The Last Girl

by Nadia Murad

  Usually Kathrine and I labored over our long hair, conditioning it with palmfuls of olive oil and coloring it with henna, but today we hadn’t even bothered to comb it. My niece was pale and silent, and I suddenly felt much, much older than her. I wanted to make her feel better. “Don’t worry,” I told her, taking her hand. “Everything is going to be all right.” It was what my mother told me, and even though I hadn’t believed her, it had been her job to stay hopeful for her children just as it was now my job to stay hopeful for Kathrine.

  Elias came into the courtyard, and everyone turned toward him. He was breathing quickly, as though he had raced home from the jevat, and he tried to calm himself before he started talking. “Daesh has surrounded Kocho,” he said. “It’s not possible to leave.”

  The Islamic State commander had warned the men at the jevat that if they tried to escape, they would be punished. “He said that four families have already tried,” Elias told us. “They stopped them. The men refused to convert. They killed them. The women held on to their children. They separated them. They took their cars and their daughters.”

  “Surely the peshmerga will come back,” my mother whispered from where she sat. “We have to pray. God will save us.”

  “Someone will come to help us,” Massoud said. He was angry. “They can’t just leave us here.”

  “The commander said we should call our relatives on Mount Sinjar and tell them to come back down and turn themselves in,” Elias continued. “They said to tell them that if they leave the mountain, they will be spared.”

  We were silent, absorbing this news. In spite of all the hardships on top of the mountain, at least the Yazidis who had made it there were away from ISIS. We trusted the mountain to protect us from persecution. Over generations Yazidis had fled to the safety of its caves, drunk from its streams, and survived on figs and pomegranates picked from its trees. Our temples and sheikhs surrounded it, and we thought God must be watching it especially closely. Hezni had made it from Sinjar City to the mountain, and when he called, he would chastise us for worrying about him. “You are crying for us, but we are crying for you,” he said. “We are already saved.”

  We would do what the militants told us to do. When they came door-to-door to collect the villagers’ weapons, we handed over all but one gun, which we buried on our farm late one night when we thought they wouldn’t be able to see. We wouldn’t try to escape. Every day Elias or another brother would go to the jevat to get orders from the Islamic State commander, and then he would come home to give us the news. We stayed indoors and were quiet. That buried gun would, in the end, stay buried. But no matter what promises ISIS made, we would sooner die than tell Hezni or anyone else to leave Mount Sinjar. Everyone knew what would happen to the Yazidis if they came down from the mountain.

  Chapter 7

  The siege of Kocho lasted for close to two weeks. Some days passed by in one big blur, every moment just like the next, while other days I felt every second like a sting. In the morning the Islamic call to prayer echoed from the Islamic State checkpoints, a sound that, although unusual for Kocho, I knew well from studying Islam in school and traveling to Sinjar City. There older Yazidis would complain about hearing the call to prayer. “Sinjar is no longer a Yazidi city,” they would sigh, convinced that we all would soon be confined in our little villages and towns while the more desirable parts of the Yazidi areas were left to the richer and better-connected Arabs and Kurds. Still, I was never really bothered by the call to prayer until ISIS came to Sinjar. With them surrounding us, the sound became menacing.

  One by one relatives began pouring into our house. Jilan, Hezni’s wife, abandoned their nearly completed house just outside town to join us, and cousins and half siblings came from all over the village, carrying small suitcases or food and formula for the babies. Shireen, Saoud’s wife, had just given birth, and when she brought her squalling pink newborn to us, the women surrounded the baby, which was like an image of hope. Our few rooms filled quickly with clothes and blankets, photographs and valuables, anything they could carry. During the day we huddled around the television, looking for stories about the massacre of Yazidis in Sinjar. It was like something out of a nightmare. Airplanes couldn’t fly low enough to properly distribute aid, and the enormous mountain seemed to swallow the packages of food and water as they fell.

  Yazidis frantically tried to board Iraqi Army helicopters that landed on the roads cutting across the mountaintop, pushing babies and the elderly on board while the soldiers pushed back, shouting that there wasn’t enough room. “The helicopter can’t take off with this many people!” they yelled, a logic that didn’t matter to the frenzied people on the mountaintop. We heard that one woman, determined to leave on a helicopter, dangled for a moment from the landing skid as it lifted off before she lost her grip and fell. Someone said that when her body hit the rocks below, it looked like an exploding watermelon.

  Hezni had only narrowly made it to the mountain before ISIS took over Sinjar City. After his police station was evacuated, he took off walking with another policeman toward the mountain. Not wanting to leave any weapons behind for the terrorists heading to the city, each of the men in his unit left holding a rifle, with pistols tucked into their pants. It was hot and dusty on the way, and they were scared, unsure where the militants might be hiding or where they would be coming from. About half a mile outside Zainab, they watched as an Islamic State truck drove up to the town’s Shiite mosque and then as the mosque crumbled in an explosion. Switching direction along the highway, they narrowly missed being discovered by three trucks full of Islamic State militants who would, only a few minutes later, execute the men walking behind Hezni and his colleague. “I was saved by a miracle,” my brother would later tell me.

  On top of the mountain, the days were brutally hot and the nights freezing. They had no food, and people were dying of dehydration. On the first day, displaced Yazidis slaughtered the sheep they had herded up the sides of the mountain, and everyone ate a small ration of meat. On the second day, Hezni and some others crept down the eastern side of the mountain on foot and went to a small village that ISIS had not yet reached. There they filled a tractor with raw wheat, which they boiled back on top of the mountain, giving everyone a cup, just enough to fill their stomachs. One day some militants from the YPG—the Syrian branch of the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers Party, a Turkey-based Kurdish guerrilla army—brought bread and food from Syria.

  Eventually the YPG, with help from U.S. air strikes, cleared a path for the Yazidis from Sinjar into the Kurdish parts of Syria, which had been kept relatively safe since the beginning of the Syrian civil war. There Kurds aligned with the PKK had been trying to establish an autonomous region. ISIS shot at the Yazidis as they fled, but tens of thousands were able to make it off the mountain and into relative safety. Hezni fled the mountain to our aunt’s house near Zakho. As Yazidis made their way through Kurdish Syria and into Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurds living there, most of whom are Sunni, drove to meet them, delivering food, water, and clothing. Others opened their homes, stores, and schools to the fleeing Yazidis. It was a show of compassion that still moves us today.

  Before the massacres, I hadn’t given the PKK much thought. They didn’t have a large presence in Sinjar, and even though I would sometimes see images of them on Kurdish television—men and women in baggy gray uniforms kneeling beside their Kalashnikovs somewhere in the Qandil Mountains, on the border with Iran—they didn’t seem connected to my life, and neither did their fight against the Turkish government. But after they saved the Yazidis stranded on the mountain, the PKK became heroes in Sinjar, replacing the peshmerga in the minds of many as the protectors of Yazidis. Their involvement would end up inflaming tensions between them and Barzani’s party, the KDP, which still wanted to have the most influence in Sinjar, making our home vulnerable to a different kind of war, one that began unfolding over the next few years. But at the time we were just grateful to the PKK for helping Yazidis off the mountain and
for sending hundreds of soldiers to fight on the front lines against ISIS in Sinjar.

  There was no sign, however, of help coming to Kocho. Each day one of my brothers would go to the jevat and come home with news, and none of it was hopeful. Kocho’s men were trying to figure out a plan, they said, but no one outside the village was willing to help. “Maybe the Americans will use their planes to free us, like they did at the mountain,” my mother said. The only time the Islamic State militants who surrounded Kocho seemed scared was when they heard the sound of planes or helicopters. “Or maybe the PKK will come here next,” she continued. But my brothers, who were in touch with Yazidi translators who had worked with the U.S. Army and were now in America, quickly lost hope that either of those things would happen.

  Airplanes and helicopters flew over us, but they were heading to the mountain, not to Kocho, and we knew it was unlikely that the PKK would make it to us. The PKK militants were brave and had been training for a long time—they had been fighting the Turkish Army for almost half a century—but they were mountain fighters and wouldn’t be able to overtake ISIS on the flat plains that connected us to Mount Sinjar. Plus, Kocho was now in enemy territory, far enough south to be out of reach. We were nowhere.

  For a long time, though, we held out hope that the Americans would come to break the siege of Kocho. My brother Jalo, the one who had been stationed at Tal Afar airport after the U.S. invasion, had a friend in the United States named Haider Elias, a Yazidi who had been granted asylum in Houston because he worked as a translator for the Americans. They spoke every day, usually more than once, although Haider cautioned Jalo not to call him—he was worried that if ISIS checked Jalo’s phone and saw a U.S. number, they would kill him on the spot.

  Haider and a group of expat Yazidis, were scrambling to help Yazidis in Iraq, petitioning the governments in Washington, Erbil, and Baghdad from a hotel room they had rented in Washington, D.C., but they were making no progress in Kocho. Jalo answered every phone call from Haider immediately, and his hope was quickly replaced with exasperation. My brother had been with the Americans when they had raided houses looking for insurgents and knew what they were capable of when they were on the ground. Jalo was sure that if the United States sent soldiers to attack Islamic State checkpoints around Kocho, they could break the siege. Sometimes Islamic State members would complain at the jevat about the American operations in Sinjar to save the Yazidis, calling Obama a “crusader.” When this happened, Jalo told Haider, “I think they’re losing control. They’ll probably let us go.” A few days earlier some Islamic State militants had taken Ahmed Jasso, who felt sick, to a nearby town for treatment. “Why would they do that unless they planned to keep us alive?” Jalo asked.

  Jalo loved America. Before the siege, he would call Haider in Texas to ask him about his new life outside Iraq. He was jealous that Haider was going to college in America while Jalo had not even been able to start high school. “Find me an American wife!” Jalo joked. “Someone ugly and older, who will marry me no matter what.”

  Haider had less faith in the Americans coming to help us in Kocho. He thought that if anything, ISIS might retaliate against Kocho because of the air strikes. “Be careful,” he told Jalo. “They might be fooling you into thinking they are weaker. They won’t let you go.” Everyone involved seemed overwhelmed by what was happening all over Iraq. The media weren’t even reporting on the siege of Kocho. “They are changing the prime minister in Baghdad,” Elias said. “They don’t have time to think about us.”

  So we waited. The village was quiet and the streets empty. Everyone stayed inside. We stopped eating, and I watched my brothers grow thin, their faces pale. I assumed that the same thing was happening to me, but I didn’t want to look in the mirror to check. We didn’t bathe, and soon the stench of all our bodies filled the house. Each night we climbed up to the roof—after dark, so that militants wouldn’t see us—where we slept shoulder to shoulder. We crouched low to the ground while we were up there, trying to hide behind the roof’s short wall, and we whispered quietly so they wouldn’t hear us. Our bodies tensed when Shireen’s baby, unaware of what was happening, began to cry. None of that mattered, of course. ISIS knew we were there. That was the point.

  ISIS held us prisoners in our homes while they carried out the genocide elsewhere in Sinjar. They didn’t have time, yet, to take care of us. They were busy confiscating Yazidi homes and filling bags with their jewelry, car keys, and cell phones; busy rounding up the Yazidis’ cows and sheep to keep as their own. They were distributing young women among militants in Iraq and Syria to be used as sex slaves and murdering the men who might be old enough to defend themselves. Thousands of Yazidis had already been killed, their bodies swept into mass graves that ISIS would try—and fail—to keep hidden.

  Our last hope for outside help was with the neighboring villages, where our Sunni Arab friends and kiriv lived. We heard stories of Arabs sheltering Yazidis or driving them to safety. But we heard many more stories of them turning on Yazidis, handing them over to ISIS and then joining the militants. Some were only rumors, and some came from people close to us whom we trusted, and so we knew them to be true. One morning one of my cousins took his family to his kiriv’s house, desperate for help. The family welcomed them and made them feel safe. “You can wait here,” they said. “We will help you.” Then they reported my cousin to the Islamic State commander, who sent militants to capture him and his family.

  My brothers called everyone they could think of in these villages, climbing to the roof where there was better cell reception, and most of the people they reached sounded genuinely worried about us. None, though, had any answers or could think of ways to help. They told us to stay where we were. “Be patient,” they said. Some of our Muslim neighbors came to visit us while we were under siege, bringing food to the village and telling us that our pain was their pain. They laid their palms on their hearts and promised, “We won’t abandon you.” But day by day, they all did.

  Our Sunni neighbors could have come to us and tried to help. If they knew what was going to happen to the women, they could have dressed us all in black and taken us with them. They could have just come and told us, matter-of-factly, “This is what will happen to you,” so we could stop fantasizing about being rescued. But they didn’t. They made the decision to do nothing, and their betrayals were like bullets before the real bullets came.

  One day I went with Dimal, Khairy, Elias, and Khaled—one of my half brothers—to our farm to get a lamb to slaughter for dinner. Unlike the adults, who had no appetite, the kids cried for something real to eat, and without any food coming into Kocho, we had to sacrifice one of our lambs.

  There was good cell phone service at the farm, and Elias brought his phone so the men could continue to call for help while we got the lamb. We had just heard that my niece, Baso, was captured by ISIS trying to escape to the mountain from Tal Kassab, where she had been tending to a sick cousin, and then taken to a school in Tal Afar. The school, we were told, was painted red and was full of Yazidi girls and women. I remembered that one of my teachers, a Sunni man called Mr. Mohammed, was from Tal Afar, and I thought he might be able to help us find Baso.

  Many of our teachers were Sunni Arabs from outside Kocho, mostly from Mosul. We respected them and treated them as part of our village. With ISIS now in their hometowns, I thought about what they were going through. None of them had called to see what was happening in Kocho. At first this worried me. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like for them having to escape ISIS or, worse, live under them. As the siege wore on, though, I started to wonder if the teachers were silent not because they were living in fear but because they were happy that ISIS was there. Maybe all along they had considered their students like me to be kuffar. Just the thought made me feel sick to my stomach.

  I had all my teachers’ phone numbers written down in the back of one of my textbooks, and I used Elias’s phone to call Mr. Mohammed. After a few rings, he picked up.


  “Merhaba, Ustaz Mohammed,” I said, addressing him politely in Arabic. I thought about the days I’d spent in Mr. Mohammed’s class, trying to follow his lessons, knowing that if I passed, I would move up to the next grade, closer to graduation and the rest of my life. I trusted him.

  “Who is this?” My teacher sounded normal, and his calmness made my heart race.

  “Nadia, ustazi,” I said. “From Kocho.”

  “Nadia, what is it?” he asked. His voice quickened slightly. He sounded cold and impatient.

  I explained that Baso had been captured by ISIS and taken to Tal Afar. “They said that the school is painted red,” I told him. “That’s all we know. We can’t leave Kocho, Daesh has surrounded the village, and they said they will kill anyone who tries to leave. Can you help us talk to Baso? Do you know where the school is?”

  For a moment, my teacher was silent. Maybe he couldn’t hear me. Maybe Daesh had cut service, or maybe Elias was out of credits. When Mr. Mohammed finally spoke, he sounded like a different person from the man who had taught me only months before. His voice was distant and cold. “I can’t talk to you, Nadia,” he said in a whisper. “Don’t worry about your niece. They will ask her to convert, and someone will marry her.” He hung up before I could respond. I looked at the phone in my hand, a piece of cheap, useless plastic.