The Last Girl

by Nadia Murad

  Back upstairs the room was dark and crowded. I pulled my hair over my shoulder and put my hands on my stomach to hide the burns from my nieces, and then I found Kathrine, sitting next to a woman who looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties. The woman wasn’t from Kocho; she must have arrived at the center before us. She had two young children with her, one a baby young enough to be breast-feeding, and she was pregnant. She held the infant to her chest, rocking slightly to keep him quiet, and asked me what had happened downstairs. I just shook my head.

  “Are you in pain?” the woman asked me.

  Although I didn’t know her, I leaned against her. I felt very weak. I nodded.

  Then I told her everything, about leaving Kocho and being separated from my mother and my sisters, about seeing my brothers being driven away. I told her about the bus and Abu Batat. “They beat me,” I said, and I showed her the cigarette burns on my shoulder and on my stomach, raw and painful.

  “Here,” she said, reaching into her bag and handing me a tube. “It’s diaper cream, but it might help with the burns.”

  I thanked her and took the lotion to the bathroom, where I rubbed some of it onto my shoulder and stomach. It soothed the burns a little. Then I rubbed a bit more onto the parts of my body where Abu Batat had touched me. I noticed that I had my period, and I asked a militant for some sanitary pads, which he handed to me without looking at me.

  When I sat back down in the room, I asked the woman, “What has been happening here? What have they done to you?”

  “Do you really want to know?” she asked, and I nodded. “On the first day, on August third, about four hundred Yazidi women and children were taken here,” she began. “It’s an Islamic State center, where the militants live and work. That’s why there are so many of them here.” She paused and looked at me. “But it’s also where we are sold and given away.”

  “Why haven’t you been sold?” I asked.

  “Because I am married, they will wait for forty days before giving me to a militant to be his sabiyya,” she said. “That’s one of their rules. I don’t know when they will come for you. If they don’t choose you today, they will choose you tomorrow. Each time they come, they take some of the women. They rape them and then they bring them back, or sometimes I think they keep them. Sometimes they rape them here, in a room in the house, and just bring them back when they are done.”

  I sat there silently. The pain from my burns built slowly, like a pot of water slowly coming to a boil, and I winced. “Do you want a pill for the pain?” she asked, but I shook my head. “I don’t like taking pills,” I told her.

  “Drink something, then,” she said, and I gratefully took the bottle from her, drinking a few sips of the lukewarm water. Her baby had quieted down and was close to sleeping.

  “It won’t take much time,” she continued in a softer voice. “They will come, and they will take you, too, and they will rape you. Some girls rub ashes or dirt on their faces, or mess up their hair, but it doesn’t matter because they just make them shower and look nice again. Some of the girls have committed suicide, or tried to, by cutting through the veins in their wrists right over there,” she gestured to the bathroom. “You can see the blood high on the walls where the cleaners don’t notice it.” She didn’t tell me not to worry or that everything was going to be fine. When she stopped talking, I leaned my head against her shoulder, close to where her baby had just fallen asleep.

  That night when I closed my eyes, it was only for a moment. I was exhausted but too terrified to sleep. It was summer, so the sun rose early, and when the light came in—hazy and dim through the heavy curtains—I saw that most of the girls had been awake all night like me. They were groggy, rubbing their eyes and yawning into the sleeves of their dresses. Militants came in with some rice and tomato soup for breakfast, on plastic plates that they threw away afterward, and I was so hungry, I ate some as soon as they put it in front of me.

  Many of the girls had spent the night crying, and more started again in the morning. A girl from Kocho who was about Dimal’s age but who, unlike Dimal, hadn’t managed to fool the militants into thinking she was a married woman, sat close to me. “Where are we?” she asked. She hadn’t recognized any of the buildings or roads as we were driving.

  “I don’t know exactly,” I told her. “Somewhere in Mosul.”

  “Mosul,” she whispered. We had all grown up so close to the city, but few of us had ever been.

  A sheikh entered the room, and we stopped talking. He was an older man with white hair, dressed in the baggy black pants and sandals popular among ISIS militants, and although his pants were shorter than usual and slightly ill-fitting, he walked around the room and stared at us with an arrogance that made me think he must be someone very important. “How old is she?” he pointed to a young girl from Kocho, cowering in the corner. She was about thirteen. “Very young,” a militant told him, proudly.

  I could tell from the sheikh’s accent that he was from Mosul. He must have helped the terrorists take over the city. Maybe he was a wealthy businessman who could help ISIS grow, or maybe he was a religious figure or had been important when Saddam was in power and had been waiting for the moment when he could get back the authority that the Americans and Shiites had taken from him. It was possible, too, that he wholeheartedly believed all the religious propaganda; that’s what they all told us, when we asked why they were part of ISIS, even the ones who spoke no Arabic and didn’t know how to pray. They told us that they were right and that God was on their side.

  The sheikh pointed at us as if he already owned every girl in the room, and after a few minutes, he settled on three—all from Kocho. After handing the militant a fistful of American dollars, he left the room and the three girls were dragged out behind him downstairs, to where his purchases were logged and processed.

  The mood in the room shifted to complete panic. By now we knew what ISIS had planned for us, but we had no idea when more buyers would arrive and how they would treat us. Waiting was torture. Some girls whispered about trying to escape, but that was impossible. Even if we could make it out the window, the house, which was clearly some kind of Islamic State center, swarmed with militants. There was no way any of us could slip away without someone noticing. Plus, Mosul is a sprawling, unfamiliar city. If we did manage to somehow slip past the crowds of militants downstairs, we would have no way of knowing what direction to run in. They had driven us here at night, with the windows covered. They would do anything to make sure we didn’t get out alive.

  The talk soon shifted to suicide. I admit that, at first, it crossed my mind. Anything would be better than what the woman had described to me the night before. Kathrine and I made a pact with a few others. “We would rather die than be bought and used by Daesh,” we said. Killing ourselves seemed more honorable than submitting to the militants, our only way of fighting back. Still, it was impossible that we would watch while one of our neighbors took her own life. One girl wrapped her shawl around her neck, saying she was going to strangle herself, but others forced it out of her hands. Some said, “We can’t escape, but if we get to the roof, we can jump off.” I kept thinking of my mother. For her, nothing in life was bad enough to justify suicide. “You have to believe that God will take care of you,” she would tell me whenever something bad happened to me. After my accident on the farm, she had sat beside me in the hospital praying that I would live, and she spent so much money on the jewelry she gave me when I woke up. She had wanted me to live so badly. I couldn’t take my own life now.

  Quickly, we reversed our pact. We wouldn’t kill ourselves; we would help one another as much as we could and take the first opportunity to escape. While we waited in that house, it became clear how vast the slave trade was in ISIS-held Mosul. Thousands of Yazidi girls had been taken from their homes and were being bought and traded, or given as gifts to high-ranking militants and sheikhs, and transported to cities all over Iraq and Syria. It didn’t make a difference if one girl killed
herself, or even a hundred. ISIS wouldn’t be bothered by our deaths, and they wouldn’t change what they were doing. Besides, by now, having lost a few slaves, the militants guarded us to make sure that even if we cut our wrists or strangled ourselves with our scarves, we wouldn’t die from the wounds.

  A militant came through the room demanding whatever documents we had held on to. “Any papers that say you are a Yazidi, give them to us,” he said, shoving them into a bag. Downstairs they piled up all the documents—IDs, ration cards, birth certificates—and burned them, leaving the ashes in a mound. It was as though they thought that by destroying our documents, they could erase the existence of Yazidis from Iraq. I handed over everything I had except for my mother’s ration card, which I kept tucked into my bra. It was all I had of her.

  Inside the bathroom, I splashed some water on my face and arms. A mirror hung over the sink, but I kept my gaze downward. I couldn’t look at myself. I suspected that I already wouldn’t recognize the girl who looked back. On the wall above the shower, I saw the blood the woman from the night before had warned me about. The small reddish-brown stains high up on the tiles were all that was left of some Yazidi girls who had come before me.

  After that we were separated again, this time into two groups. I managed to stay with Kathrine, and we were lined up and put back on the buses. Some others—all girls I knew from Kocho—stayed behind. We didn’t get to say goodbye to them, and later we learned that their group was taken across the border to Raqqa, the capital of ISIS in Syria. I was so relieved to be in Iraq. No matter what happened, I thought I could survive as long as I stayed in my country.

  I moved quickly to the back of the bus to make sure I got a seat beside a window, where I thought it would be harder for Abu Batat or another militant to reach me. It was strange to be outside in the heavy summer light after spending the past few days inside with the curtains drawn or being moved from city to city in the dark. I peeked through the curtains as the bus moved, watching the Mosul streets. At first they looked completely normal, just as Sinjar City had, with people buying groceries and walking their kids to school. But unlike Sinjar, Mosul was full of Islamic State militants. The men were stationed at checkpoints, patrolling the streets, clustered in the backs of trucks, or just living their new lives in the changed city, buying vegetables and carrying on conversations with neighbors. All the women were completely covered in black abayas and niqabs; ISIS had made it illegal for a woman to leave home uncovered or alone, so they floated through the streets, almost invisible.

  We sat quietly, stunned and terrified. I thanked God that I was with Kathrine, Nisreen, Jilan, and Rojian. Their presence gave me the small bit of strength I needed not to completely lose my mind. Not everyone was so lucky. One girl had been separated from everyone she knew back in Kocho, and she started weeping uncontrollably. “Each of you has someone, but I have no one,” she said, wringing her hands in her lap. We wanted to comfort her, but no one was brave enough to try.

  At close to ten in the morning, we pulled up to a two-story green house, slightly smaller than the first, and were pushed inside. On the second floor, a room had already been cleared of most of the possessions of the family who once lived there, although a Bible on the shelf and a small cross on the wall made it clear that they had been Christians. A few girls were already there when we arrived. They were from Tel Ezeir, and they sat close together. More thin mattresses were piled up along the walls, and the small windows had either been blacked out or covered with heavy blankets, filtering the midday sun into a dim, depressing light. The whole space reeked of cleaning solution, the same fluorescent blue paste women used in Kocho to sterilize our kitchens and bathrooms.

  While we sat there waiting, a militant came into the room to make sure the windows were completely covered and no one could see in or out of them. When he noticed the Bible and the cross, he grumbled to himself, picked up a plastic crate, tossed them inside it, then carried the crate out of the room.

  On his way out, he yelled at us to shower. “All you Yazidis, do you always stink?” he said with an exaggerated look of disgust on his face. I thought back to Saoud, coming home from Kurdistan and telling us that people there made fun of Yazidis, saying that we smelled bad and how angry that used to make me. But with ISIS, I hoped I did stink. Filth was armor, protecting us from the hands of men like Abu Batat. I wanted the militants to be so put off by our stench—after sitting in hot buses, many of us vomiting from fear—that they wouldn’t touch us. Instead, they pushed us toward the bathroom in groups. “Wipe that filth off of you!” they demanded. “We don’t want to smell you anymore.” We did as we were told, splashing water on our arms and faces from the sinks but unwilling to take off our clothes and be naked so close to the men.

  After the militant left, some of the girls whispered to one another and pointed at a desk. A black laptop computer sat, closed, on top of it. “I wonder if it works,” one of the girls said. “Maybe it has the Internet! Then we can connect to Facebook and message some people to tell them we are in Mosul.”

  I had no idea how to work a laptop or any computer—this was the first one I had ever seen—so I watched while a couple of the others approached the table, slowly. The idea of connecting to Facebook had given us some hope, and it spread through the room. Some of the girls stopped crying. Others stood up on their own for the first time since leaving Solagh. My heart raced a little. I wanted so badly for the machine to work.

  A girl opened the laptop, and the screen lit up. We gasped, excited, and watched the door for militants. She started tapping on some keys, then harder, frustrated. Soon she closed the lid and turned back to us, hanging her head. “It doesn’t work,” she said, sounding like she might cry. “I’m sorry.”

  Her friends surrounded her, comforting her. We were all so disappointed. “It’s okay, you tried,” they whispered to her. “Besides, if it worked, Daesh wouldn’t have left it here.”

  I looked over to the wall where the girls from Tel Ezeir sat. They hadn’t moved or said anything to us since we arrived. They held one another so close, it was hard to tell where one of them stopped and another started. Their faces, when they looked back at me, were like masks made of pure sorrow, and I thought I must look the same.

  Chapter 5

  The slave market opened at night. We could hear the commotion downstairs where militants were registering and organizing, and when the first man entered the room, all the girls started screaming. It was like the scene of an explosion. We moaned as though wounded, doubling over and vomiting on the floor, but none of it stopped the militants. They paced around the room, staring at us, while we screamed and begged. Those of us who knew Arabic begged in Arabic, and the girls who knew only Kurdish screamed as loud as they could, but the men reacted to our panic as if we were whining children—annoying but not worth acknowledging.

  They gravitated toward the most beautiful girls first, asking, “How old are you?” and examining their hair and mouths. “They are virgins, right?” they asked a guard, who nodded and said, “Of course!” like a shopkeeper taking pride in his product. Some girls told me they had been checked by a doctor to make sure they weren’t lying about their virginity, while others, like me, had only been asked. A few insisted that in fact they were not virgins, that they were spoiled, thinking it would make them less desirable, but the militants could tell they were lying. “They are so young, and they are Yazidi,” they said. “No Yazidi girl would have sex unless she was married.” Now the militants touched us anywhere they wanted, running their hands over our breasts and our legs, as if we were animals.

  It was chaos while the militants paced the room, scanning girls and asking questions in Arabic or the Turkmen language. Nafah, who had arrived when the market opened, chose a very young girl, which made some of the other militants laugh. “We knew you would pick her,” they teased him. “Let me know when you are done with her—give her to me.”

  “Calm down!” militants kept shouting at us. “Be quiet!
” But their orders only made us scream louder. An older militant appeared in the doorway, a fat man with a huge belly called Hajji Shakir, who turned out to be one of the leaders in Mosul. (Hajji is both a common name and a title for respected men.) He had a girl in tow. She was wearing the niqab and abaya worn by all women in Islamic State towns. “This is my sabiyya,” he said, pushing her farther into the room. “She is going to tell you how happy she is now that she is Muslim.”

  The girl lifted up her niqab. Although she was frail, she was extremely beautiful, with smooth dark skin, and when she opened her mouth, a small gold tooth glinted in the light. I thought she couldn’t be older than sixteen. “She has been my sabiyya since August third, when we liberated Hardan from the infidels,” Hajji Shakir said. “Tell them how at peace you are, to be with me and to no longer be kafir,” he said again to her, who remained quiet. “Tell them!”

  She looked down at the carpet but didn’t say anything. It looked like she couldn’t physically speak. Quickly the chaos of the market took over, and when I glanced back toward the door a moment later, the girl was gone. Hajji Shakir, meanwhile, had approached another sabiyya, a young girl I knew from Kocho.

  I lost all control. If it was inevitable that a militant would take me, I wouldn’t make it easy for him. I howled and screamed, slapping away hands that reached out to grope me. Other girls were doing the same, curling their bodies into balls on the floor or throwing themselves across their sisters and friends to try to protect them. We were no longer scared that we would be beaten, and many of us, myself included, wondered whether we could provoke them into killing us. When a militant slapped me across the face and said, “This is the one who caused all the trouble yesterday,” I was surprised by how little his hand hurt me. It was far more painful a moment later when he touched my breast, and after he left, I collapsed onto the floor, where Nisreen and Kathrine tried to comfort me.