by Nadia Murad
While I waited in the crowd, a militant walked over to me. It was the same man who had earlier been poking through the scarves with his gun, and he still held that weapon in his hands. “Will you convert?” he asked me. As he had been when he played with our scarves, he was smirking, mocking us.
I shook my head.
“If you convert, you can stay here,” he said, gesturing back at the institute, where my mother and sisters were. “You can be with your mother and sisters and tell them to convert, too.”
Again, I shook my head. I was too scared to say anything.
“Fine.” He stopped smirking and scowled at me. “Then you will get on the bus with all the others.”
The bus was huge, with at least forty rows of six seats cut down the middle by a long lit aisle and surrounded by windows that were covered by drawn curtains. As the seats filled, the air quickly became heavy and hard to breathe, but when we tried to open the windows, or even the curtains so that we could see outside, a militant yelled at us to sit still. I was close to the front and could hear the driver talking on his phone. I wondered if he would reveal where we were going. But he spoke in the Turkmen language, so I couldn’t understand him. From my seat on the aisle, I watched the driver and the road through the wide windshield. It was dark when we pulled away from the institute, so all I could see when he turned on the headlights was a small patch of black asphalt and the occasional tree or bush. I couldn’t see behind us, and so I didn’t get to watch the Solagh Institute retreat into the background with my mother and sisters inside it.
We drove quickly, the two buses full of girls in the front and one with boys in the back, and the white jeeps leading and following our caravan. Our bus was eerily quiet. All I could hear were the footsteps of a militant pacing the aisle and the sound of the engine. I started to feel carsick and tried to close my eyes. The smell of sweat and body odor filled the bus. A girl in the back vomited into her hand, violently at first and then, when a militant yelled at her to stop, as quietly as she could. Her vomiting created a sour odor that spread through the bus and was almost unbearable, and some girls close to her started throwing up as well. No one could comfort them. We weren’t allowed to touch or talk to one another.
The militant pacing the aisle was a tall man about thirty-five years old named Abu Batat. He seemed to enjoy his job, stopping at certain rows to peer at the girls, singling out the ones who cowered or pretended to be asleep. Eventually he started pulling certain girls from their seats and sending them to the back of the bus, where he made them stand against the wall. “Smile!” he told them, before taking a photo on his cell phone, laughing while he did it as though amused by the panic that overwhelmed each girl he chose. When they looked down in fear, he would yell, “Raise your head!” and with each girl, he seemed to grow bolder.
I closed my eyes and tried to block out what was happening. In spite of how terrified I was, my body was so exhausted that I quickly fell asleep. I couldn’t rest, though, and every time sleep came, my head snapped back up, and I opened my eyes, startled, and sat there staring through the windshield and remembering, after a moment, where I was.
I couldn’t tell for sure, but it seemed like we were on the road to Mosul, which was serving as the capital of the Islamic State in Iraq. Taking over the city was a huge victory for ISIS, and videos online showed celebrations after they occupied the streets and municipal buildings and blocked the roads around Mosul. The Kurdish and central Iraqi forces, meanwhile, swore that they would take the city back from the Islamic State militants, even if it took years. We don’t have years, I thought, and fell asleep again.
Suddenly I felt a hand on my left shoulder and opened my eyes to see Abu Batat standing over me, his green eyes glowing and his mouth contorted into a smile. My face was almost level with the pistol he had strapped to his side, and I felt like a rock sitting there, unable to move or to talk. I closed my eyes again, praying that he would go away, and then I felt his hand move slowly across my shoulder, brushing my neck, and then down the front of my dress until it stopped over my left breast. It felt like fire; I had never been touched like that before. I opened my eyes but didn’t look at him, I just looked straight ahead. Abu Batat reached inside my dress and grabbed my breast, hard as if he wanted to hurt me, and then walked away.
Every second with ISIS was part of a slow, painful death—of the body and the soul—and that moment on the bus with Abu Batat was the moment I started dying. I was from a village and raised in a good family. Whenever I left the house, no matter where I was going, my mother would examine me. “Button up your shirt, Nadia,” she would say. “Be a good girl.”
Now this stranger was touching me savagely, and there was nothing I could do. Abu Batat continued to walk up and down the bus, groping the girls who sat on the aisle, passing his hand over us as if we were not human, as if he had no fear that we would move or get angry. When he came to me again, I grabbed his hand, trying to stop him from putting it under my dress. I was too scared to talk. I began crying, and my tears fell on his hand, but still he didn’t stop. These are the things that happen between lovers when they get married, I thought. This had been my view of the world, and of love, my entire life, from the moment I was old enough to know what marriage was, through all the courtships and celebrations in Kocho, until the very moment that Abu Batat touched me and shattered that idea.
“He’s been doing that to all the girls sitting on the aisle,” the girl sitting in the middle seat next to me whispered. “He’s been touching all of them.”
“Please switch with me,” I begged her. “I don’t want him to touch me again.”
“I can’t,” she replied. “I’m too scared.”
Abu Batat continued walking up and down the aisle, pausing in front of the girls he liked best. When I closed my eyes, I could hear the swish of his baggy white pants and his sandals slapping against his feet. Every few moments a voice in Arabic would come in on the radio he held in one hand, but it was too staticky to make out exactly what it was saying.
Each time he passed me, he ran his hand along my shoulder and over my left breast, then walked away. I was sweating so much I felt as if I were in the shower. I noticed that he avoided the girls who had been vomiting earlier, and I pushed my hand into my mouth trying to make myself throw up, hoping that I could cover my entire dress in vomit and keep his hand off me, but it was useless. I gagged painfully, and nothing came out.
The bus stopped in Tal Afar, a majority Turkmen city about thirty miles from Sinjar City, and militants started talking on their cell phones and radios, trying to figure out what their superiors wanted them to do. “They said to drop the boys off here,” the driver said to Abu Batat, and they both left the bus. Through the windshield, I saw Abu Batat talking to other militants, and I wondered what about. Three-quarters of Tal Afar’s residents were Sunni Turkmens, and months before ISIS came to Sinjar, the city’s Shiites had fled, leaving it open for the militants.
The left side of my body ached where Abu Batat had groped me. I prayed that he wouldn’t get back on the bus, but after a few minutes he did, and we started moving again. As we backed away, I could see through the windshield that we were leaving one of the buses behind. Later I learned that it was the bus full of boys, including my nephew, Malik, whom ISIS would try to brainwash into fighting in their terrorist group. As the years went by and the war continued, they would use the boys as human shields and suicide bombers.
As soon as he was back on the bus, Abu Batat resumed molesting us. He had chosen his favorites, and he visited us most often and kept his hand on us longer, gripping us so hard, it felt like he wanted to tear our bodies apart. About ten minutes after leaving Tal Afar, I couldn’t take it anymore. When I felt his hand on my shoulder again, I screamed. It tore open the silence. Soon other girls started screaming as well, until the inside of the bus sounded like the scene of a massacre. Abu Batat froze. “Shut up, all of you!” he shouted, but we didn’t. If he kills me, I don’t care, I tho
ught. I want to be dead. The Turkmen driver pulled over, and the bus stopped with a jolt, jerking me in my seat. The driver shouted something into his phone. A moment later one of the white jeeps that had been driving in front of us stopped, too, and a man got out of the passenger seat and started walking toward our bus.
I recognized the militant, a commander named Nafah, from Solagh. At the institute, he had been particularly cruel and harsh, shouting at us without an ounce of humanity. I thought he was like a machine. The driver opened the door for the commander, and Nafah stormed onto the bus. “Who started this?” he asked Abu Batat, and my tormentor pointed at me. “She did,” he said, and Nafah walked over to where I sat.
Before he could do anything, I started talking. Nafah was a terrorist, but didn’t ISIS have rules about how the women were treated? Surely if they considered themselves to be good Muslims, they would object to the way that Abu Batat was abusing us. “You brought us here, on this bus. You made us come, we had no choice, and this man”—I pointed at Abu Batat, my hand shaking out of fear—“he has been putting his hand on our breasts the entire time. He’s been grabbing us, and he won’t leave us alone!”
Nafah was quiet after I spoke. For a moment I had hope that he would punish Abu Batat, but that hope disappeared when Abu Batat started to talk. “What do you think you are here for?” he said to me, his voice loud enough for everyone in the bus to hear. “Honestly, don’t you know?”
Abu Batat walked over to where Nafah stood and grabbed my neck, pushing my head against the seat and pointing his gun at my forehead. Girls around me shrieked, but I was too scared to make a sound. “If you close your eyes, I will shoot you,” he said.
Nafah walked back toward the bus door. Before he left, he turned to us. “I don’t know what you thought we had taken you for,” he said. “But you have no choice. You are here to be sabaya, and you will do exactly what we say. And if any of you scream again, trust me, things will be even worse for you.” Then, with Abu Batat still pointing his gun at me, Nafah left the bus.
It was the first time I had heard the Arabic word applied to me. When ISIS took over Sinjar and began kidnapping Yazidis, they called their human spoils sabaya (sabiyya is singular), referring to the young women they would buy and sell as sex slaves. This was part of their plan for us, sourced from an interpretation of the Koran that had long been banned by the world’s Muslim communities, and written into the fatwas and pamphlets ISIS made official before they attacked Sinjar. Yazidi girls were considered infidels, and according to the militants’ interpretation of the Koran, raping a slave is not a sin. We would entice new recruits to join the ranks of the militants and be passed around as a reward for loyalty and good behavior. Everyone on the bus was destined for that fate. We were no longer human beings—we were sabaya.
Abu Batat let go of my neck and put his gun away, but from that moment on until we arrived in Mosul about an hour later, I was his primary target. He still touched other girls, but he focused on me, stopping by my seat more frequently and pushing his hand against my breast with so much force, I was sure I would be bruised. The left side of my body went numb, and although I stayed quiet, fully believing Abu Batat would kill me if I lashed out again, inside my head I never stopped screaming.
It was a clear night, and through the windshield I could see the sky, which was full of stars. The sky reminded me of an ancient Arabian love story my mother used to tell us called “Layla and Majnun.” In the story, a man named Qays falls so much in love with a woman named Layla and is so open about how he feels, writing poem after poem about his love for her, that the people around him give him the nickname Majnun, which means “possessed” or “crazy” in Arabic. When Majnun asks for Layla’s hand in marriage, her father turns him down, telling him that he is too unstable to be a good husband.
It’s a tragic story. Layla is forced to marry another man and then dies of a broken heart. Majnun leaves his village and wanders the desert alone, talking to himself and writing poetry in the sand, until one day he finds Layla’s gravestone. He stays beside it until he dies, too. I loved hearing my mother tell this story, even though it made me cry for the two lovers. The dark sky that usually frightened me became romantic instead. Layla means “night” in Arabic, and my mother used to end the story by pointing at two stars in the sky. “Since they couldn’t be together in life, they prayed to be together after death,” she would tell me. “And so God turned them into stars.”
On the bus, I started praying, too. “Please, God, turn me into a star so that I can be up in the sky above this bus,” I whispered. “If you did it once, you can do it again.” But we just kept driving toward Mosul.
Chapter 4
Abu Batat didn’t stop touching us until we arrived in Mosul. The clock above the windshield read two a.m. when we stopped in front of a large building, a home that I thought must have belonged to a very wealthy family. The jeeps drove into a garage, and the buses parked in front of the house, opening their doors for us. “Come on! Get out!” Abu Batat shouted, and we began slowly lifting our bodies out of the seats. Few of us had slept, and we were all sore and aching from sitting. My body hurt where Abu Batat had touched me, but I was wrong to think that now that the bus had stopped, he would leave me alone. We lined up to exit, holding on to whatever we had brought with us, and he waited by the open door, putting out his hands to grope girls as they stepped off the bus. He ran his hands over my body, from my head to my feet.
We entered through the garage. I had never seen such a nice house. It was huge, with large sitting rooms and bedrooms and enough furniture, I thought, for a half-dozen families. No one in Kocho, not even Ahmed Jasso, lived in a house like this. The rooms were still full of the clocks and rugs I assumed had belonged to the family that once lived here, and I noticed that one of the militants was drinking from a mug that had been decorated with a posed family photo. I wondered what had happened to them.
There were Islamic State militants everywhere, dressed in uniforms with their radios squawking constantly. They watched us as we were sent into three rooms, each of which opened onto a small landing. From where I sat with Kathrine and a few others, I could see into the other rooms, where women and girls shuffled around in a daze, looking for people they knew but had been separated from on the buses. The room was crowded, and we sat on the floor, leaning against each other. It was almost impossible not to fall asleep.
The two small windows in the room were closed and the curtains drawn, but luckily someone had set up a swamp cooler—the hulking, cheap relatives of air conditioners that are common throughout Iraq—which thinned the air and made it easier to breathe. There was no furniture in our room except for some mattresses stacked up against the walls. A sickening odor was coming out of the hall bathroom. “A girl had a cell phone, and when they came to search her, she tried to flush it down the toilet,” someone whispered. “I heard them talking about it when we got here.” At the entrance to the bathroom, I could see a pile of headscarves like what we had left in Solagh, lying on the tile floor like flower petals.
After the rooms were full, a militant pointed at where I was sitting. “Come with me,” he said, then turned and walked toward the door.
“Don’t go!” Kathrine wrapped her small arms around me, trying to keep me from standing up.
I didn’t know what he wanted, but I didn’t think I could say no to him. “If I don’t, they will just force me,” I told her, and I followed the militant.
He led me to the garage on the first floor, where Abu Batat and Nafah were waiting along with another militant. The third militant spoke Kurdish and I was shocked when I recognized him; it was Suhaib, who owned a store in Sinjar City. Yazidis visited his store all the time and I am sure many thought of him as a friend. All three men looked at me angrily. They still wanted to punish me for my outburst on the bus. “What’s your name?” Nafah asked, and when I tried to back away he pulled my hair and pushed me against the wall.
I answered him. “Nadia,” I
said.
“When were you born?” he asked, and I told him. “Nineteen ninety-three.”
Next he asked, “Are you here with any of your family?”
I paused. I didn’t know if they wanted to punish Kathrine and the others just for being related to me, so I lied. “I’m here with the other girls,” I said. “I don’t know what happened to my family.”
“Why did you scream?” Nafah tightened his grip on my hair.
I was terrified. I felt my body, which had always been small and thin, practically disappear in his hands. I told myself to say whatever I had to for them to let me go back upstairs to Kathrine. “I was scared,” I told him honestly. “This guy in front of you”—I gestured toward Abu Batat—“touched me. The whole trip from Solagh, he was touching us.”
“What do you think you’re here for?” Nafah repeated what he had said on the bus. “You are an infidel, a sabiyya, and you belong to the Islamic State now, so get used to it.” Then he spat in my face.
Abu Batat took out a cigarette, which he lit and gave to Nafah. I was surprised; I thought smoking was illegal under Islamic State law. But they didn’t mean to smoke the cigarette. Please don’t put it out on my face, I thought, still concerned, back then, with being pretty. Nafah pushed the lit cigarette into my shoulder, pressing it down through the fabric of the dresses and shirts I had layered on that morning, until it hit my skin and went out. The smell of burned fabric and skin was horrible, but I tried not to scream in pain. Screaming only got you into more trouble.
When he lit another cigarette and put it out on my stomach, I couldn’t help it—I cried out.
“She screams now, will she scream tomorrow?” Abu Batat said to the others. He wanted them to be even harsher with me. “She needs to understand what she is and what she’s here for.”
“Leave me alone, and I won’t do it again,” I said.
Nafah slapped my face hard, twice, and then let go of me. “Go back to the other sabaya,” he said. “And never make another sound again.”
