The Last Girl

by Nadia Murad

  When ISIS first came to Iraq, they promised that they would restore services to cities and towns that lacked them. Their propaganda, when it wasn’t celebrating their violence, flaunted these promises—for electricity, better garbage collection, and nicer roads—as though they were a normal political party. We were told that people believed them and thought they would serve them better than the Iraqi government, but I didn’t see anything in Mosul that made me think that life was better for the average person there. This city was like a shell of itself, empty and dark, smelling of death and populated only by the terrorists who made the empty promises in the first place.

  We stopped at the Islamic State headquarters and went inside. As in Mosul, it was full of militants. I sat quietly and waited to be told what to do; I was exhausted and desperate to sleep. A militant walked in. He was short and so old that his back was hunched, and the teeth he had left were rotting in his mouth. “Go upstairs,” he told me. I was terrified, sure that Hajji Salman was continuing his punishment of me by selling me to the old man and that he was sending me to the room where he planned to rape me. When I opened the door to the room, though, I saw that there were other girls there. It took me a moment before I recognized them.

  “Jilan! Nisreen!” It was my sister-in-law and my niece. I had never been so happy to see anyone in my life, and we rushed toward one another, kissing and weeping. They were dressed like me and looked as if they hadn’t slept in weeks. Nisreen was really small—I didn’t know how she coped with being a sabiyya—and for Jilan, separated from the husband she loved so much, I thought that rape must be even worse than it was for me. Quickly, knowing we could be taken from one another at any moment, we sat on the floor and started telling one another our stories.

  “How did you get here?” I asked them.

  “We were both sold,” Nisreen said. “I was sold twice in Mosul and then brought here.”

  “Do you know what happened to Kathrine?” Nisreen asked me.

  “She’s in a center, too, in Mosul,” I said.

  I told them what Lamia had told me about Walaa, and some of what had happened to me. “I was held by a terrible person,” I said. “I tried to escape, but he caught me.” I didn’t tell them everything. Some of it I wasn’t ready to say out loud. We held one another as close as we could. “The nasty-faced old man downstairs—I think he’s the one who bought me,” I said.

  “No.” Nisreen looked down. “He owns me.”

  “How can you stand it, when this disgusting old man comes to you at night?” I said to Nisreen.

  Nisreen shook her head. “I don’t think about me,” she said. “What about Rojian, taken by that enormous guy? After she left, we all went crazy. We cried as much as we could. For once, we weren’t even thinking about what had happened in Kocho—all we thought about was Rojian with that monster.”

  “What happened in Kocho?” I was scared to ask. “Do you know for sure?”

  “I saw on TV that all the men were killed,” Nisreen said. “Everyone was killed, every man. It was on the news.”

  Even though I had heard the bullets being fired behind the school, until that moment I had held out hope that the men had survived. Hearing my niece confirm it was like hearing the bullets again, round after round of them until it was the only thing in my head. We tried to comfort one another. “Don’t cry because they are dead,” I told them. “I wish we had been killed with them.” Being dead was better than being sold like merchandise and raped until our bodies were in shreds. Among our men there had been students, doctors, the young, and the elderly. In Kocho, my brothers and half brothers had stood side by side as ISIS killed almost all of them. But their deaths took just a moment. When you are a sabiyya, you die every second of every day, and just like the men, we would never see our families or our homes again. Nisreen and Jilan agreed. “We wish we had been with the men when they killed them,” they said.

  The militant with the rotting teeth—Nisreen’s captor—came to the door and pointed at me. “Time to go,” he said, and we all started begging. “You can do whatever you want to us, just please keep us together!” we screamed, holding on to one another just as we had that night in Mosul. And just like that night, they tore us apart and dragged me downstairs before I could say goodbye.

  In Hamdaniya I lost all hope. It was ISIS controlled, so there was no way of escaping, and no way to dream that someone walking in the streets would be moved to help if they saw a Yazidi girl in distress. There was nothing but empty houses and the smell of war.

  Fifteen minutes later we arrived at the second center in Hamdaniya. I had the sinking feeling that here I would meet my new owner, and I walked slowly from the car, feeling like my body was made of cement. This center was made up of two houses, and when the car pulled up, a middle-aged man walked out of the smaller one. He wore a long black beard and the Islamic State black pants. The driver indicated that I was to follow him inside. “That’s Abu Muawaya,” he told me. “Do what he says.”

  The house was only one story, but it was very tidy and beautiful, having once belonged to a wealthy Christian family. There were no girls there to greet me, but Yazidi clothes were piled everywhere, brighter and bolder than the typical dress of a conservative Muslim Iraqi woman, as well as remnants of the family that had fled the house. It was like entering a tomb. Abu Muawaya joined another, younger man in the kitchen where they ate bread and yogurt and drank black tea.

  “How many days will I be here?” I asked the men. “I have family members in the other center. Can I be with them?”

  They barely looked at me, and Abu Muawaya answered. “You are a sabiyya,” he said calmly. “You don’t give orders—you take them.”

  “Nadia, did you convert?” the other man asked.

  “Yes,” I said, wondering how they knew my name and what else they knew about me. They didn’t ask me any questions about where I was from or what happened to my family, but those details may not have mattered to them. All that mattered was that I was there, and I belonged to them.

  “Go and shower,” Abu Muawaya said. I wondered how much Hajji Salman had sold me for. Sabaya who were no longer virgins sold for less money, I knew that, and I might have had a reputation as a troublemaker because of the incident on the bus and because I tried to escape. Was this further punishment for that attempt? Maybe Salman had been so eager to get rid of me he had given me as a present, or maybe he had found the most brutal man he could and simply given me to him. That happened, I knew. Yazidi girls were passed from terrorist to terrorist for no money at all.

  “I showered this morning,” I told him.

  “Then go wait for me in that room,” Abu Muawaya pointed to a bedroom, and I obediently walked through the doorway. It was a small room with a narrow brown bed, covered by a blue-and-white-striped blanket. Shoes filled two shelves against the wall, and a large bookshelf was full of books. On top of a desk a computer sat dead, its screen dark. The room must have belonged to a student, I thought, a boy about my age; the shoes were the kind of loafers worn by college students, and they weren’t that big. I sat on the bed and waited. I avoided looking into the large mirror hanging on the wall, and I didn’t think about whether I was small enough to fit through the air vent that was there in place of a window. I didn’t want to open the closet or look through his things to learn more about him. I didn’t even check to see what the books were on the shelf. Probably the boy was still alive somewhere, and it didn’t seem right for a dead person to go through the things of the living.

  Chapter 11

  Every Islamic State member treated me cruelly, and the rape was always the same, but I remember a few small differences between the men who abused me. Hajji Salman was the worst, in part because he was the first to rape me and in part because he acted the most like he hated me. He hit me if I tried to close my eyes. For him, it was not enough just to rape me—he humiliated me as often as he could, spreading honey on his toes and making me lick it off or forcing me to dress up for him. Mortej
a acted like a child who had been allowed a treat he had been whining for when he came to rape me, and I will never forget the other guard’s glasses, the way he was so gentle with them and so vicious with me, a person.

  Abu Muawaya, when he came into the room around eight p.m., took me by the jaw and pushed me against the wall. “Why aren’t you resisting?” he asked. It seemed to make him angry. I assumed from the amount of Yazidi clothing in his house that he had been with many sabaya, and perhaps they all resisted except for me. Maybe he liked proving that he could have them even if they fought back. He was small, but he was very strong. “What’s the point?” I said to him. “It’s not just one man or two or three—you all do this. How long do you expect me to resist?” I remember that he laughed when I said that.

  After Abu Muawaya left, I fell asleep alone and was woken up later that night by a body behind me in bed. It was the man who had been eating bread and yogurt with Abu Muawaya in the kitchen; I don’t remember his name. I remember that my throat hurt from thirst, and when I got up to get some water, he grabbed my arm. “I just need to drink something,” I said. I was shocked by my own hopelessness. After what happened with the guards at Hajji Salman’s, I lost all fear of ISIS and of rape. I was just numb. I didn’t ask this new man what he was doing, I didn’t try to convince him not to touch me, I didn’t talk to him at all.

  At some point, there was rape and nothing else. This becomes your normal day. You don’t know who is going to open the door next to attack you, just that it will happen and that tomorrow might be worse. You stop thinking about escaping or seeing your family again. Your past life becomes a distant memory, like a dream. Your body doesn’t belong to you, and there’s no energy to talk or to fight or to think about the world outside. There is only rape and the numbness that comes with accepting that this is now your life.

  Fear was better. With fear, there is the assumption that what is happening isn’t normal. Sure, you feel like your heart will explode and you will throw up, you cling desperately to your family and friends and you grovel in front of the terrorists, you cry until you go blind, but at least you do something. Hopelessness is close to death.

  I remember that Abu Muawaya’s friend acted offended when I pulled away from him in the morning after I opened my eyes and saw, to my horror, that my leg was resting over his. Since I was a child, whenever I sleep next to someone I love, like my sister, mother, or brother, I put my leg over them, to be close to them. When I saw I had done that with a terrorist, I immediately jerked away. He laughed and asked, “Why did you move?” I hated myself. I worried that he would think I cared for him. “I’m not used to sleeping next to anybody,” I said. “I want to rest a little.” He checked the time on his phone and then left to go to the bathroom.

  Abu Muawaya laid out breakfast on a floor mat and told me to come eat. Even though it meant sitting in the kitchen and sharing a meal with two men who had raped me, I rushed to the food. I hadn’t eaten since leaving Salman’s, and my hunger was powerful. The food was familiar and good—dark honey, bread, eggs, and yogurt. I ate in silence while the men talked about the mundane chores that would fill their days—where to get more gasoline for the generators, who would be arriving at what center. I didn’t look at them. When we finished, Abu Muawaya told me to take a shower and put on an abaya. “We will leave here soon,” he said.

  Back in the room, out of the shower, I looked in the mirror for the first time. My face was pale and yellow, and my hair, which was almost to my waist, was matted and tangled. My hair used to bring me so much happiness, but now I wanted to have nothing to remind me of how I used to want to be pretty. I looked through the drawers for a pair of scissors to cut it off, but I couldn’t find any. It was so hot in the room, I felt that my head was on fire. Suddenly the door opened, and the second man walked in. He had a blue dress with him and told me to put it on. “Can’t I wear this instead?” I asked, showing him one of my Yazidi dresses. It would have felt comforting to have that on, but he said no.

  He watched me as I dressed and came close to me, touching me everywhere. “You stink,” he said, covering his nose. “Didn’t you shower? Do all Yazidi girls stink like you?”

  “This is how I smell,” I told him. “I don’t care if you like it or not.”

  On the way out of the house, I noticed a small plastic disc—a memory card for a cell phone—on the table, near Abu Muawaya’s phone. I wondered what could be on it. Pictures of sabaya? Pictures of me? Plans for Iraq? In Kocho I used to love to take people’s memory cards and put them into Khairy’s phone, just to see what was on them. Each one was a small mystery to be solved, and they usually said a lot about their owners. For a moment I fantasized about stealing the terrorist’s memory card. Maybe there were secrets on it that could help Hezni find me or the Iraqi Army retake Mosul. Maybe there was evidence of the crimes ISIS was committing. But I left the card; I was so hopeless that I couldn’t imagine anything changing no matter what I did. Instead I just followed the men outside.

  A van, about the size of an ambulance, was parked on the street outside, and a driver stood by the gate, waiting. He had come from nearby—Mosul or Tal Afar—and while we stood there, he updated Abu Muawaya on how the militants were faring in those cities. “We have great support in both places,” he said. Abu Muawaya nodded his approval. They stopped talking when the door to the van opened and three women stepped out.

  Like me, the women were covered fully in abayas and niqabs. They huddled together outside the van. One of the figures was much taller than the other two, and the smaller figures clutched at the larger figure’s abaya and her gloved hands, as though waiting for the folds of her abaya to swallow them. They paused at the foot of the van, turning their heads from left to right, looking around them, taking in the Hamdaniya compound. Their eyes, peering through the gap in the niqab, were full of fear when they landed on Abu Muawaya, who watched them closely.

  The tall one had her hand on the smallest one’s shoulder and was pulling her very close to her plump body. The smallest girl might have been as young as ten. I thought it must be a mother and her two young daughters, and that they had all been sold together. “It is not permissible to separate a mother from her prepubescent children through buying, selling, or giving away [a slave],” the Islamic State pamphlet on sabaya reads. Mothers stay with their children until those children are “grown and mature.” After that, ISIS can do whatever it wants with them.

  Staying close together, the threesome walked slowly away from the van toward the small house where I had spent the night, the two girls moving around their mother like chicks around a hen, clinging to the slippery fabric of her gloves. Had I been exchanged for them? As they passed us, I willed them to make eye contact with me, but by then they were looking straight ahead. One by one they disappeared into the darkness of the small house, and the door shut behind them. It must be terrible to watch your children or your mother or sisters go through what we were going through. Still, I envied them. They were lucky; ISIS often violated their own rules and separated mothers from their children. And it was so much worse to be alone.

  Abu Muawaya gave the driver some Iraqi dinars and we began driving out of Hamdaniya. I didn’t ask where we were going. My hopelessness was like a cloak—heavier, darker, and more obscuring than any abaya. In the car, the driver played the kind of religious music so popular in ISIS-held Mosul, and the noise and the motion of the car made me dizzy. “Please pull over,” I told Abu Muawaya. “I need to throw up.”

  The car stopped on the side of the highway, and I pushed open the door, running a few feet into the sand where I lifted up my niqab and threw up breakfast. Cars whizzed by, and the smell of gasoline and dust made me throw up again. Abu Muawaya got out and stood a small distance away, watching me to make sure I didn’t try to run, either into the field or into traffic.

  On the road connecting Hamdaniya and Mosul, there is a large checkpoint. Before ISIS came to Iraq, it was manned by the Iraqi Army, which wanted to moni
tor the movements of Al Qaeda–linked insurgents. Now that checkpoint was part of ISIS’s scheme to control the roads, thereby controlling the country. You could say that Iraq is a country of checkpoints, and the one connecting Hamdaniya and Mosul is just one of many that flew the terrorists’ black and white flag.

  In Kurdistan, the checkpoints are decorated with the bright yellow, red, and green Kurdish flag and staffed by peshmerga. Elsewhere in Iraq the checkpoints that are covered in the black, red, white, and green Iraqi flag tell you that you are in territory controlled by the central government. In the northern Iraqi mountains connecting us to Iran, and now in parts of Sinjar, the YPG fly their flags over their own checkpoints. How can Baghdad or the United States say that Iraq is a unified country? You would have to have never traveled along our roads, waited in line at our checkpoints, or been questioned solely based on the city written on your license plate to think that Iraq isn’t broken into a hundred pieces.

  At around eleven-thirty in the morning we stopped at the checkpoint. “Get out, Nadia,” Abu Muawaya told me. “Go inside.” I walked slowly into the small concrete building that served as the guards’ office and lounge, feeling light-headed and fragile from nausea. I assumed they needed to do some additional checking while I waited, so I was surprised when I saw the van drive through the checkpoint and continue along the road to Mosul, leaving me alone.

  The building was made up of three small rooms: the main room, where a militant sat behind a desk covered in paperwork, as well as two smaller rooms that seemed to be lounges. One of the doors was ajar, and I could see the iron frame of a twin bed. A girl was sitting on top of the mattress talking to another girl in Arabic. “Salam alakum,” the militant said to me, looking up from his work. I started walking toward the room with the girls, but he stopped me. “No, you will go into the other room.” My heart sank; I would be alone in there.