The Last Girl

by Nadia Murad

  We pulled up to the hotel, a small and nondescript place with some dark-colored couches. The windows were covered with gauzy curtains and the floors tiled with a shiny gray material. A few Yazidi men sat inside the lobby, and they said hello to me, but I wanted to sleep, and Sabah showed me to the room. Inside I found a family, an old woman with her son, who also worked in the hotel, and his wife. They were sitting together at a small table eating soup, rice, and vegetables from the hotel restaurant. When the woman saw me, she gestured to me. “Come sit,” she said. “Eat with us.”

  She was about my mother’s age and, like my mother, wore a flowing white dress and white headscarf. Seeing her, all the restraint I had tried to practice since leaving the Islamic State house in Mosul left me. I went crazy. I screamed with my entire body, and I could barely stand up. I cried for my mother, whose fate I didn’t know yet. I cried for my brothers, whom I had seen being driven to their deaths, and for the ones who survived and who would have to live the rest of their lives trying to pick up the pieces of our family. I cried for Kathrine and Walaa and my sisters who were still in captivity. I cried because I had made it out and didn’t think that I deserved to be so lucky; then again, I wasn’t sure I was lucky at all.

  The woman came to me and held me. Her body was soft like my mother’s. When I had calmed down a little bit, I noticed that she was crying, too, and so were her son- and daughter-in-law. “Be patient,” she told me. “Hopefully everyone you love will come back. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  I sat down with them at the table. My body felt like it was made out of nothing, like I could float away at any moment. Just because they insisted, I ate a little bit of the soup. The woman looked very old, older than her age, and almost all her white hair had fallen out. Her skull, a delicate pink speckled with brown, was visible beneath what was left. She was from Tel Ezeir, and her recent life was a long tragedy. “I had three sons, all of them unmarried, die in 2007 in the bombings,” she told me. “I told myself when they died that I wouldn’t bathe until I saw their bodies. I wash my face and clean my hands. But I haven’t taken a bath. I don’t want to be clean until I can clean their bodies for burial.”

  She saw how tired I was. “Daughter,” she said, “go to sleep.” I lay down in her bed and closed my eyes, but I couldn’t sleep. All I could think about were her three sons, their missing bodies, and my mother. “I left my mother in Solagh,” I told her. “I don’t know what happened to her.” I began to cry again. The entire night, with her next to me in bed, we cried, and in the morning after I had put on Kathrine’s dress, I kissed her on both cheeks.

  “I used to think that what happened to my sons was the worst thing a mother could bear,” she said. “I wished all the time for them to be alive again. But I am glad they didn’t live to see what happened to us in Sinjar.” She straightened her white scarf over what remained of her hair. “God willing, your mother will come back to you one day,” she said. “Leave everything to God. We Yazidis don’t have anyone or anything except God.”

  Downstairs in the hotel lobby, I saw a familiar-looking boy and went over to him. It was the brother of a friend from Kocho. “Do you know what happened to her?” he asked.

  The last time I saw his sister was in Mosul at the market where I first was taken by Hajji Salman. When Rojian and I left, she had not been selected by anyone yet, but I assumed she had been soon after. “One day, hopefully, she will be safe, too,” I said. I was learning that for a lot of Yazidis in Kurdistan, I would be the messenger of bad news.

  “She hasn’t even made a phone call,” he said.

  “It’s not easy to make phone calls,” I told him. “They don’t want us to have phones or to reach anyone. I didn’t call Hezni until I escaped.”

  Sabah came into the lobby and told me that it was time for me to go to Zakho. “Nasser is in that room,” he said, pointing to an open door down the hallway. “Go say goodbye to him.”

  I walked to the room and pushed open the door. Nasser was standing in the middle, and the moment I saw him, I began to cry. I felt pity for him. When I was with his family, I had felt like a stranger walking through someone else’s life. My hope for my future began and ended with my escape, and here I was in Erbil, reunited with my nephew and other Yazidis. Nasser, though, had to retrace our terrifying journey and go back to the Islamic State. It was my turn to fear for him.

  Nasser began to cry as well. Sabah was standing in the doorway watching us. “Sabah, could I talk to Nadia for two minutes?” he asked. “After that I will have to go.” Sabah nodded and left.

  Nasser turned to me, a serious expression on his face. “Nadia, you’re with Sabah now, and you’ll be going to join the rest of your family. There’s no need for me to come. But I need to ask you something. Do you feel safe? If you are scared at all that something is going to happen to you or that they will do anything to you because you were a sabiyya, I’ll stay with you.”

  “No, Nasser,” I said. “You saw the way Sabah treated me. I’ll be fine.” In truth, I wasn’t completely sure, but I wanted Nasser to find his own way. I still felt extremely guilty because of the PUK video, and I wasn’t sure how much time he had before someone recognized him. “Don’t believe anything Daesh said about Yazidis,” I told him. “I’m crying for you, because you did this for me. You saved my life.”

  “It was my duty,” he said. “That’s all.”

  We left the room together. I couldn’t find the words to tell him how grateful I was that he had helped me. For the past two days, we had shared every frightening and every sad moment, every worried glance and every terrifying question. When I felt sick, he had comforted me, and at every checkpoint, his calm had helped keep me from collapsing altogether from fear. I’ll never forget what he and his family did for me.

  I don’t know why he was good and so many others in Mosul were so terrible. I think that if you are a good person, deep down, then you can be born and raised in Islamic State headquarters and still be good, just like you can be forced to convert to a religion you don’t believe in and still be a Yazidi. It’s inside you. “Be careful,” I told him. “Take care of yourself, and stay as far away from those criminals as you can. Here, take Hezni’s number.” I handed him a slip of paper with Hezni’s cell phone number, along with money for the taxi his family had paid for. “You can call Hezni anytime. I will never forget what you did for me. You saved my life.”

  “I wish you a happy life, Nadia,” he said. “A good life from now on, going forward. My family will try to help others like you. If there are other girls in Mosul who want to escape, they can call us, and we’ll try to help them.

  “Maybe one day, after all the girls are freed and Daesh is gone from Iraq, we will meet again and talk about this,” Nasser said. Then he laughed quietly. “How is everything, Nadia?” he said.

  “It’s hot,” I replied, smiling a little bit.

  “Never forget,” Nasser said, teasing me. “It’s very hot, Nasser, it’s very hot.”

  Then, the smile leaving his face, he said, “God be with you, Nadia.”

  “God be with you, Nasser,” I replied. And as he turned and walked toward the exit, I prayed to Tawusi Melek that he and his family would end up somewhere safe. Before I had finished my prayer, he was gone.

  Chapter 9

  After Nasser left Erbil, I tried to follow what happened to him and his family. I felt sick with shame when I thought about the PUK video, and prayed that it wouldn’t put them in danger. He was just a kid from a poor neighborhood, but Hezni and I worried that it was only a matter of time before he became entangled with the terrorists. For years ISIS had been planting roots in the city, preying on the discontent among Sunnis and the instability in the country. Men there had hoped that the terrorists would be like the Baathists and give them their power back. Even if they became disillusioned by ISIS, by the time Nasser returned from Kurdistan, boys had grown into soldiers and, worse, into true believers. Had Mina’s sons managed to escape the battlefi
eld? I still don’t know.

  Hezni was really worried about something happening to them. “They helped you,” he said. “How can we cope if they were punished because of it?” He took his responsibility as head of our family very seriously. Of course, there was nothing he could do from Zakho or, later, from the refugee camp. Hezni spoke to Hisham and Nasser a couple of times, and then one afternoon he called and a voice on the line told him the number had been disconnected. After that, Hezni had to rely on secondhand information about Nasser and his family. One day we got news that ISIS had, in fact, found out that Nasser had helped me and arrested Basheer and Hisham but that the men had convinced the militants that Nasser had acted alone.

  The family was still in Mosul in 2017 when Iraqi forces began to liberate the city, and it became even harder to get information. Hezni heard through others that one of Nasser’s brothers was killed in 2017 during the battle between ISIS and Iraqi forces for control of the road connecting Mosul and Wadi Hajar, but we don’t know how or if it’s true. The family lived in East Mosul, which was the first part of the city liberated that year, and they could have escaped or they could have died in the fight. I heard that ISIS was using people as human shields when the Iraqi forces came in, making sure that civilians were with them in the buildings that the Americans wanted to bomb. People fleeing Mosul described living in hell. All we could do was pray they were safe.

  Before going to my aunt’s house in Zakho, where Hezni had been staying since ISIS came to Sinjar, we stopped at the hospital in Duhok where Saeed and Khaled were still recovering from their wounds. The refugee camp wasn’t finished yet, and the Yazidis who had fled to Iraqi Kurdistan were sleeping wherever they could. On the outskirts of the city, Yazidi families filled unfinished apartment buildings, pitching tents given to them by aid agencies on the concrete floors. The walls hadn’t been finished yet on the high buildings, and I worried, passing them, about the safety of the families inside. A few times small children did fall out of the upper stories. But they had nowhere else to go. All of Sinjar had been packed into these bare buildings, and they had nothing of their own. When aid agencies brought food to distribute, people sprinted and pushed through the crowd to try to make sure they received a bag. Mothers ran as fast as their legs would carry them for just one can of milk.

  Hezni, Saoud, Walid, and my aunt were waiting for me at the hospital. When we saw one another, we all burst into tears and hugged, asking question after question until the commotion died down and we were able to hear what people were saying. I told them briefly what had happened to me, leaving out the rape. My aunt wailed and started a funeral chant, one that mourners usually shout while walking in a circle around the body, slapping their chests hard to show their anguish, sometimes for hours and hours until your throat is in shreds and your legs and chest numb. My aunt didn’t move while she chanted, but the volume of her shouts was big enough to fill the whole room, maybe all of Duhok.

  Hezni was calmer. My normally emotional brother, who cried when any member of his family was sick and could have been the subject of a book of love poems while he courted Jilan, had become obsessed with the mystery of his own survival. “I don’t know why God spared me,” he said. “But I know I need to use my life for good.” As soon as I saw his wide, friendly tan face and small mustache, I burst into tears. “Don’t cry,” Hezni said, hugging me. “This is our fate.”

  I walked over to Saeed’s hospital bed. His wounds tormented him, but not as much as the memory of the massacre and the guilt of surviving when so many others had died. Even the people whom ISIS hadn’t managed to kill had lost their lives—an entire generation of lost Yazidis like my brothers and me, walking around in the world with nothing in our hearts but the memory of our family and nothing in our heads but bringing ISIS to justice. Saeed had joined the Yazidi division of the peshmerga and was aching to fight.

  “Where is my mother?” I cried, embracing him. “No one knows, Nadia,” he said. “As soon as we can, we are going to liberate Solagh from Daesh and save her.”

  Khaled’s wounds were worse than Saeed’s, even though my half brother had been shot fewer times. Two bullets had shattered his elbow, and he needed an artificial joint, but nothing like that was available in the hospital in Duhok. To this day, his arm just hangs stiff from his body, useless, like a dead tree branch.

  When I first arrived in Zakho, Hezni was still living near our aunt in the same half-built house he had escaped to from the mountain. My aunt and uncle had been in the process of building a small house for their son and his wife on their property, but they weren’t rich, and so they had to build slowly, adding a bit here and there when they had a little extra money to spend. The war with ISIS stopped the construction altogether, and when I arrived, the house was just two bedrooms made of blank concrete, with windows that hadn’t been covered and gaps in the seams between the concrete slabs letting in the wind and the dust. I had never been in that house without my mother, and I felt her absence like a missing limb.

  I moved into the half-built house with my brothers Hezni and Saoud and my half brothers Walid and Nawaf. After they were released from the hospital, Saeed and Khaled joined us. We tried our best to make it a home. When the aid agency distributed tarps, we used them to cover up the windows, and when they handed out food, we rationed it out carefully and stockpiled what we could in the small room we used as a kitchen. Hezni ran long extension cords from the main house into our rooms and strung bulbs up to the ceilings so we could have light. We bought some caulk to fill in the gaps in the walls. Although we talked endlessly about the war, we rarely mentioned details that would upset one another.

  Saeed and Nawaf were the only two unmarried men, and their loneliness was less palpable than my married brothers’. Hezni had not heard from Jilan yet; all we knew was that she was in Hamdaniya with Nisreen. We had no information about Saoud’s wife, Shireen, or my half brothers’ wives. I told them what I knew about ISIS and what I had seen in Mosul and Hamdaniya, but I was vague about what had happened to me in captivity. I didn’t want to make my brothers suffer more by confirming their worst nightmares about what ISIS was doing to Yazidi girls. I didn’t ask about the massacre in Kocho because I didn’t want to remind Saeed and Khaled about what they had been through. No one wanted to add to another person’s despair.

  Although inhabited by survivors, the house was a place of misery. My brothers, who had once been so full of life, were like empty bodies, staying awake in the day only because it was impossible to sleep all the time. Because I was the only woman, I was expected to clean and cook, but there was a lot I didn’t know how to do. Back home, my older sisters and sisters-in-law did the housework while I studied, and I felt useless and stupid fumbling around the makeshift kitchen and sloppily washing our clothes. My brothers were kind to me and knew that I hadn’t learned how to do chores at home, so they helped, but it was still clear that once I learned, this would be my responsibility. My aunt knew that I didn’t know how to make bread, and so she made extra to bring to us, but that skill, too, I was expected to pick up. School was a very distant memory.

  I had escaped ISIS and was with my family, but still I felt like my life, when I recalled it, if I was lucky enough to grow old, would be just one long chain of miseries. In one misery, I am captured by ISIS, and in the next, I am living a life of total poverty, with nothing, no place to call my own, reliant on others for all our food, with no land and no sheep, no school and just a fraction of my big family, only waiting for the camp to be built and then waiting for the tents in that camp to be replaced with container homes. Then waiting for Kocho to be liberated, which I thought might never happen, and my sisters to be freed and my mother to be rescued in Solagh. I cried every day. Sometimes I cried with my aunt or with my brothers, and sometimes I cried alone in bed. When I dreamed, it was always about being returned to ISIS and having to escape again.

  We learned how to make the most of what the aid agencies offered. Once a week big trucks came loaded wi
th sacks of rice and lentils and pasta, as well as some cooking oil and canned tomatoes. We had no pantry or refrigerator, and so sometimes the food we saved would spoil or attract mice, and we had to throw away full sacks of sugar and bulgur until we found an empty oil barrel that we cleaned out and used to store our food. Throwing out the food was painful; without money to buy more, we would just have to eat less until the next truck came through Zakho. When the weather got colder, my aunt gave me some warm clothes, but I didn’t have any underwear or bras or socks, and I didn’t want to ask for anything, so I made do with what I had.

  Hezni’s phone rang often, and when it did, he would take the calls outside, away from the rest of us. I was desperate to know what kind of information he was getting, but he would only tell me a little bit, I think because he didn’t want to upset me. One day he got a call from Adkee and went out into the yard to talk. When he returned, his eyes were red, as if he had been crying. “She’s in Syria,” he told us. Somehow she had managed to stay with our nephew, whom she had claimed was her son in Solagh, but she was worried that at any moment ISIS would discover she was lying and take the boy away from her. “I’m trying to find a smuggler in Syria,” he told us. “But getting girls from there is even harder than in Iraq, and Adkee doesn’t want to leave anyone behind.” To make matters worse, the Syrian smuggling networks were developing separately from the Iraqi ones, making it even more difficult for Hezni to get Adkee out.

  My aunt was the first person I told my entire story to, including the rape. She wept for me and held me close to her. It was a relief to tell someone, and I stopped worrying that Yazidis would reject me or blame me for what happened. So many of us had been killed or kidnapped by ISIS that those of us who survived, no matter what happened to us, had to come together and try to repair what was left. Still, most of the escaped sabaya were tight-lipped about their time with ISIS, as I had been at first, and I understood why. It was their tragedy and their right not to tell anyone.