that Evin’s strategy made sense. In the logic of these men there were only two possibilities for us to stay together: either Amjed bought Evin—which I considered most unlikely, as he wasn’t a particularly rich man and, in any case, he’d had quite enough of me—or he found someone else in the camp to buy me. I was nauseated by the idea of having to put up with another man, irrespective of who he was. But in principle Amjed seemed to find Evin’s suggestion a good one.

  “No one’s going to want this girl,” he moaned, “because she’s such a devil. My God, I really ought to have gotten rid of her long ago.”

  I couldn’t help smiling to myself. Aha, I thought. My struggles and constant attempts at resistance were not completely ineffectual. I’d succeeded in spoiling Amjed’s fun. And it also seemed that word had got around among the others that they wouldn’t have an easy time with me. In view of all the hardship we’d had to bear, this at least was a minor victory.

  “You might find someone interested in Farida,” my friend said, looking so mischievous that I was confused. What was she up to?

  “I’ve got an idea,” Evin whispered to me when Amjed had left.

  “What?”

  “We’ll ask Azzad to buy you.”

  “Azzad?” I looked at Evin in astonishment. She was talking about my former “owner,” the nice young man who brought us food. The same man who said he regretted having joined ISIS and who, when I arrived in the camp, couldn’t wait to sell me on, which we’d always interpreted as moral fiber. But perhaps it had just been awkwardness. Could we convince him to save me?

  “I’ll put it to him,” Evin said. “I mean, we’ve got nothing to lose.”

  She was right. Given the alternative of going with Amjed to Raqqa and leaving Evin behind, we could leave no stone unturned. We couldn’t allow them to separate us again. I knew that without Evin’s maternal care I wouldn’t survive imprisonment, neither physically nor mentally. No, I couldn’t be without her. On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine Azzad going along with her suggestion. After all, he didn’t want a slave and he’d already passed me on once before, virtually for nothing.

  “Wouldn’t it be better to try running away?” I asked her. By now I was able to walk again, although I couldn’t move quickly. I still had a pronounced limp. What was more, our prison was in the middle of the military camp, surrounded on all sides by containers in which the soldiers lived. An outer ring of guards protected the camp itself. So it certainly wouldn’t be easy.

  However, I’d recently exploited my purported inability to understand Arabic and listened in to a conversation among the soldiers. Some of them had evidently been approached by people smugglers asking about the girls in the camp. From what they said I inferred that they were toying with the idea of supplementing their pay by giving information. Naturally this was exciting news for us girls. Were our relatives using this method to look for us? Perhaps some of the men would prove open to bribery.

  “We’ll run away as soon as the opportunity presents itself,” Evin promised. “But first, we’ve got to buy some time.”

  I looked at her doubtfully.

  “If Azzad says no, we can always try to escape,” she conceded.

  We didn’t know for sure when Amjed was planning to leave, so we had no time to lose. The next time Azzad stood outside our door with a plate of steaming rice, Evin quickly pulled him into the container. The young Syrian was rather taken by surprise, for men who weren’t our “owners” weren’t actually allowed inside the container.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, bemused.


  “You’ve always been good to us, Azzad,” Evin said, and I saw him blush at her words. This made me happy; although he was a soldier, Azzad had clearly not lost all of his humanity. “Now we need your help.”

  Azzad frowned. Maybe he was worried that we’d ask him to help us escape. That would be terribly risky for him; I knew he couldn’t agree to it. “What can I do for you?” he asked cautiously.

  “You’ve got to buy Farida back,” Evin said. “Otherwise Amjed will take her with him to Raqqa.”

  Now Azzad stared at us in disbelief. “Does Amjed know of your plan?” he asked.

  “No, but I think he’d be open to it,” Evin said.

  Azzad turned to me and I lowered my gaze in shame.

  “I’ll think about it,” he promised.

  “Please don’t take too long.”

  EVIN’S PLAN ACTUALLY worked. A few days later, a content Amjed let me know that he was rid of me. Azzad had taken me back, he said. I’ve no idea what sort of financial arrangement the men came to, but I gave a sigh of relief; Azzad really was a good man, I thought. Perhaps everything would be different now. Perhaps he would even help us escape.

  Soon afterward Azzad called for me, something he’d never done before. Two of his comrades came to fetch me. I had a strange feeling as they accompanied me to his container. There Azzad was sitting on his bed, his rifle close at hand. He didn’t beat around the bush; he was one of the few who knew I spoke excellent Arabic.

  “Farida, I want to take you as my wife,” he said.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I’d briefly regarded this man as my savior, but the spell had quickly been broken. How could I have been so stupid and so wrong about him? I realized that Azzad had only spurned me when I arrived in the camp because I was in such an appalling state. Now that I was better again, he saw things differently. He wasn’t one iota better than the other ISIS men; he wanted to have sex with me. And like the others, he too was quite happy to use his rifle to claim his supposed right.