The Last Girl

by Nadia Murad

  The small room looked as if it had been recently cleaned and painted. A television sat dark in the corner, and a prayer rug was rolled up beside it. Some fruit had been left on a plate next to the TV, and the faint, sweet odor from the warm apples made me remember my nausea. I drank from a watercooler that was gurgling against the wall, then sat on a mattress that was on the floor. I was dizzy—I felt like the room was going in circles.

  Another militant appeared in the doorway. He was young and very skinny. “Sabiyya, what’s your name?” He stood still, looking at me.

  “Nadia,” I said, wincing from a headache.

  “Do you like it here?” he asked me.

  “Why,” I said, “am I going to stay here?” Was I going to be kept at this checkpoint, a place that wasn’t even a place?

  “You’re not going to stay long,” he said, then left.

  The room started spinning faster, and I gagged and coughed, trying to keep the water in my stomach. I was scared that if I threw up, I would get into trouble.

  Someone knocked on the door. “Are you okay?” the skinny man’s voice came from outside the room.

  “I want to throw up,” I said. “Is it okay if I throw up?”

  “No, no, not here,” he said. “This is my room, I pray here.”

  “Let me go to the bathroom, then,” I said. “I want to wash my face.”

  “No, no.” He wouldn’t open the door. “You’re fine. You’re fine, just wait.”

  A moment later he came back with a mug of something hot. “Drink this,” he said, holding it out to me. “You’ll feel better.” The liquid was tinted green and smelled of herbs.

  “I don’t like tea,” I told him.

  “It’s not tea,” he said. “It will make your headache go away.” He sat on the mattress facing me, pursing his lips together and putting his hand on his chest. “Drink it like this,” he demonstrated, breathing in the steam and then sipping the liquid.

  I was terrified. I thought for sure this was the man who had bought me, and any moment he would take his hand off his own chest and put it on mine. Even if he wanted to cure my headache, it was just so that I would be well enough for him to molest.

  My hands shook while I drank the liquid. Once I had taken a few sips, he took the mug out of my hands and put it on the floor next to the mattress.

  I started to cry. “Please,” I said. “I just came from other men this morning. My head hurts. I’m really sick.”

  “You will be okay,” he said. “You will be okay,” and he started pulling at my dress. It was so hot in the room that I had taken off my abaya, and all I was wearing was the blue dress Abu Muawaya’s friend had brought me that morning. I tried to resist him, yanking my skirt down as soon as he pulled it up, and he quickly lost his temper, hitting me hard on my thighs and saying again, “You’re going to be okay.” This time it sounded like a threat. He started raping me with my dress half on and was very fast, and when he finished, he sat up, straightened his shirt, and said, “I’ll be right back. I am going to see if you can stay here or not.”

  When he left, I pulled my dress back down and wept a little, then picked up the mug and started drinking the herbal water again. What was the point of crying? The liquid was lukewarm, but it helped with my headache. Soon the militant came back, as though nothing had happened between us and asked me if I wanted more to drink. I shook my head.

  It was clear by now that I didn’t belong to the skinny militant or to any particular man. I was a sabiyya at the checkpoint, and any Islamic State member could come into the room and do whatever he wanted with me. They would keep me in a locked room with nothing but a mattress and a bowl of rotting fruit, just waiting for the door to open and another militant to enter. This was my life now.

  I was still very dizzy when the skinny man left, and I thought maybe it would help to stand up and walk around. There was nothing for me to do but pace around that room in circles like a prisoner, past the watercooler, past the fruit bowl, past the mattress and the TV that I never tried to turn on. I ran my hand along the white wall, feeling the small clots of paint as if they contained messages. I took off my underwear to see if maybe I had my period, but I didn’t. I sat back down on the mattress.

  Soon after another militant came inside. He was huge and spoke in a loud, arrogant voice. “Are you the sick one?” he asked.

  “Who else is here?” I said back to him, but he refused to answer. “None of your business,” he said, then repeated, “Are you the sick one?” This time I nodded, yes.

  He came in and locked the door. He had a gun attached to his belt, and I imagined grabbing it and putting it to my head. Just kill me, I wanted to say to him, but then I thought that if he saw me reaching for the gun, he would think of a punishment worse than death, and so I didn’t try to do anything.

  Unlike the skinny guy before him, the new militant locked the door. This sent me into a panic. I stepped away from him, and then dizziness took over, and I fell onto the floor, not completely unconscious but sick and foggy. He came and sat next to me and said, “I think you’re scared.” His tone wasn’t kind—it was mocking and cruel.

  “Please, I’m really sick,” I said to him. “Please, hajji, I’m really sick.” I repeated it over and over, but he still came over to where I was lying and dragged me by the shoulders onto the mattress. The floor scraped against my bare feet and my calves.

  Again, he mocked me. “Do you like it here?” He laughed. “Do you like how they treat you here?”

  “You all treat me the same,” I said. My head was floating, and I could barely see. I lay where he had dragged me, closing my eyes and trying to block him out and forget about the room. I tried to forget who I was. I tried to lose all ability to move my limbs, to talk, to breathe.

  He continued to taunt me. “You are sick—don’t talk,” he said, putting his hand on my stomach. “Why are you so thin? Don’t you eat?”

  “Hajji, I am really sick.” My voice faded into the air while he lifted up my dress.

  “Don’t you know how much I like you when you’re like this?” he said. “Don’t you understand that I like it when you are weak?”

  Chapter 12

  Every sabiyya has a story like mine. You can’t imagine the atrocities ISIS is capable of until you hear about them from your sisters and cousins, your neighbors and schoolmates, and you realize that it wasn’t that you were particularly unlucky, or that you were being punished for crying out or trying to escape. The men were all the same: they were all terrorists who thought it was their right to hurt us.

  Other women saw their husbands killed in front of them before they were abducted, or listened to their captors gloat about the slaughter in Sinjar. They are held in homes or hotels, even in prisons, and systematically raped. Some of them are children and are attacked no matter whether they have started their period or not. One girl had her hands and legs tied when her captor raped her, and another was raped for the first time while she slept. Some girls were starved and tortured if they disobeyed their captors, and others even if they did everything the militant asked them to do.

  One woman from our village was being transported from Hamdaniya to Mosul when her captor decided he couldn’t wait to rape her, and so he pulled over to the side of the road and raped her in the car. “It was right there on the road, with the door open and my legs stuck outside the car,” she told me. When they got to his home, he made her dye her hair blond and pluck her eyebrows and behave like a wife.

  Kathrine was taken by Dr. Islam, a specialist who used to travel to treat Yazidis before he joined ISIS. Every week he bought a new girl and got rid of an old one, but he held on to Kathrine, his favorite. He forced her to groom herself and wear makeup, as Hajji Salman had done to me, and then he would make her pose for photos of the two of them together. In one set they are wading in a river, Dr. Islam holding Kathrine in his arms like newlyweds. She has her niqab flipped up over her head and is smiling so wide it looks like her face might split. Dr. Isl
am forced her to look happy and to pretend she loved him, but I know her and I can tell that behind that forced smile is pure terror. She tried to escape six times and was turned in by the people she went to for help. Each time when she was delivered back to Dr. Islam, he punished her viciously. The stories are endless.

  I was at the checkpoint for one night. Early the next morning the militant’s two-way radio went on, waking him up. “Are you feeling better?” he asked me. I hadn’t slept at all. “I don’t feel better,” I answered. “I don’t want to be here.”

  “Then you need something. I’ll show you later how you can feel better,” he said, then started answering the calls on his radio and, soon after, left the room.

  They locked me inside. I could hear cars passing through the checkpoint and militants talking into their radios, and I thought they might keep me there until I died. Banging on the door to be let out, I began throwing up again, this time just allowing the vomit to go onto the floor and the mattress. The skinny militant came back and told me to take off my hijab, then poured water over my head while I threw up. For fifteen minutes I heaved out little more than a thin dribble of sour-smelling liquid, as if my body were being drained. “Go to the bathroom,” he told me. “Wash yourself.” Abu Muawaya’s van had returned to take me the rest of the way back to Mosul.

  In the bathroom, I splashed water over my face and arms. My body shook as if I had a fever, and I could barely see or stand. I had never felt so weak. That feeling changed something inside of me.

  Since leaving Kocho, I had begged for death. I had willed Salman to kill me or asked God to let me die or refused to eat or drink in the hopes I would fade away. I had thought many times that the men who raped and beat me would kill me. But death had never come. In the checkpoint bathroom, I began to cry. For the first time since I left Kocho, I thought I actually might die. And I also knew for sure that I didn’t want to.

  Another militant had arrived to take me the rest of the way to Mosul. His name was Hajji Amer, and I assumed that he was my new owner, although I was too sick to ask. It was a short distance between the checkpoint and the city, but because I had to stop every few minutes to throw up, the drive took us nearly an hour. “Why are you so sick?” Hajji Amer asked, and I didn’t want to tell him that I thought it was because of the rape. “I haven’t eaten or had much water,” I said. “And it’s so hot here.”

  When we got to Mosul, he went into a pharmacy and bought me some pills, which he gave me after we arrived at his house. I was crying quietly the whole time, and he chuckled the way my brothers would when they thought I was being overly dramatic. “You are bigger than this,” he told me. “You shouldn’t cry.”

  His small house was painted dark green with a white stripe, and it looked as if it hadn’t been occupied by ISIS for long. It was clean, and there were no Islamic State clothes or dresses left by Yazidi girls. I went to the sofa and fell asleep the moment I lay down, and it was evening before I woke up and my headache and nausea were gone. The driver was lying on another couch with his phone next to him. “Are you feeling better?” he asked when he saw that I was awake.

  “A little,” I said, though I still wanted him to think I was too sick to touch. “I’m dizzy. I think I need to eat something.” I hadn’t eaten since breakfast with Abu Muawaya, the morning before, and I had vomited up all that food.

  “Read a little Koran and pray,” he told me. “Then the pain will disappear.”

  I went to the bathroom, taking my bag with me. I worried that if I left it in the living room, he would take it from me, even if he thought it held only clothes and sanitary pads. Locking the door behind me, I checked to make sure that my jewelry was safely tucked inside the pads, hidden enough that no one could tell it was there unless they chose to lift up each pad individually, which I couldn’t imagine any man doing. I picked up my mother’s ration card and held it in my hand for a moment, remembering her. Then I left the bathroom, determined to get the militant to give me some information.

  It was strange to be with a man who didn’t rape me the moment we were alone. At first I wondered if it was possible that Hajji Amer, in spite of being with ISIS, had some pity in him when he saw that I was so sick. Perhaps he was low-ranking enough that his only job was to watch me. Back in the living room, though, he was waiting for me the way Hajji Salman had every evening, with a cruel, entitled look on his face, and although he didn’t rape me, he assaulted me. After he had finished, he relaxed back on the couch and began talking in a normal tone as though we knew each other.

  “You’re going to stay in this house for a week,” he told me. “After that you might go to Syria.”

  “I don’t want to go to Syria!” I begged. “Take me to another house in Mosul, but don’t send me to Syria.”

  “Don’t be afraid,” he told me. “There are many sabaya like you in Syria.”

  “I know there are,” I said. “I still don’t want to go.”

  Hajji Amer paused and looked at me. “We’ll see,” he said.

  “If I’m going to be here a week, can I see my nieces Rojian and Kathrine?” I asked him.

  “Maybe they are in Syria,” he said. “Maybe if you go to Syria, you can see them.”

  “I saw them not that long ago in Mosul,” I replied. “I think they must still be somewhere in this city.”

  “Well, I can’t help you,” he said. “All I know is that you are supposed to wait here. You could be in Syria as early as tomorrow.”

  “I am telling you, there is no way I am going to Syria!” I was angry now.

  Hajji Amer smiled. “Who do you think controls where you go?” he told me, his voice never rising. “Think about it. Where were you yesterday? And where are you today?”

  He went to the kitchen, and a moment later I heard the loud pop of eggs frying in hot oil. I followed him. A plate of eggs and tomatoes was waiting for me on the table, but in spite of my hunger I no longer wanted to eat. The thought of going to Syria terrified me. I could barely sit. He didn’t seem to mind that I wasn’t eating.

  After he finished his eggs, he asked me if I had any abayas other than the one I was wearing.

  “This is my only one,” I said.

  “You may need more if you are going to Syria,” he replied. “I’ll go out and buy you some.”

  He took the keys to the car and walked to the front door. “Stay here,” he told me. “I’ll be back soon.” Then he left, the door slamming behind him.

  I was alone. There were no other people in the house, and no noise. We were a little bit outside the city, and the streets were mostly peaceful, with only a few cars driving by, and although the houses were spaced close together, they were small. From the kitchen window, I could see some people walking from house to house, and beyond that the road stretching out of Mosul. The neighborhood seemed peaceful, not frantic like the part of the city around Hajji Salman’s house and not destitute like Hamdaniya. I stood looking out that window for almost a half hour before it even occurred to me that the roads were empty not just of people but of ISIS.

  For the first time since being punished by Hajji Salman, I thought about escaping. The torture at the checkpoint and the promise that I was going to go to Syria had reignited the urgency to flee. I contemplated climbing out of the kitchen window, but before I did, I walked to the front door to see if the militant had, by some miracle, left it unlocked. The door was heavy and wooden. I turned the yellow handle, and my heart sank. It wouldn’t budge. He wouldn’t be so stupid as to leave it unlocked, I thought. But for good measure, I gave it one last pull and nearly fell over when it swung open.

  Dazed, I stepped out onto the stoop and stood perfectly still, expecting at any moment to have a gun pointed at me and to hear the loud voice of a guard. But there was nothing. I walked down the stairs and into the garden. I wasn’t wearing my niqab, so I walked with my head slightly turned down, looking out of the corners of my eyes for guards or militants. There were none. No one shouted at me—no one even seeme
d to notice me. There was a low wall around the garden, but I could easily jump over it if I used a trash can as a step stool. My stomach turned in anxiety.

  Quickly, as though something had taken over my body, I ran back inside the house and grabbed my bag and niqab. I moved as fast as I could; who knew when Hajji Amer would come back, and what if he was right and tomorrow they planned on taking me to Syria? I pulled my niqab down over my face, lifted the straps of my bag over my shoulder, and yanked on the door handle again.

  This time I used all my strength the first time, and it opened easily. I quickly crossed the threshold onto the stoop, but as soon as the air hit me, I felt a tug on the skirt of my abaya, and I turned around. “I feel sick!” I said, expecting to see a militant standing in the doorway. “I need air!” Even the night with Salman’s guards was less terrifying than that moment. There was no way they would believe I was doing anything but trying to escape. But when I looked behind me, I saw that no one was there. The tug I felt was only the corner of my abaya, caught in the door as it closed. I almost laughed, pulling it unstuck, and then I ran into the garden.

  Standing on top of a trash can, I peered over the garden wall. The street was empty. To my left was a large mosque that must have been full of Islamic State militants observing the dusk prayer, but to my right and in front of me were normal neighborhood streets whose residents were inside, perhaps praying, perhaps cooking dinner. I could hear cars and the sound of a running hose; next door a woman was watering her yard. Fear stopped me from climbing over the wall. What if Hajji Amer drives back right this moment? I thought. Can I handle the punishment again?

  I considered jumping over the wall into a neighbor’s garden rather than onto the street, where I worried Hajji Amer might be driving. None of the houses appeared to have electricity, and it was getting dark out. In my abaya, I might go unnoticed in the shadowy yards. Already I had ruled out going through the garden gate, which I was sure someone would be watching. A woman alone, covered or not, coming out of an ISIS-held house, would raise alarms, and the reward for turning in a sabiyya was too tempting.