by Nadia Murad
“The son of a bitch,” Elias said, grabbing the lamb by the collar and steering it toward the path home. “We’ve been calling and calling, and none of them are responding.”
In that moment something within me changed, maybe forever. I lost hope that anyone would help us. Maybe my teacher was like us: scared for himself and his family and doing whatever he needed to do to stay alive. Or maybe he had welcomed ISIS and the chance to live in the world it envisioned, one guided by their brutal interpretation of Islam—a world without Yazidis, or anyone who didn’t believe precisely what they believed. I didn’t know. But in that moment I was sure that I hated him.
Chapter 8
The first time I saw an Islamic State militant up close was six days into the siege. We had run out of flour and drinkable water, so I went with Adkee and two of our nieces, Rojian and Nisreen, to Jalo’s house to get supplies. It was only a few minutes’ walk from our house to Jalo’s, through a narrow alley, and it was unusual to see Islamic State members on the village roads. They stayed on the outskirts of the village, manning the checkpoints to make sure no one tried to escape.
Still, we were terrified to leave home. Stepping out of the front door was like walking onto another planet. Nothing about Kocho seemed familiar or comforting. Normally the alleyways and streets would be full of people, kids playing and their parents shopping in the small convenience stores or the pharmacy, but now the village was empty and quiet. “Stay close to me,” I whispered to Adkee, who walked ahead, braver than the rest of us. We moved quickly, shuffling through the alley in a huddle. I was so scared I felt as if I were hallucinating. We ran from our own shadows.
My mother told us to go. “You don’t need the men,” she said, and we agreed. We had been sitting around the house doing nothing but watching TV and crying, growing thinner and weaker by the day. My brothers at least went to the jevat, and when they came home, after telling us what the mukhtar or Islamic State commander said, they punched numbers into their cell phones, still trying to find someone who would help us, until they collapsed from hunger and exhaustion. My brothers were fighters, like our father, and I had never seen them so hopeless. It was my turn to do something to help.
There is no grand design to Kocho, no one who mapped out all the homes and streets when the village was settled so it would all make sense in the end. If you own land, you can build whatever you want on it, wherever you want, and so the village is haphazard and can be dizzying to walk through. Houses expand in such unpredictable ways that they can seem alive, and the alleyways zigzag around these houses in a maze that would confuse anyone who hadn’t memorized the layout of the village. And memorizing it takes a lifetime of walking from home to home.
Jalo’s house was at the very end of the village, and all that separated him from the world outside Kocho was a brick wall. Beyond that the desert-like Sinjar stretched toward Mosul, which was now the capital of the Islamic State in Iraq. We pushed through the metal gate and walked into the kitchen. The house was empty and tidy, with no sign that Jalo and his family had left in a rush, but I was scared being inside. It seemed haunted by their absence. Finding some flour and water and a case of baby formula, we loaded the supplies into bags as quickly as we could, without talking.
On our way out, Rojian pointed to the garden wall, where a brick had fallen out, leaving a hole at about waist height. None of us had been brave enough to look for long at the militants we could see from our roof, where we felt too exposed. The wall, though, provided some cover and through that hole we would be able to see one of the first checkpoints leading out of Kocho. “Do you think there is Daesh out there?” Rojian wondered, and walked into the garden, crouching beside the wall. Looking at one another, the three of us dropped what we carried and joined her, pressing our foreheads against the wall to get a good view of the world outside.
About two hundred yards away, a few militants manned a checkpoint that used to belong to the peshmerga, and the Iraqi Army before them. They were dressed in baggy black pants and black shirts, and their weapons hung by their sides. We watched their movements as though they held a code—their feet tapping on the sandy road, their hands moving while they talked to one another—and each gesture filled us with dread.
A few minutes earlier we had been so scared at the possibility of running into a militant on our walk, but now we couldn’t tear ourselves away from the sight of them. I wished we could hear what they were saying. Maybe they were planning something, and we could understand better what was waiting for us, bring some news to help our brothers fight. Maybe they were gloating about taking Sinjar; if we heard that we would get so angry we would fight back.
“What do you think they’re talking about?” Rojian whispered.
“Nothing good,” Adkee said, snapping us back to reality. “Come on, let’s go. We promised Mom we’d deliver these things quickly.”
We walked home in a state of disbelief. Nisreen broke the silence. “They’re the same as the people holding Baso captive,” she said. “She must be so scared.”
The alley felt even narrower, and we walked as quickly as we could, trying to stay calm. But when we got home and told my mother what we had seen—how close they were to the home where Jalo’s children had slept only days before—Nisreen and I couldn’t help it. We began to cry. I wanted to be hopeful and strong, but I needed my mother to understand how scared I was so that she would comfort me.
“They’re so close,” I said. “We’re in their hands. If they want to do anything bad to us, they can.”
“We have to wait and pray,” my mother replied. “Maybe we’ll be rescued. Maybe they won’t hurt us. Maybe we’ll be saved somehow.” Not a day went by that she didn’t say something like that.
Our clothes turned gray from dust and sweat, but we didn’t think about changing. We stopped eating and drank only small amounts of tepid water out of plastic bottles that had been left in the sun. The power went out and stayed out for the rest of the siege. We ran the generator just enough to charge our cell phones and to watch TV when the news was showing reports on the war with ISIS, which it almost always was. The headlines made us feel hopeless: close to forty children had died on top of Mount Sinjar from starvation and dehydration, and many more had died while fleeing. Bashiqa and Bahzani, two major Yazidi villages close to Mosul, had been taken over by ISIS, but luckily most of the people there had been able to flee to Iraqi Kurdistan. Thousands of Yazidi women and girls from across Sinjar had been abducted; we heard that ISIS was using them as sex slaves.
Qaraqosh, a majority Christian town in Nineveh, had fallen, and almost its entire population had fled to Iraqi Kurdistan, where they were living as refugees in half-built malls and tents set up in church gardens. Shiite Turkmen in Tal Afar were struggling to escape their own siege. ISIS had almost made it all the way to Erbil, but the Americans had stopped them—to protect their consulate, they said, while also giving cover to the Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar with air strikes. Baghdad was in chaos. The American president, Obama, was calling what was happening to the Yazidis a “potential genocide.” But no one talked about the siege of Kocho.
We were living in a new world. Life in Kocho stopped as people stayed inside for fear of being seen by ISIS. It was strange to be so removed from the other families in the village. We were used to visitors coming over until late at night, spending mealtimes with friends, and talking across rooftops before going to sleep. With ISIS surrounding Kocho, even whispering to the person lying next to you at night seemed dangerous. We tried to go unnoticed, as though ISIS might forget we were there. Even getting skinnier seemed like a way of protecting ourselves, as though if we stopped eating, eventually we would become invisible. People ventured from home only to check on relatives, get more supplies, or help out if someone was sick. Even then they walked quickly and always toward shelter, like insects running away from a broom.
One night, though, in spite of ISIS, we gathered together as a village to celebrate Batzmi, a holiday ob
served mostly by Yazidi families originally from Turkey. It normally takes place in December, but a villager named Khalaf, whose family celebrates the holiday, thought we needed the ceremony now, when fear kept us from one another and we were close to losing hope. Batzmi is a time to pray to Tawusi Melek, but even more important to us during the siege, it is also a time to remember Yazidis who have been forced to leave their homeland, Yazidis like Khalaf’s ancestors, who had once lived in Turkey, before the Ottomans drove them out.
All of Kocho was invited to Khalaf’s house, where four men who were thought to have clean souls because they were unmarried were going to bake the holy Batzmi bread. We waited until the sun set, and then people began pouring out of their homes toward Khalaf’s. On the way, we cautioned one another not to draw attention to what we were doing. “Don’t make noise,” we whispered as we walked through the village streets. I was with Adkee, and we were both terrified. If ISIS discovered us, I knew, Khalaf would be punished for conspiring to perform an infidel’s ritual, but I didn’t know what else the militants might do. I hoped it wasn’t too late to bring our case before God.
The lights were on inside Khalaf’s house, and people crowded around the baking bread, which is left to puff up on a special dome before being blessed by the head of the household. If the bread stays whole, it brings good luck. If it breaks, something bad might happen to the family. The bread was plain because we were under siege (normally it’s studded with nuts and raisins), but it was sturdy and round and showed no sign of breaking.
Except for the sound of soft crying and the occasional pop of the wood in the oven, Khalaf’s house was quiet. The familiar smell of the smoke from the oven settled over me like a blanket. I didn’t look around to see if Walaa or other school friends, whom I hadn’t seen since the siege started, were there. I wanted to focus on the ritual. Khalaf began to pray. “May the God of this holy bread take my soul as a sacrifice for the whole village,” he said, and the weeping grew louder. Some of the men tried to calm their wives, but I thought it was brave, not weak, to cry there in Khalaf’s house where the sound might carry out to the checkpoints.
Afterward Adkee and I walked home in silence, retracing our steps back through the front door and onto the roof, where those who had stayed behind to guard the house sat upright on their mattresses, relieved that we had returned safely. The women had all taken to sleeping on one side of the roof, the men on the other. My brothers were still constantly on their phones, and we wanted to spare them our crying, which we knew would only make them feel worse. That night I managed to sleep a little, until just before the sun came up and my mother nudged us awake. “It’s time to go downstairs,” she whispered, and I tiptoed down the ladder into the dark courtyard, praying that no one could see us.
In my family it was Hajji, one of my half brothers, who talked the most about villagers rebelling against ISIS. Militants still told the men at the jevat that if we didn’t convert to Islam, they would take us to Mount Sinjar, but Hajji was sure they were lying. “They just want to keep us calm,” he insisted. “They want to make sure we won’t fight back.”
Every once in a while, I saw Hajji whispering over our garden wall with our neighbors, and it looked as if they were planning something. They watched closely as Islamic State convoys drove by the village. “They’ve just come from a massacre,” Hajji would say, turning his head as they raced by. Sometimes he would stay up all night watching TV, anger filling him until the sun was high the next morning.
Hajji wasn’t the only one in the village thinking about ways to revolt. Many families, like ours, hid weapons from ISIS, and they discussed ways to get them and attack the checkpoints. The men had trained as fighters and wanted to prove themselves, but they also knew that no matter how many Islamic State members they managed to kill with their buried knives or AK-47s, there would still be more along the road, and that eventually, no matter what they did, a lot of people from the village would end up dead if they tried to fight. Even if we all got together and killed the militants who were stationed just around the village, we would have nowhere to go. They controlled every road out of Kocho and had cars and trucks and all the weapons they seized from us and the Iraqi Army. Uprising wasn’t a plan; it was a fantasy. But for men like Hajji, the thought of fighting back was all that kept them sane while we waited.
Every day men from the village gathered in the jevat to try to come up with a plan. If we couldn’t escape, or fight our way out, or hide, could we trick the militants? Maybe if we told them that we would convert to Islam, they would give us more time. It was decided that if a militant threatened or touched one of Kocho’s women or girls, then, and only then, would we stall by pretending to convert. But the plan was never carried out.
When the women plotted, it was to try to come up with ways we could hide the men if ISIS came to kill them. There were plenty of places in Kocho where the militants wouldn’t know where to look—deep, barely wet wells and basements with hidden entrances. Even bales of hay and sacks of animal feed might keep the men safe long enough for them to avoid being killed. But they refused to consider hiding. “We would rather be slaughtered than leave you alone with Daesh,” they said. And so, while we waited to find out our fate at the hands of ISIS and lost hope that anyone was coming to save us, I tried to face every possibility of what could happen to me and my family. I started to think about dying.
Before ISIS came, we weren’t used to young people dying, and I didn’t like talking about death. Just the thought of it frightened me. Then in early 2014 two young people from Kocho had died suddenly. First, a border policeman named Ismail was killed in a terrorist attack while working south of Kocho in Al Qaeda–influenced areas where ISIS was already taking root. Ismail was about Hezni’s age, quiet and devout. It was the first time someone from Kocho was killed by ISIS, and everyone started to worry about their family members who had taken jobs with the government.
Hezni was at the police station in Sinjar when they brought Ismail’s body in, and so we heard about his death before most people in the village, even before his own wife and family. They were poor, as we were, and Ismail had joined the military, as my brothers had, because they needed the money. That morning I walked the long way to school, avoiding his house. I couldn’t bear passing by, knowing that he was dead when his family inside had yet to find out. As word spread through the village, men began firing their rifles into the air in mourning, and all the girls in the classroom screamed when they heard the shots.
Yazidis consider it a blessing to prepare a body for burial, sometimes sitting with it for hours until the sun comes up. My brother Hezni prepared Ismail. He washed the body, braided his hair, dressed him in white, and when his widow brought him the blanket they had slept in on their first night as a married couple, Hezni wrapped her husband in it. A long line of villagers followed his body to the edge of town, before it was loaded onto a truck to be driven to the graveyard.
A few months later, my friend Shireen was accidentally shot by her nephew while he played with a hunting rifle on their farm. I had been with Shireen the night before she was killed. We talked about exams and her two mischievous brothers who had been arrested for fighting. Shireen brought up Ismail. She had a dream the night before he died, she told me. “In the dream something really huge happened in Kocho. Everyone was crying,” she said. Then, sounding a little guilty, she confessed, “I think it was about Ismail dying.” Now I am sure the dream must have been about her own death, too, or about her nephew, who refused to leave the house after the accident, or even about ISIS coming to Kocho.
My mother prepared Shireen. My friend’s hands were stained brownish red with henna and then tied loosely together with a white scarf. Because she was unmarried, her hair was arranged into a single long braid. If she had any gold, it was buried with her. “If man can be buried, then gold can be buried, too,” Yazidis say. Like Ismail, Shireen was washed and shrouded in white, and her body was marched in front of a long, mournful crowd to the
edge of town, where a truck waited to take her the rest of the way.
These rituals are important because the afterlife, according to Yazidism, is a demanding place, where the dead can suffer like humans. They rely on us to take care of them, showing us what they need through our dreams. Often someone will see a loved one in a dream who tells them that they are hungry or who, they notice, is wearing threadbare clothing. When they wake up, they give food or clothing to the poor, and in return, God gives their dead food and clothing in the afterlife. We consider these good deeds vital to being a pious Yazidi partly because we believe in reincarnation. If you were a good person and a faithful Yazidi during your lifetime, your soul will be born anew, and you will rejoin the community that mourned you. Before that can happen, you have to prove to God and his angels that you deserve to go back to earth, to a life that might even be better than the one you left.
While our souls travel the afterlife, waiting to be reincarnated, what happens to our bodies, our flesh after our souls have no more use for it, is much simpler. We are washed and then buried wrapped in cloth, and the grave is marked with a ring of stones. There should be very little separating us from the dirt, so we can more easily give our bodies back, clean and whole, to the earth that made us. It’s important that Yazidis are buried properly and prayed for. Without these rituals, our souls may never be reborn. And our bodies may never go home to where they belong.
Chapter 9
On August 12 an Islamic State commander visited the jevat with an ultimatum: we either convert to Islam and become part of the caliphate, or suffer the consequences. “We have three days to decide,” Elias told us all, standing in the courtyard of our house, his eyes darting with a crazy energy. “First they said, if we don’t convert, we will have to pay a fine.”
