The Last Girl

by Nadia Murad

  ISIS appeared to revel in the way it took over the city’s most important buildings, hoisting their black and white flag wherever they went. The local airport, as well as the entire sprawling campus of Mosul University, once one of the best schools in Iraq, became military bases. Militants stormed the Mosul Museum, the second largest in all of Iraq, destroying artifacts they said were anti-Islamic and selling others in a black market devised to fund their war. Even the city’s Nineveh Oberoi Hotel, a lopsided five-star hotel built in the 1980s under Saddam, was filled by key members of the terrorist group. The nicest rooms, people said, were reserved for suicide bombers.

  When ISIS came in 2014, hundreds of thousands of people left Mosul, waiting for hours at KRG checkpoints to get into Kurdistan, and debris from their escape was still fresh along the roads where Hajji Salman and I drove. Abandoned cars had been burned down to black skeletons; rebar poked out of the rubble of half-flattened houses; scraps of Iraqi police uniforms littered the roads, left by officers who thought they would have a better chance of making it out alive if they shed their uniforms. Consulates, courthouses, schools, police stations, and military bases were now under the control of ISIS, and they left their mark everywhere, hanging flags, blasting speeches from mosque loudspeakers, even blacking out the faces of children on a mural outside an elementary school since they considered these portraits haram, or sinful.

  Prisoners from Badush prison had been set free and, in return, were told to pledge their loyalty to ISIS. Joining the militants, they blew up Christian, Sufi, and Shiite shrines and holy sites, some that were as much a part of Iraq as the mountains. At least the Mosul grand mosque was still standing in the old city, although it was made ugly the moment Baghdadi stood behind its pulpit and declared Iraq’s second most important city the capital of ISIS in Iraq and, by 2017, it was destroyed like so much of the city.

  Finally we stopped in front of the Mosul courthouse, a large sand-colored building on the west bank of the Tigris, with thin spires that reminded me of a mosque. A large Islamic State flag decorated the top of the courthouse. The building was crucial to the Islamic State plan for instituting a new order in Mosul, one led not by the laws of the central Iraqi government but by the Islamic State’s fundamentalist beliefs. Islamic State IDs replaced our Iraqi ones, and cars were already being outfitted with new Islamic State license plates. In ISIS-controlled Mosul, women had to be covered all the time—in niqabs and abayas—and escorted by men if they wanted to leave the home. ISIS banned television, radios, and even cigarettes. Civilians who didn’t join the terrorist group had to pay a fee if they wanted to leave Mosul, then were allowed to be outside the city for only a certain amount of time. If they were gone too long, a member of their family could be punished and their home and property confiscated for “abandoning the caliphate.” Many of the trials were carried out in this courthouse.

  Inside, crowds waited to be seen by judges and clerks. A line of militants with black-clad women, who I assumed were sabaya like me, waited in front of a particular room. There we would fill out documents that would officially recognize which Yazidi girls were owned by which militants. We would be forced to convert to Islam, and that conversion was recorded as well. Then a judge would declare us the property of the man who had brought us in. This was a contract for rape that the militants, including Hajji Salman, called “marriage.”

  When the militants working there saw Hajji Salman, they waved us to the front of the line. Overhearing conversations, I was able to better understand what my captor did for ISIS. Hajji Salman was a judge, and his job was to determine whether a defendant who had been found guilty should be executed.

  Inside, the room was empty except for a gray-bearded judge sitting behind a long desk, surrounded by paperwork. Behind him a large Islamic State flag waved in the wind from the air cooler, and two more flags decorated the shoulders of his uniform. As we walked inside, I prayed to God furiously to forgive me for what was about to happen. I will always believe in you, I prayed. I will always be Yazidi.

  The judge, Husayn, was stern and efficient. “Lift up your niqab,” he ordered, and I did, showing my face to him. “Do you know the shahada?” he asked me. “Yes,” I said. Everyone knew the simple Islamic prayer, which demonstrates a convert’s commitment to Islam and which Muslims recite when they pray. When I finished, Judge Husayn’s face brightened. “God bless you,” he said to me. “What you are doing is very good.” Then he picked up a camera off his desk and took a picture of my bare face.

  Afterward he turned to Hajji Salman and said, “She is your sabiyya now. Do with her what you like,” and we made our way out of the courthouse.

  With these “marriages” ISIS continued their slow murder of Yazidi girls. First, they took us from our homes and killed our men. Then they separated us from our mothers and sisters. Wherever we were, they reminded us that we were just property, there to be touched and abused, the way Abu Batat squeezed my breast as if he wanted to break it or Nafah put cigarettes out on my body. All of those violations were steps in the execution of our souls.

  Taking our religion from us was the cruelest. Leaving the courthouse, I felt empty. Who was I if I wasn’t Yazidi? I hoped that God knew that even though I had recited the shahada, I didn’t mean it. As long as my soul, murdered by ISIS, could be in the afterlife with God and Tawusi Melek, then ISIS could have my body.

  “Was the photo for an ID?” I asked Hajji Salman.

  “No,” he replied. “They will use the photo to keep track of where you are and who you are with.” His grip tightened on my arm. “And if you try to escape, they will print hundreds of copies of those photos with my name and phone number next to it and hang them at every checkpoint to make sure that you are returned to me. You will be returned to me.”

  Of course, I believed him.

  Chapter 7

  We left the courthouse and drove to a new home where Morteja, the guard, lived with his family. Compared to Hajji Salman’s residence, it was a modest house, only one floor, but still grander than what I had grown up in. Since I had just converted, I thought maybe Hajji Salman would take pity on me and tell me what had happened to my family, so I asked him. “Please, just take me to see Kathrine, Nisreen, and Rojian,” I begged. “I just want to make sure they are okay.”

  To my surprise, he said he would try. “I know where they are,” he said. “I’ll make a phone call. Maybe you can see them, for a moment, but we will have to wait here for now.”

  Entering through the kitchen, we were immediately greeted by a large older woman who introduced herself as Morteja’s mother. “Nadia was an infidel, but she has just converted,” Morteja told his mother, and she raised her thick arms in enthusiastic congratulations to Hajji Salman. “It’s not your fault that you were born a Yazidi,” she said to me. “It is the fault of your parents, and you will be happy now.”

  I hadn’t been in the same room as a non-Yazidi woman since arriving in Mosul, and I stared at Morteja’s mother, looking for a glimmer of sympathy. She was a mother, after all, and I thought that might mean more to her than her being Sunni and me being Yazidi. Did she know what Hajji Salman had done to me the night before, and what he planned on doing as soon as I finished my period? Even if she didn’t, she knew I was there by force, that I was separated from my family, and that the men in Kocho had been killed. She showed no affection or sympathy toward me, only glee in finding out that because I had been forced to convert to Islam, there was one fewer Yazidi in Iraq.

  I hated her, not just because she had let Mosul be taken over by ISIS, but because she had let it be taken over by men. Under ISIS, women were erased from public life. Men joined it for obvious reasons—they wanted money, power, and sex. They were too weak, I thought, to figure out how to get these things without using violence, and in any case, the Islamic State militants I had met so far seemed to enjoy making people feel pain. Those men were served by the laws adopted by ISIS, which gave them total authority over their wives and daughters. />
  I couldn’t understand, though, why a woman would join the jihadists and openly celebrate the enslavement of girls the way Morteja’s mother did. Any woman in Iraq, no matter her religion, had to struggle for everything. Seats in parliament, reproductive rights, positions at universities—all these were the results of long battles. Men were content to stay in power, so power had to be taken from them by strong women. Even Adkee’s insistence on driving our tractor was a gesture of equality and a challenge to those men.

  And yet when ISIS came to Mosul, women like Morteja’s mother welcomed them and celebrated the vicious policies that would hide women like her and exploit women like me, just as she had stood by while the terrorists killed or pushed out the city’s Christians and Shiites, people the Sunnis had lived with for over a thousand years. She chose to stay and watch and to live under ISIS.

  If I had ever seen Yazidis in Sinjar attack Muslims the way that ISIS attacked us, there is no way I would have stood by while it happened. No one in my family would have, men or women. Everyone thinks Yazidi women are weak, because we are poor and live outside the cities, and I have heard people say female fighters with ISIS are, in their own way, proving their strength among men. But none of them—not Morteja’s mother, not even a suicide bomber—was a fraction as strong as my mother, who overcame so many struggles and who never would have let another woman be sold into slavery, no matter her religion.

  I now know that female terrorists are nothing new. Across the world and throughout history, women have joined terrorist organizations, sometimes taking starring roles, and yet their actions continue to astonish outsiders. People assume that women are too docile, particularly in the Middle East, to be violent. But there are many women in ISIS, and like the men, they reject all faiths except for Islam and think that by joining the terrorists, they are helping the greater cause of building their Sunni caliphate. Like the men, they consider themselves victims of sectarian oppression and the American invasion. The women believed ISIS when they said that if the women supported them, their families would have more money, their husbands would get better jobs, and their children would be given the status they deserved in their country. They were told that it was their religious duty to support the men, and they accepted that.

  I have heard stories of Islamic State women helping Yazidis. One girl from Kocho was given a cell phone by the wife of her captor, a foreign fighter who had taken his entire family with him on the long journey from their home in the West to Syria. At first the wife had been enticed by Islamic State propaganda, but quickly she became appalled by the enslavement of Yazidi women. Because of this woman, the Yazidi girls in that house were able to coordinate being smuggled out of Syria to safety.

  More often, though, I hear stories of women who are even crueler than the men. They beat and starve their husbands’ sabaya, out of jealousy or anger or because we are easy targets. Maybe they think of themselves as revolutionaries—even feminists—and they have told themselves, as people have throughout history, that violence toward a greater good is acceptable. I’ve heard of all this, and when I think about bringing ISIS to justice for genocide, I feel some pity for the women. I understand better how people could see them as victims. But I don’t understand how anyone could stand by and watch while thousands of Yazidis are sold into sexual slavery and raped until their bodies break. There is no justification for that kind of cruelty, and no greater good that could come out of it.

  Morteja’s mother kept talking to Hajji Salman, trying to impress him. “Other than Morteja, I have a twelve-year-old daughter,” she said. “And a son in Syria, fighting with Dawla,” using a shortened Arabic term for ISIS. She smiled, thinking of him. “He is so beautiful!” she gushed. “God will bless him.”

  After the greetings were over, Morteja’s mother showed me to a small room. “Wait here for Hajji Salman,” she said. “Don’t try to go anywhere, and don’t touch anything.” She closed the door behind her.

  I sat on the edge of a couch and hugged my arms to my body. I wondered if Hajji Salman was in fact trying to find my nieces, and if I would be able to see them. It wasn’t uncommon for sabaya to interact with one another—men often traveled with them—and it was possible he would give me what I wanted to keep me calm, so that later I would fight less. As long as I got to see that Kathrine and the others were still alive, I didn’t care what came after.

  Suddenly the door opened, and Morteja walked in. I noticed for the first time how young he was, no more than a year older than me, with a scruffy, short beard. It was clear that he was low-ranking among the militants, and I wasn’t even sure he had a sabiyya; if he did, there was no evidence of her living with him. Without Hajji Salman nearby, he approached me with more authority, but it seemed put on, like a boy wearing his father’s shoes.

  He closed the door behind him and sat down on the bed close to me. Instinctively I pulled my legs up to my chest and rested my forehead on my knees, avoiding looking at him. Nevertheless, he started talking. “Are you happy to be here?” he asked. “Or would you be happier if you could escape and be with your family?” He was making fun of me; he knew how any human being would answer that question.

  “I don’t know anything about what happened to my family,” I said. I pleaded with God for him to go away.

  “What would you give me if I helped you escape?” he asked me.

  “I have nothing to give you,” I said, answering sincerely, even though I knew what he was suggesting. “But if you help me, I will call my brother, and he will give you anything you want.”

  He laughed and asked, “Are you scared?” all the while inching closer to me.

  “Yes, I’m scared,” I told him. “Of course I’m scared.”

  “Let me see,” he said, and he reached out for my chest. “Let me see if your heart is beating fast because you are scared.”

  As soon as I saw his hand coming toward me, I stopped talking to him and screamed as loud as I could. I wished my scream would make the walls collapse around us and the ceiling fall down and kill us all.

  The door opened, and Morteja’s mother appeared. She gave her son an angry look. “Leave her alone,” she said to Morteja, “she doesn’t belong to you.” And Morteja left the room, hanging his head in shame like a child. “She’s a kafir,” his mother said to him as he left, then scowled at me. “And she belongs to Hajji Salman.”

  For a moment, I wondered how she would act if it were just the two of us. In spite of who she was, and what she had allowed to happen, if she had just come and sat down next to me and done nothing beyond acknowledge what was happening to me, I think I would have forgiven her. She was close to my mother’s age, and her body was fleshy and soft like my mother’s. If she had said, “I know they brought you here by force,” and if she had asked, “Where are your mother and your sisters?” and not done anything but say those things, I would have felt so relieved. I fantasized about her waiting until Morteja left and then sitting beside me on the bed and taking my hand, calling me her daughter and whispering, “Don’t worry, I will help you escape. I’m a mother, I feel for you.” Those words would have been like a piece of bread after I hadn’t eaten for weeks. But she said nothing. She left, and I was alone again in that little room.

  After a few minutes, Hajji Salman came in. “We can go see Kathrine now,” he told me, and my heart felt full and empty at the same time. I worried about my niece more than anyone else.

  Kathrine was born in 1998, Elias’s oldest daughter, and from the first moment she was born, she was special in our family. It was Kathrine’s teary protests that prevented Elias from moving his family out of our house. She loved my mother almost as much as I did, and she loved me. We shared everything, even clothing, and sometimes we dressed alike. At my cousin’s wedding, we both wore red, and at one of my brothers’ weddings, we both wore green.

  Even though I was older, I was behind a few years in school, and so we were in the same classes. Kathrine was smart, but she was practical beyond her year
s and hardworking, and she dropped out of school after sixth grade to work on the farm. She liked being outside with our family more than she liked studying, and she liked feeling useful. Even though she was young and slight and quiet, she could do everything in the house and on the farm. Kathrine milked our sheep and cooked as well as Dimal. When someone got sick, she wept over them and said she could feel their illness inside her until they got better. Falling asleep at night, we would talk about our plans for the future. “I will get married at twenty-five,” she used to tell me. “I want lots of children and a big family.”

  During the siege, Kathrine barely moved from the living room, where she sat in front of the television and wept for the people on the mountain. She refused to eat after she heard that Baso, her sister, had been captured. “We have to be optimistic,” I would tell her, stroking her face, which had turned yellow from lack of food and sleep. “Maybe we will survive.” My mother would tell her, “Look at your father—you have to be strong for him.” But Kathrine lost hope very early and never got it back.

  Kathrine and I were put on different trucks leaving Kocho, and I didn’t see her again until Solagh, when she held on to my mother as tightly as she possibly could, trying to keep ISIS from taking her away. “I’m going with my mother,” she told an Islamic State militant. “She can’t walk by herself.” But he yelled at her to sit down, and she did.

  In Mosul, it was Kathrine who had worried about me the most. “Don’t scream again,” she said. “I know what Abu Batat was doing. He did the same to me.” She knew that I had a hard time controlling my temper—she knew me better than anyone—and she wanted to help me avoid being punished. “Don’t speak Arabic, Nadia,” she’d said while we waited in the house in Mosul to be divided. “You don’t want them to take you to Syria.” The last I saw of her, I was being torn from her by Salwan and taken downstairs.