The Last Girl

by Nadia Murad

  The visiting militant turned out to be Nafah, the man from the first center who had punished me for screaming on the bus. He scowled at me but addressed only Hajji Salman. “My sabiyya hasn’t stopped asking to see yours,” he said. “We will have to sit with them and listen to what they say, though, because I don’t trust Nadia.”

  Nafah’s sabiyya was Lamia, my friend Walaa’s sister, and we ran to hug and kiss each other on the cheek, so relieved to see a familiar face. Then the four of us sat together, and when Salman and Nafah began to talk together, ignoring us, Lamia and I switched from Arabic to Kurdish.

  Lamia was wearing a long dress and a hijab over her hair. We didn’t know how long we would have together, so we spoke quickly, trying to get as much information as we could. “Did he touch you?” she asked me.

  “Did he touch you?” I asked her back, and she nodded yes.

  “He made me convert, and then we were married at the courthouse,” she confessed to me, and I told her the same thing had happened to me. “You shouldn’t look at it like a marriage, though,” I said. “It’s not like getting married in Kocho.”

  “I want to escape,” she said. “But people are always visiting Nafah, and it’s impossible to leave.”

  “Same thing with Salman,” I told her. “There are guards everywhere, and he told me that if I try to escape, he will punish me.”

  “What do you think he would do?” she asked quietly, glancing at our captors. They were talking to each other, oblivious to what we were doing.

  “I don’t know. Something bad,” I said.

  “We told you girls to speak in Arabic!” Salman yelled. They had overheard us and were angry that they couldn’t understand what we were saying.

  “What happened to Walaa?” I asked Lamia in Arabic. I hadn’t seen my friend after we left Kocho.

  “The same night they took me, they distributed all the other girls,” Lamia told me. “I don’t know what happened to Walaa. I’ve been asking Nafah to find her, but he won’t. What about Dimal and Adkee?”

  “They stayed in Solagh,” I said, “with my mother.” We were quiet for a moment, letting the weight of their absences fall on top of us.

  Thirty-five minutes later Nafah got up to leave. Lamia and I kissed each other goodbye. “Take care of yourself and don’t be upset,” I told her as she pulled her niqab down over her face. “We are all going through the same thing.” Then they left, and I was alone with Salman again.

  We walked upstairs to my room. “This is the first time I’ve seen your expression change at all,” he said to me when we reached my door.

  I turned to him. I didn’t pretend not to be angry. “What do you want my face to look like when you lock me up and do things to me that I don’t want?” I said back.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he said. “Go inside.” He opened the door and stayed in the room with me until morning.

  Hajji Salman would tell me over and over, “I will punish you if you try to escape,” but he never said exactly what he would do. He would almost certainly beat me, but it wouldn’t be the first time he did that. Salman hit me all the time. He hit me when he was displeased with the way I cleaned the house, when he was angry about something from work, if I cried or kept my eyes closed while he raped me. Maybe, if I tried to escape, the beating would be severe enough to scar or disfigure me, but I didn’t care. If a wound or a scar prevented him or anyone else from raping me, I would wear it like a jewel.

  Sometimes after he raped me, he would tell me that there was no point in even trying to escape. “You are no longer a virgin,” he would say, “and you are a Muslim. Your family will kill you. You are ruined.” Even though I had been forced, I believed him. I felt ruined.

  Already I had thought about ways to make myself ugly—in the center, girls had smeared ashes and dirt on their faces, tangled their hair into knots, and avoided showering so that their stench might repel buyers—but I couldn’t think of anything other than slashing my face or cutting off all my hair, which I assumed would make Salman beat me. If I tried to disfigure myself, would he kill me? I didn’t think so. I was more valuable alive, and he knew that death would be a welcome relief. I could only imagine what Salman would do to me if I tried to escape. Then one day the opportunity came to test him.

  In the evening, Salman came home with two men, militants I had never seen before who were traveling without their sabaya. “Did you finish cleaning the house?” he asked, and when I said I had, he told me to spend the rest of the evening in our room, alone. “There is food in the kitchen. If you are hungry, tell Hossam, and he will bring some up for you.” I was to stay out of their way and wait for him.

  First, though, he told me to bring everyone tea. He wanted to show off his sabiyya. I did as I was told, putting on one of the dresses that he liked and taking the tea from the kitchen into the living room. As usual, the militants there were talking about Islamic State victories in Syria and Iraq. I listened for any mention of Kocho, but I didn’t hear them say anything about my home.

  The room was crowded with men, only two of whom were visitors. All the center’s guards appeared to be joining Salman and his guests for dinner, leaving their stations unmanned for the first time since I arrived. I wondered if that was why he had been so insistent that I stay in my room until the guests left. If all the guards were joining them, it meant there would be no one patrolling the garden or watching to make sure that if I closed the door to the bathroom, I didn’t try to crawl out the window. There would be no one outside my door, listening to what was going on inside.

  When I finished serving the tea, Hajji Salman dismissed me, and I went back upstairs. A plan was already forming in my head, and I moved quickly, knowing that if I stopped to think about what I was doing, I might talk myself out of it, and that a chance like this might never come again. Instead of going to my room, I went into a living room, where I knew the closets were still full of clothes left by Yazidi girls and the family who owned the house, looking for a spare abaya and niqab. I found the abaya quickly and slipped it on over my dress. To cover my hair and face, I settled on a long black scarf in place of a niqab, hoping that I would find safety before anyone noticed the difference. Then I walked to the window.

  We were on the second floor but not very high up, and the wall below the window was built so that some of the sand-colored bricks stuck out a few inches. It was a popular design in Mosul, not meant for anything but decoration, but I thought those bricks could be used as a ladder to climb down to the garden. I poked my head out the window, looking for the guards who usually walked the garden at all hours, but it was empty. An oil drum leaned against the garden fence; it would be a perfect step stool.

  Beyond the garden wall the highways rumbled with cars, but the streets were beginning to thin out as people went home for dinner, and in the dusk I thought it was less likely that anyone would notice that the black scarf was not a proper niqab. Hopefully I could find someone who would help me before I was discovered. Other than my jewelry and my mother’s ration card, which I tucked into my bra, I left everything behind in the room.

  Carefully I put one leg through the open window and then another. With my body halfway through the window and my torso still inside, I moved my feet, trying to feel for one of those bricks. My arms shook, holding on to the windowsill, but I quickly steadied myself. I could tell the climb wouldn’t be too difficult. I was just beginning to look for lower bricks when I heard the sound of a gun being cocked just below me. I froze, my body folded over the windowsill. “Go inside!” a male voice yelled up at me, and without looking down, I quickly heaved myself back up and through the window, falling onto the floor below it, my heart racing with fear. I didn’t know who had caught me. All of Hajji Salman’s guards were in the living room with him. I curled up on the floor beneath the window until I heard footsteps come toward me, and when I looked up and saw Hajji Salman standing over me, I ran as quickly as I could back to my room.

  The door opened, and Haj
ji Salman came in, carrying a whip in his hands. Screaming, I threw myself onto the bed and pulled a thick comforter over my entire body and my head, hiding the way a child hides. Salman stood beside the bed and without a word started beating me. The whip came down hard, over and over, so fast and with so much anger that the thick blanket did little to protect me. “Get out of there!” Hajji Salman shouted, louder than I had ever heard him. “Get out from under that blanket and get undressed!”

  I had no choice. I lifted the blanket off and, with Salman still hovering over me holding the whip, slowly took off my clothes. When I was completely naked, I stood still, waiting for what he would do to me and crying silently. I assumed he would rape me, but instead, he started walking toward the door. “Nadia, I told you that if you tried to escape something really bad would happen to you,” he said. His soft voice had returned. Then he opened the door and walked through it.

  A moment later Morteja, Yahya, Hossam, and the three other guards walked in, staring at me. They stood where Salman had been a moment before. As soon as I saw them, I understood what my punishment would be. Morteja was the first to come to the bed. I tried to stop him, but he was too strong. He pushed me down, and there was nothing I could do.

  After Morteja, another guard raped me. I screamed for my mother and for Khairy, my brother. In Kocho, they came whenever I needed them. Even if I just burned my finger a little bit, if I asked for them, they would come to help me. In Mosul, I was alone, and their names were all I had left of them. Nothing I did or said stopped the men from attacking me. The last thing I remember from that night is the face of one of the guards as he came toward me. I remember that before it was his turn to rape me, he took off his glasses and carefully put them down on a table. I guess he worried they would break.

  When I woke up in the morning, I was alone and naked. I couldn’t move. Someone, one of the men I supposed, had put a blanket over me. My head spun when I tried to get up, and my body ached when I reached out for clothes. Every movement felt like it would push me back into unconsciousness, as if a black curtain had been halfway drawn in front of my eyes or everything in the world had become a shadow of itself.

  I went to the bathroom to take a shower. My body was covered in filth left by the men, and I turned on the water and stood under it for a long time, crying. Then I cleaned myself very well, scrubbing my body, my teeth, my face, my hair, and the entire time praying and asking God to help me, and to forgive me.

  Afterward I went back to my room and lay down on the sofa. The bed still smelled like the men who had raped me. No one came to see me, although I could hear them talking outside my room, and after a moment I managed to sleep. I didn’t dream about anything. When I next opened my eyes, Salman’s driver was standing over me, poking me on the shoulder. “Wake up, Nadia. Get up, get dressed,” he said. “It’s time to go.”

  “Where am I going?” I asked, stuffing my things into my black bag.

  “I don’t know—away from here,” he said. “Hajji Salman has sold you.”

  Chapter 10

  When I was first captured and learned what was happening to Yazidi girls, I prayed that I would be held by only one man. Being bought once as a slave, having your humanity and dignity taken from you, was bad enough, and I couldn’t stand the thought of being passed from militant to militant, moved from house to house, and maybe even transported across the border into ISIS-held Syria, like an object at the market, like a sack of flour in the back of a truck.

  Back then I didn’t understand how cruel one man could be. Hajji Salman was the worst man I had ever met, and after he allowed his guards to rape me, I prayed to be sold. I didn’t care to whom and I didn’t care where they took me. Even the possibility of going to Syria, where it was much harder to escape and which I had once thought of as a death sentence, seemed better to me than staying with Salman. When I fantasize about putting ISIS on trial for genocide, I want to see Hajji Salman, like Salwan, captured alive. I want to visit him in jail, where he will be surrounded by Iraqi military officers and guards with guns. I want to see how he looks and hear how he talks without the power of ISIS behind him. And I want him to look at me and remember what he did to me and understand that this is why he will never be free again.

  I packed my bag and followed the driver outside. Hajji Salman was somewhere in the house, but I didn’t see him when I left. I willed myself not to look at Morteja and the other guards as I passed by them. It was getting dark by the time we left Hajji Salman’s, but the air was still hot, with only a little breeze blowing sand onto my face, which no one had asked me to cover. Although I was outside, I didn’t feel any sense of freedom. Knowing that there was no person in the whole of Mosul who would help me made me feel hopeless.

  A new guard, a man I didn’t recognize, sat in the front of a small white car with the driver. “Are you hungry?” he asked me as we left. I shook my head no, but we pulled over to a restaurant anyway. The driver went inside and brought back some sandwiches wrapped in foil, one of which he tossed onto the backseat beside me along with a bottle of water. Outside the car, people walked around, bought food and sat and ate, talked on their phones. I wished I could just open the door and show myself to them. I wished that as soon as they knew what was happening, they would help me. But I didn’t think they would. A strong smell of meat and onions rose through the foil, and I closed my eyes as we started driving, trying not to throw up.

  Soon we arrived at the first checkpoint out of Mosul. It was manned by Islamic State militants carrying automatic weapons and pistols. I looked out the window, wondering if they were in fact posting photos of escaped sabaya as Hajji Salman had said they were, but it was too dark to see anything. “Why isn’t your wife wearing the niqab?” a militant asked the driver.

  “She’s not my wife, hajji,” he said. “She’s a sabiyya.”

  “Congratulations to you,” the militant said, and waved us through.

  By now it was completely dark. We drove along the highway east out of Mosul, passing a few cars and trucks along the way. In the darkness, the flat Iraqi landscape seemed to have no end. When they ran, where did the escapees go? How did they get through the checkpoints in Mosul? If they managed to, how did they know where to run through the fields, who might help them and who would turn them in, how long could they go without dying of thirst? They were so brave to try.

  “Look!” the driver said, pointing a bit ahead of us on the side of the road at a box, glowing white in our headlights. “I wonder what it is?”

  “Don’t stop,” the guard warned. “It could be an IED. You know this road is full of them.”

  “I don’t think so,” the driver said, pulling over and stopping about ten feet from the box. There were pictures and lettering on the side, but from the car it was impossible to tell what it was. “I bet it’s something that was looted and fell off a truck.” He was excited: as a lowly driver, he wouldn’t have been able to get as much new stuff as higher-ranking men in ISIS.

  While the guard kept protesting—“No one would have left anything good on the road!” he said. “If it explodes, it will kill all of us!”—the driver got out of the car and walked toward the box. He crouched and examined it without touching it. “Whatever it is, it’s not worth it,” the guard muttered to himself. I pictured the driver greedily opening the lid and a huge bomb going off, blowing him apart and launching our car into the middle of the desert. If I died, it didn’t matter, as long as the two men died, too. Let it be a bomb, I prayed.

  A minute later the driver picked up the box and triumphantly carried it back to the car. “Fans!” he said, putting it in the trunk. “Two of them, and they run on batteries.”

  The guard sighed and helped him shove the box into the trunk. I sank back into the seat, disappointed. After the second checkpoint, I asked the driver, “Hajji, where are we going?”

  “Hamdaniya,” he told me. Apparently Hamdaniya, a district in the north of Nineveh, had been taken over by ISIS. My half brother Khaled had
been stationed there with the military, and he hadn’t told me that much about it, but I knew that there was a large Christian population there, who would all by now be gone or dead. Along the way we passed the charred, upturned remains of an Islamic State vehicle, evidence of the battle to take over the area.

  In Kocho, during the siege, we followed the Islamic State attacks on the Christian villages closely. Like us, the villagers there had lost all their belongings and the houses they had spent their life’s earnings to build. Iraqi Christians were also being forced from their homes just because of their religion. Christians in Iraq were often under attack, and, like Yazidis, they struggled to stay in their homeland. Over the years, the population has gotten smaller and smaller as they have left for countries where they feel more welcome. After ISIS arrived, many Christians said that soon there would not be a single one of them left in all Iraq. When ISIS came to Kocho, though, I felt envy for the Christians. In their villages, they had been warned that ISIS was coming. Because, according to ISIS, they were “people of the book” and not kuffar like us, they had been able to take their children, their daughters, to safety in Kurdistan, and, in Syria, some had been able to pay a fine rather than convert. Even those who had been expelled from Mosul without anything at least had been spared enslavement. Yazidis had not been given the same chance.

  Soon we arrived at a city in Hamdaniya district. The entire city was dark without electricity, and it smelled terrible, like rotting animal flesh. Streets were quiet, and homes had been emptied of regular people. Only terrorists remained, and only the Islamic State headquarters was lit up, powered by a huge generator that made a loud noise in the still night.