The Last Girl

by Nadia Murad

  Sinjar is a disputed territory—claimed by both Baghdad and Kurdistan—strategically close to Mosul and Syria and potentially rich with natural gas. Like Kirkuk, another disputed territory in eastern Iraq, Kurdish political parties consider Sinjar to be part of their greater Kurdish homeland. According to them, without Sinjar, the Kurdish nation, if there ever is one, would be born incomplete. After 2003, with American support, and with the Sunni Arabs steadily losing wealth and power, Kurds who were aligned with the KDP happily came to fill the void in Sinjar. They established political offices and staffed those offices with party members. With the Sunni insurgency mounting, they manned checkpoints along our roads. They told us that Saddam was wrong to call us Arabs; we had always been Kurds.

  In Kocho the changes after 2003 were huge. Within a couple of years, the Kurds started building a cell phone tower, and after school I would go with friends just outside the village to watch the giant, metal structure grow out of our farmland like a skyscraper. “Finally Kocho will be connected to the rest of the world!” my brothers said, delighted, and soon enough, most of the men and some of the women had cell phones. Satellite dishes installed on the roofs of houses meant we were no longer limited to Syrian films and Iraqi state TV, and Saddam’s marches and speeches disappeared from our living room. My uncle was among the first to get a satellite dish, and as soon as he did, we all crowded into his sitting room to see what was on. My brothers looked for the news, particularly on Kurdish channels, and I became addicted to a Turkish soap opera where the characters constantly fell in and out of love.

  We had resisted calling ourselves Arab, but being told that we were Kurdish was easier for some to accept. Many Yazidis feel close to a Kurdish identity—we share a language and ethnic heritage—and it was impossible to ignore the improvements in Sinjar after the Kurds came in, even if it had more to do with the United States than with Barzani. Jobs in the military and security forces were suddenly open to Yazidis, and some of my brothers and cousins traveled to Erbil to work in the hotels and restaurants; a new one seemed to be built every day. They quickly filled with oil workers or tourists from other parts of Iraq looking for a cooler climate, reliable electricity, or a break from the violence plaguing the rest of the country. My brother Saoud worked construction jobs near Duhok, in the west of Kurdistan, operating a cement mixer. He would come home with stories of Kurds who, like Arabs, looked down on Yazidis. Still, we needed the money.

  Khairy began working as a border guard, and soon afterward Hezni became a policeman in Sinjar City. Their salaries gave our family our first steady income, and we started to live what felt like real lives, thinking about the future and not just the next day. We bought our own land to farm and our own sheep to herd and didn’t have to work for landlords anymore. The paved roads outside Kocho made it much quicker to drive to the mountain. We picnicked in the fields near the village, eating plates of meat and chopped vegetables, the men drinking Turkish beer and then tea so sweet it made my lips pucker. Our weddings grew even more elaborate; women sometimes made two trips to Sinjar City for clothes, and men slaughtered more lambs—and if they were very well-off, a cow—to share with the guests.

  Some Yazidis envisioned a future Sinjar with a strong local government that was still in Iraq, but others thought we would eventually be part of an independent Kurdistan. With the KDP office in Kocho and the peshmerga in Sinjar, I grew up thinking that was our destiny. We became more distant from our Sunni Arab neighbors. While travel to Kurdistan got easier, it became harder to get to the Sunni villages where insurgents, and the extremist theology that guided them, were gaining ground. Sunni Arabs, meanwhile, didn’t like the Kurdish presence in Sinjar. It reminded them of the power they had lost, and they said that with the Kurds in control, they didn’t feel welcome in Sinjar and could no longer visit Yazidi villages, even the ones where their kiriv lived. Kurdish peshmerga interrogated them at checkpoints that were once manned by Baathists, and many lost their salaries and jobs when the Americans came and dismantled Saddam’s institutions. Only recently they had been the richest and best-connected people in the country, but with a Shiite government supported by the occupying Americans in power, Sunni Arabs suddenly lost their power. Isolated in their villages, they would soon decide to fight back. Within years that fight became fueled by a religious intolerance that made Yazidis, even though we had never had any power in Iraq, their target.

  I didn’t know then that the Kurdish government was content to distance Yazidis from our Arab neighbors because it helped them in their campaign to take over Sinjar, or how disruptive the American occupation was for ordinary Sunnis. I was unaware that, while I went to school, an unnamed insurgency was paving the way for Al Qaeda, and eventually ISIS, to flourish in our neighboring villages. Sunni tribes across Iraq tried, and mostly failed, to rebel against the Shiite authority in Baghdad and the Americans. They became accustomed to violence and harsh rule, which went on for so long that many Sunnis my age and younger grew up knowing nothing but war and the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam that became part of that war.

  ISIS built up slowly in those villages just beyond our borders, a spark that I didn’t notice until it became a bonfire. For a young Yazidi girl, life only got better after the Americans and the Kurds took over. Kocho was expanding, I was going to school, and we were gradually lifting ourselves out of poverty. A new constitution gave more power to the Kurds and demanded that minorities be part of the government. I knew that my country was at war, but it didn’t seem like it was our fight.

  In the beginning, American soldiers visited Kocho almost once a week to hand out food and supplies and talk to the village leaders. Did we need schools? Paved roads? Running water so that we no longer had to buy tanks off of trucks? The answer to all of it, of course, was yes. Ahmed Jasso invited the soldiers over for large, elaborate meals, and our men glowed with pride when the Americans said they felt so safe in Kocho they could lean their weapons against the walls and relax. “They know the Yazidis will protect them,” Ahmed Jasso said.

  Kids ran to the American soldiers when they pulled into Kocho, their armored cars kicking up dust and drowning out the village noises with their loud motors. They gave us gum and candy and took photos of us smiling with the presents. We marveled at their crisp uniforms and the friendly, conversational way they approached us, so unlike the Iraqi soldiers before them. They raved to our parents about Kocho hospitality, how comfortable and clean our village was, and how well we understood that America had liberated us from Saddam. “Americans love the Yazidis,” they told us. “And Kocho especially. We feel at home here.” Even when their visits slowed to a trickle and then stopped completely, we held on to the American praise like a badge of honor.

  In 2006, when I was thirteen, one of the American soldiers gave me a ring as a present. It was a simple band with a small red stone, the first piece of jewelry I’d ever owned. It instantly became my most valued possession. I wore it everywhere—to school, digging on the farm, at home watching my mother bake bread, even to sleep at night. After a year, it had become too small for my ring finger, and I moved it onto my pinky so I wouldn’t have to leave it at home. But it slid up and down on that finger, barely catching on my knuckle, and I worried about losing it. I glanced at it constantly to make sure it was still there, curling my hand into a fist to feel it pressing against my finger.

  Then one day I was out with my siblings planting rows of onion seedlings when I looked down and noticed that the ring was gone. I already hated planting the onions—each one had to be laid carefully into the cold dirt, and even the seedlings made your fingers and hands stink—and now I was furious at the tiny plants, digging frantically through them, trying to find my present. My siblings, noticing my panic, asked me what had happened. “I lost the ring!” I told them, and they stopped working to help look. They knew how important it was to me.

  We walked our entire field, searching in the dark dirt for a little glimpse of gold and red, but no matter how ha
rd we looked and how much I cried, we couldn’t find the ring. When the sun started to set, we had no choice but to give up and go home for dinner. “Nadia, it’s no big deal,” Elias said as we walked home. “It’s just a little thing. You’ll have more jewelry in your life.” But I cried for days. I was sure that I would never have anything as nice again and I worried that the American soldier, if he ever came back, would be angry with me for losing his present.

  A year later a miracle happened. Picking the new onions that had sprouted from those seedlings, Khairy saw a small gold band poking out of the dirt. “Nadia, your ring!” My brother beamed, presenting it to me, and I ran to him, grabbing it out of his hand and hugging him, my hero. When I tried to slip it on, though, I found that, no matter how hard I tried, the ring was now too small even for my pinky. Later my mother saw it lying on my dresser and urged me to sell it. “It doesn’t fit you anymore, Nadia,” she said. “There’s no point in keeping it if you can’t wear it.” For her, poverty was just one wrong move away. Because I always did what she said, I went to a jewelry seller in the Sinjar City bazaar, who bought the ring from me.

  Afterward I felt heavy with guilt. The ring had been a gift, and it didn’t seem right for me to sell it. I worried what the soldier would say if he returned and asked about his present. Would he think that I had betrayed him? That I didn’t love the ring? The armored cars were already pulling up to Kocho much less frequently—fighting had grown worse in the rest of the country, and the Americans were stretched thin—and I hadn’t seen that particular soldier in months. Some of my neighbors complained that the Americans had forgotten about us, and they worried that without contact with them, Yazidis would be unprotected. But I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to explain what happened to the ring. Maybe the soldier who gave it to me, even though he was kind, would be upset that I had sold his present to the jewelry merchant in Sinjar City. Coming from America, he might not understand what even that small amount of money meant to us.

  Chapter 5

  When things were really bad in Iraq, Yazidis in Kocho usually felt the impact of the violence like the aftershocks of an earthquake. We were removed from the worst of it—the battles between insurgents and American marines in Anbar Province, the rise of Shiite authoritarianism in Baghdad, and the strengthening of Al Qaeda. We watched on TV and worried about the men in our village who were working for the police and the army, but Kocho was spared the suicide bombings and roadside IEDs that seemed to happen every day in the rest of the country. Iraq today is so fractured that it may be impossible to repair: we watched it break from afar.

  Khairy, Hezni, and Jalo would return home after long posts with stories of the battles outside. Sometimes they went to Kurdistan, where terrorist attacks were almost unheard of. Other times they were sent outside peshmerga-protected areas into the unknown parts of Iraq, which scared those of us they left behind. Those jobs could be extremely dangerous. Even if you didn’t encounter fighting or terrorism, working with the Americans as a translator made you a target. Many Yazidi men sought asylum in the United States because their lives had been threatened after insurgents discovered they had worked for the Americans.

  The war dragged on for much longer than anyone expected it to. People quickly forgot about those exhilarating first few months just after Saddam had been ousted, when his statue fell in Baghdad’s Firdos Square and American soldiers fanned out across the country shaking hands with villagers, promising to build schools, free political prisoners, and make life easier for average Iraqis. By 2007, just a few years after the fall of Saddam, Iraq was plagued with violence, and the United States sent in more than twenty thousand additional soldiers—calling it a “surge”—mostly as a response to increased violence in Anbar and Baghdad. For a while, the surge seemed to work. Attacks decreased, and marines took over the cities, going door-to-door looking for insurgents. But for Yazidis, the year of the surge was the year the war arrived on our doorstep.

  In August 2007, the worst terrorist attack of the entire Iraq War—and the second deadliest terrorist attack in history—took place in Siba Sheikh Khider and Tel Ezeir (also known by their Baathist names Qahtaniya and Jazeera), two Yazidi towns slightly west of Kocho. Around dinnertime on August 14, a fuel tanker and three cars, which some people heard were carrying supplies and food to the Yazidis living there, parked in the centers of the towns and blew themselves up. Eight hundred people died, ripped apart by the bombs or trapped under collapsed buildings, and over a thousand were injured. The explosions were so enormous, we could see the flames and smoke all the way over in Kocho. We began to scan the roads leading to our village, frightened by any cars we didn’t recognize.

  As horrible as the attacks were, it had only been a matter of time. Tension had been rising between Yazidis and Sunni Arabs for years, most recently because of Kurdish influence in Sinjar and ongoing radicalization in the Sunni areas. Then earlier that year, just a few months into the American surge, Sunnis vowed to avenge the death of a young Yazidi woman named Du’a Khalil Aswad, who had been gruesomely stoned to death by her relatives after they suspected she wanted to convert to Islam and marry a Muslim man. It didn’t matter that Yazidis were equally horrified by Du’a’s death; outsiders called us savage and anti-Muslim.

  Honor killings happen in Yazidi society, as they do in all of Iraq, and conversion out of the faith is seen as a betrayal of the family and community, in part because over the centuries Yazidis have been forced to convert in order to save their lives. Still, we do not kill women and men who leave Yazidism, and we were ashamed by what Du’a’s family did to her. Not only was she stoned to death while people watched, horrified but unable or unwilling to stop it, but a video of her murder was then broadcast online, picked up by news stations, and used as an excuse to attack us, no matter how strongly we condemned it.

  As soon as the story of Du’a began to spread, propaganda calling us infidels and worthy of death—language similar to what ISIS uses today—began circulating around Mosul. Kurds, who are mostly Sunni, also turned against us. We lived in shame and fear. Yazidi university students dropped out of schools in Kurdistan and Mosul, and Yazidis living abroad suddenly found themselves having to defend themselves to people who might never have even heard of Yazidism before and who now thought we were a religion of murderers.

  Since Yazidis had no real representatives in the media and no strong voice in politics to explain what had really happened, the hatred against us in Sunni communities grew. Maybe it had always been there, just beneath the surface. Now it was all out in the open, and it spread quickly. Two weeks after Du’a was killed, Sunni gunmen stopped a bus carrying Yazidis and executed twenty-three of the passengers, saying they were avenging Du’a’s death. We braced ourselves for more attacks, but we could never have imagined something on the scale of what happened in Siba Sheikh Khider and Tel Ezeir.

  As soon as they saw the explosions, my brothers piled into cars and drove toward the destruction, joining hundreds of Yazidis who carried food, mattresses, and medicine to the villages. They returned home later that night, their heads hung with sadness and exhaustion. “It was worse than anything you could imagine,” Elias said. “The towns are destroyed, and the dead are everywhere.”

  My mother sat them down and made tea while they cleaned the filth off their hands. “I saw a body torn in half,” Hezni said, shaking. “It looks like the whole town is covered in blood.” The explosions ripped bodies apart with such force that hair and pieces of clothing clung to the power lines high above the streets. Hospitals and clinics quickly ran out of space and medication. Shawkat, a friend of my brother’s, was so distraught at seeing a body being dragged by the feet that he grabbed it out of the medic’s hands and carried it to the morgue himself. “It was someone’s father or son,” he said. “Just being dragged like that, through the dust.”

  Family members circled the destruction in a daze, pushing silently through air thick with smoke and dust. Or they screamed for their loved ones, some o
f whom would die long before their families stopped looking for them. Eventually, after the village had been cleaned up and as many bodies as possible identified, those family members would have to mourn at mass graves. “Maybe it is worse to survive,” Hezni said.

  After that attack, we took some precautions. Men guarded Kocho in shifts, two stationed on the east side and two on the west, armed with Kalashnikovs and pistols. They questioned anyone riding in unfamiliar cars—mostly Sunni Arabs and Kurds whom we didn’t recognize—and were on constant lookout for anyone who seemed threatening. Other Yazidis made dirt barricades around their towns and dug trenches so that car bombs couldn’t drive in. Even though in Kocho we were very close to the Sunni Arab villages, we didn’t pile dirt or dig a trench until years later. I don’t know why—maybe we still had hope that our relationships with our neighbors were strong enough to protect us. Maybe we didn’t want to feel trapped and isolated. After a year went by without another attack, the men left their guard posts.

  Hezni was the only one in my family who tried to leave Iraq. This was in 2009, two years after the attack. He had fallen in love with Jilan, our neighbor’s daughter, but Jilan’s parents disapproved of the match because we had so little money compared to them. This didn’t stop Hezni from trying. When Jilan’s parents wouldn’t let my brother come into their home to visit with her, the two climbed onto the rooftops and talked across the narrow alley that separated our homes. When Jilan’s parents built a wall around the perimeter of their roof to hide their daughter, Hezni piled up bricks until, standing on them, he was tall enough to see over the wall. “Nothing can stop me,” Hezni said. He was naturally shy, but he had fallen so much in love that he seemed willing to do anything to be with Jilan.