In August 2014, Farida, like any ordinary teenage girl, was enjoying the summer holidays before her last year at school. But Farida lived in the mountains of northern Iraq – and what happened next was unimaginable. Her village was an ISIS target.
ISIS jihadists murdered the men and boys, including her father and brother, before taking Farida and the other women prisoner. This is the story of what she experienced: the beatings, the rapes, the markets where ISIS sold women like cattle.
Farida realised that the more resistant she became, the harder it was for her captors. So she struggled, she bit, she kicked, she accused them of going against their religion, until, one day, the door to her room was left unlocked. She took her chance and, with five younger girls in her charge, fled into the desert.
Farida showed incredible courage in the face of the unthinkable, and now with The Girl Who Beat ISIS she bravely relives her story to bear witness. Searing and immediate, this is the first memoir by a young woman that shows what it is like for innocents caught up in the maelstrom of day-to-day life with ISIS.
Farida and her brothers were brought up in the Yazidi community in Kocho, Iraq. She was 19 years old when ISIS attacked her village, killed the men, captured the women and sold them into slavery. After four months, Farida managed to escape against all odds. She was reunited with her mother and her brothers in an Iraqi refugee camp and was granted asylum in Germany in 2015.
Andrea C. Hoffmann is a Middle East expert, a writer for Focus magazine in Germany, and author of numerous books. Her specialisation is the situation of women in Muslim countries.
My father showed me how to stand. ‘Put your left foot a touch further forward and bend your legs slightly.’
He corrected my posture by taking hold of my shoulders from behind and adjusting my torso so I was front on. As a border guard in the Iraqi army he knew how to handle rifles. He placed the gun, an AK-47, in my hands. The Kalashnikov wasn’t as heavy as I’d anticipated.
‘Put your right hand at the back by the trigger,’ he said. ‘Like that. Now with your left hand you can align the barrel at the front. Aim at the tree trunk over there.’ I got one of the mulberry trees in our garden in my sights. ‘And fire!’
I tentatively fingered the trigger. Nothing happened.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Don’t be afraid, Farida.’
I pulled the metal lever gently until finally it clicked quietly. From behind me Dad laughed.
‘Just like that,’ he said. ‘Well done!’
I looked at him quizzically.
‘I haven’t taken off the safety catch. But we’ll change that right away. This is how you do it.’ He showed me how to release the safety catch on the right-hand side of the receiver. ‘Are you ready?’
‘Of course,’ I said, focused.
‘Careful, now.’
‘OK.’
‘Are you aiming right?’
I nodded.
‘Go on then.’
A loud report echoed through our garden and the force of the Kalashnikov had me staggering.
‘Bravo!’ Dad said, grinning beneath his dark moustache.
The two of us walked over to the tree, to examine the results of my first shooting attempt. And, in the event, a small piece of metal was lodged at the very right-hand edge of the trunk. The empty cartridge lay in the dust about a metre away.
‘You’ve got talent,’ my father said. ‘With a little practice you’ll be better than your mother.’
‘Do you think so?’ I asked excitedly. He stroked my head with affection.
‘Yes, you’ve just got to do it a few times, then it’ll be a piece of cake. I’ll put up a target for you in the garden. You’ll see, over time you’ll lose that fear of the bang and you’ll be better at offsetting the kick.’
I nodded eagerly. I was terribly proud that my father was teaching me, at the age of fifteen, how to handle a Kalashnikov. He’d already shown my mother and my brother Delan, who was a couple of years older than me, how to do it years ago. Although not my brother Serhad, who was two years younger. It was a sure sign that he thought I was grown up enough to defend our house and property should it ever come to that.
There were three rifles in a box in my parents’ bedroom. One was Dad’s army service rifle; the others he’d picked up at the bazaar.
‘Women need to know how to use a weapon too,’ he said. ‘When I’ve got enough money I’ll buy another AK-47 so that there’s one for each of us in an emergency.’
Dad didn’t specify what this emergency might be. And I didn’t have the imagination to picture it. Back then it didn’t cross my mind that my father’s circumspection might be linked to the fact that we were Yazidis and not Muslims. I was just thinking of burglars who might try to steal our valuables. I was only fifteen years old and the catastrophe awaiting us in the future was completely beyond my imagination.
We lived in Kocho, a village on the plain to the south of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. It had 1,700 inhabitants. In spring the countryside is ablaze with all the colours of the rainbow. Around the village the many trees and plants come into bloom, as well as grasses on which the shepherds drive their goats. In summer the heat dries everything out and the plants wither. Because of this the villagers had created a few ponds around Kocho, from which we irrigated our fields. Every day we had to water our garden too, which was surrounded by a high wall. This was one of my chores. Mornings and evenings I would take the long hose, turn on the tap on the terrace and spray all our plants.
We had a very beautiful garden in which mulberry, almond and apricot trees grew. And in their shade the vegetables that my mother planted thrived too: courgettes, leeks, aubergines, potatoes, onions, salad and heads of cabbage. Around the terrace a variety of roses flowered, giving off a beguiling aroma, especially in the evenings. In the hot season my mother, my younger brothers Serhad, Shivan, Keniwar and I would spend almost our entire time in this little paradise. My father and my elder brother Delan enjoyed the peace and fresh air here too, when they weren’t working.
The house itself was on one floor and had five rooms: a kitchen, a living room, my parents’ bedroom, a bedroom for my four brothers – and one for me. As the sole daughter of the family I was entitled to my own little realm. Despite this I often regretted having no sisters, with whom I would gladly have shared my room. I was, however, allowed to invite friends back as often as I liked. My friend Evin and my best friend Nura were regular visitors to our house. Nura and I were eighteen now, and in our final year at school, and I was excited to consider what life might have in store for me next. Evin, on the other hand, was a few years older than us and had long since finished school. We envied all the free time she had; we frequently had to spend long afternoons doing our homework, while she helped her female relatives with odd chores around the house, and looked forward to being married off. Her greatest dream was to become a housewife with lots of children. With her calm, even temper Evin was like an elder sister to Nura and me.
Of my brothers, I liked Delan the best. We hung around together and shared many interests. In the afternoons we loved playing football in the garden. My big brother also secretly taught me how to drive in the mountains. Dad had only taught him and Serhad, as he didn’t think women needed to know how. In any case it was unusual for people in our village to have driving lessons or take the test.
Our house was supposed to have two floors. Well, that’s what my father’s original plan had been when he built it with my uncle. But the money he’d set aside soon ran out. With a soldier’s salary and a bit extra from farming he didn’t have that much leeway. What’s more, Dad was insistent that all his children should go to school. In short, there was always something more important to shell out for than a second storey. And over time we got used to the metal rods and wires sticking up out of the roof. Lots of houses in Kocho looked like this. The rods were a sign that another floor could be built on top at any time. And in summer, when it was too hot to sleep in the house, we would go up to the roof with our mats to enjoy the fresh night air up there.
Taking a pragmatic view of the situation, my mother tied lines between the rods and started hanging her washing up on the roof. This came as great relief to Delan and me, who’d often been hauled over the coals when our dirty football missed the goal and landed in some clean sheets that were drying in the garden.
For some time now, however, a concrete mixer and sacks of cement had stood amid the rods. Delan had bought these out of his pay as a builder. The reason was that my brother wanted to marry. And for this, of course, he needed an apartment he could move into with his wife.
He also needed a wife. On one of our jaunts to the mountains he’d admitted to me that the girl he’d originally been in love with had been forced to turn him down. Unfortunately her parents had already promised her to another man and there was nothing to be done about it. Now Delan was trying to court Zevin, a cousin of ours who I was very fond of.
‘I’ll pray that her parents accept you,’ I promised him solemnly.
The neighbouring villages were mainly populated by Muslim Arabs. They were different from us in every way, not just because of their religion. They had other customs and traditions too. We spoke Kurdish, they spoke Arabic. And as we Yazidis only marry within our own religious group, we had no relatives in these villages either. We did, however, maintain friendly and above all commercial relations with the Muslims. Muslim traders would often come to Kocho to sell their fruit or sweets. Of course the children were delighted to welcome these salesmen, and the adults were very pleased with their wares too.
Every boy in our village, moreover, had a Muslim ‘godfather’ – the man who holds the little baby in his arms during the circumcision ceremony. Usually the entire village comes to watch this ritual. When my youngest brother Keniwar was circumcised, for example, he was held by a Muslim friend of my father’s. Through this he became Keniwar’s ‘uncle’, his protector. Even if there were no blood connections between the families, the Muslim godfather would undertake an obligation to help the boy, and later the man, whenever he needed his support. At the same time the act strengthened the bonds between the Yazidi and Muslim families, and so also between my father and his friend of a different faith.
But in spite of such alliances, we Yazidis had an extremely dubious reputation among Muslims. And we knew it too. For they didn’t try particularly hard to conceal what they thought of us. When they visited the village they refused to eat our food, afraid it might be ‘unclean’. As we place great emphasis on hospitality, we regarded this as an affront. For a long time as a child I couldn’t understand why they thought of us in this way.
But the elders in the village explained that it had always been thus.
‘Our history is one of persecution and suffering,’ my grandfather told me. My father’s father lived next door to us, as is usual in our culture. He was a dignified old gentleman with a white moustache and he habitually wore the traditional white robes, which for us indicate spiritual purity. ‘They’ve all persecuted us: the Muslim Kurds, the Iranian Shah’s governors and the Ottoman sultans. They massacred and butchered us on seventy-two occasions. How many times have they stolen our women, driven us from our homeland, forced us with raised swords to renounce our religion?’
Grandad stroked my head with his large, coarse hand while I listened to these gruesome stories from the past. ‘Beware these people, my little one,’ he said, ‘for they call us abadat al-shaytan: those who worship the Lord of Hell.’
Now I got a proper fright. ‘But why?’
‘Because somebody concocted this lie a long, long time ago,’ he replied. Grandad looked at me. Like his hair, his eyes appeared to be covered in a grey veil. It seemed as if he were weighing up whether I was old enough to understand things. ‘It’s a complicated story – you’ll find out soon enough.’
The religious rituals in our village were inseparable from the cycles of nature. Every morning before it got light I’d climb up to the roof with my parents and siblings to greet the first rays of the sun. Sometimes, when it was cold, we’d stay in the house and stand in the spot where it first shone in. We would turn our heads to the sun and open out our palms, similar to how Muslims and Christians do when they pray. Then we’d put our hands together and say, ‘Amen, amen, amen. May our religion be blessed. God will help our religion to survive.’ We Yazidis do not pray to the sun, however. In our prayers we always address God. We only venerate the sun in the same way that we venerate the moon and Venus, because divine energy flows through them. Several times during the day and once at night we worship God in the face of these heavenly bodies.
Light, particularly sunlight, is very important in our faith. After all, everything in the world depends on the sun, doesn’t it? Could a plant flourish without light? Could we cultivate our fields? Could we harvest and satisfy our hunger with the yield? No! This is why the sun is sacred to us; its light is our place of worship and our most important connection to God.
The various seasons are also linked to religious festivals in our culture. In Kocho the ritual cycle began with the festival Sere Sal, after the start of the new year at the end of March, which we would celebrate on the first Wednesday in April – ‘Red Wednesday’. On this day we used to decorate our house with flowers and paint eggs in bright colours, as in our way of thinking they stand for the rebirth of all life and the beginning of the world. As a child I would hunt for the eggs in the garden, and later my mother and other women from the village would offer these same eggs to our ancestors at the cemetery as a feast.
We celebrated Cle Havine, the ‘Forty Days of Summer’, and Cle Zivistane, the ‘Forty Days of Winter’. Both festivals came with elaborate religious ceremonies, ending with a three-day fast.
The most important event of the year, though, was the pilgrimage to Lalish. In autumn, when the intense heat of the summer had abated and the weather was pleasantly mild again, the whole village would make its way to this mystical place, a wonderful green valley irrigated by two springs that we hold to be sacred. It is about 150 kilometres north-east of Kocho, in the mountains between Dohuk and Mosul.
For me, Lalish represents something like a second home, a spiritual one, as from the cradle my parents took me on the annual journey to the valley. Even as a baby I bathed in the waters of the white spring. Lalish is a divine place for us.
Like all the men in the village, for this solemn occasion my father would swap his blue army uniform, which he loved wearing, for a white robe and a white scarf on his head, which he tied in the Arab style with a black headband. My mother would also wrap a white scarf around her head. Unlike Muslim women, Yazidis are not obliged to veil themselves. So the other girls and I would go without covering our heads, and our clothes for the pilgrimage would be relatively modern. We wore the same trousers, skirts and blouses we went to school in. But we would always make sure that at least one item of clothing was white.
Each year, when we turned into the valley, my father would order us to take off our shoes and continue barefoot. Nobody was to dirty the sacred earth with the soles of their shoes. ‘Do not forget that no less a being than Sheikh Adi walked upon this ground,’ he reminded us.
Sheikh Adi, a preacher who lived in Lalish many centuries ago, is worshipped by us. His grave is in the sanctuary which lies at one of the valley’s gently sloping hillsides. You can see from afar the sand-coloured complex with the pointed towers of the holy graves.
We would seek out a spot near the shrine and unload our bundles. The guest houses were reserved for very important people and members of our priestly caste. Normal people like us set up camp outside. We would bring a large covering that my brothers tied to four wooden posts. This served as both a sunshade and protection against the rain. We also stored our crockery, blankets and food beneath this improvised tent roof. We tied a goat, which we’d brought along for food, to a nearby tree.
I loved our time in Lalish. For us young people this autumn week chiefly meant holiday and a great deal of fun. It was like a massive camping trip with all your friends and relatives.
I’d spend the days with my family. Each day would have a specific schedule. On the first we would wander to the Silat Bridge at the lower end of the valley. It marks the crossing point between Lalish’s earthly and heavenly realms. We’d wash our hands three times in the water under the bridge and three times we’d cross the bridge with torches in our hands, saying, ‘The Silat Bridge, on one side is Hell, on the other Paradise.’ Then we’d go to the upper part of the valley and sing hymns. We repeated this procedure for three days.
The bull sacrifice on the fifth day was one of the high points. The deafening salvoes that announced its death made all the men hurry to the sanctuary. My father and brothers didn’t want to miss the spectacle either. We women were less keen, however. ‘I only have to smell all that blood to be sick,’ my mother confided in me.
What I loved most of all about Lalish were the evenings, when there was traditional dancing. Seven men, swathed entirely in white clothes, ceremoniously danced twice around the sun symbol to the music of the Qewels, the holy singers who preserve our religious knowledge. They followed a fakir, a holy ascetic, who wore a dark fur and a pointed black hat. I found this ritual, which lasted all evening, both mysterious and fascinating.
I’d often slip away with Nura and Evin to meet our friends under the cover of darkness. Because of course we preferred to spend our time with people our own age rather than with our families. Sometimes we got to meet children from other villages further north from Kocho this way too. The adults frowned upon this, because they were afraid of illicit friendships between the members of the two sexes. But in the overall chaos and euphoria of the pilgrimage they couldn’t prevent contact altogether.
These encounters were invariably harmless in the end. After all, my friends and I had been brought up strictly according to our community’s code of honour, in which a bride’s virginity plays an extremely important role. For us, premarital relationships were out of the question. So it never got any further than us teasing the boys of our own age or at most exchanging stolen glances.
At school they called me ‘calculator’. My maths teacher gave this nickname to me because I was the cleverest in the class at this subject. Whenever Mr Siamand set us a problem and none of my classmates could solve it, he would finally turn to me. ‘So, Farida, what do you think?’ he asked. ‘Would you show the others how to do it?’
‘Of course,’ I replied, striding confidently towards the blackboard. With a stick of chalk I wrote up the individual stages in solving the problem, while explaining long-windedly how to get from one stage to the next. Behind me I could hear my classmates grumbling. They were annoyed that I was better at maths than them, especially the boys.
‘What’s going on? Farida’s not our teacher!’ they complained. Their voices oozed envy. But Mr Siamand always came to my defence. ‘Just concentrate and listen to how Farida works out the answer,’ he advised them. ‘She’s a wonderful teacher. You know, she’s even better at maths than I am.’
Each time I would turn bright red. Of course I was delighted by the praise issuing from the mouth of my teacher. But to be honest I don’t have to try that hard at maths. I love this subject; everything’s so clear, so structured, so logical. It seems strange to me that someone can’t understand this beautiful, ordered world. I find it all so simple.
I was particularly good at exponentiation, which we were learning in spring 2014. While my classmates frowned and chewed their pencils as they struggled to work out the answers, I saw them in my head in a flash. My classmates thought it was magic, but I just found it pretty satisfying.
Physics was my second favourite subject. I found this easy too. But unfortunately our physics teacher, Mr Khalil, explained everything in such a dull and laborious way. When he came into our classroom after the maths lesson I would lay my head on the desk and groan to Nura, ‘I’m going to have a kip. Wake me up when he’s finished.’
She would giggle and sweep her long brown hair from her face. With her light skin and button nose Nura was by far the most beautiful girl in our class. But unlike me she really struggled in both subjects. Occasionally when she was sweating over some problem or other, she’d look over at me in despair. ‘How on earth do you do this?’ she whispered. ‘Have you got a calculator there?’
‘No!’ I assured her. ‘If you come by this afternoon I’ll explain it to you.’
Of course, studying together was just a pretext for us. I was always delighted when Nura came to visit. My mother was pleased too. As my father worked shifts – and would regularly be detailed to the Syrian border for ten days at a time – we women felt alone and occasionally very lonely. In our society, moreover, we believe that guests bring a blessing to the house.
So after school we went up to the roof with our maths books and buried ourselves in the units we’d studied in the morning. I tried my best to help Nura grasp the secrets of maths and physics, but the stuff would not stick in her head. It seemed as if the light breeze drifting over to us from Mount Sinjar carried my words away before they got to Nura. I blinked in the sun and listened to the tweeting of the birds in our garden. In truth it was really too nice a day to waste on studying.
‘Come on, let’s have a break,’ I suggested.
Nura agreed at once. We closed our books and went down into the garden together. From the kitchen I fetched a carafe of lemonade that my mother had made freshly that morning. I poured us each a glass and decorated it with mint leaves that grew in our garden and smelled wonderful.
‘Studying makes you hungry,’ I said to Nura with a wink. She laughed. We always used this as an excuse when we were caught on a kitchen raid. Both of us adored snacking and, irrespective of whether we were at her house or mine, we’d plunder the fridge or harvest whatever delicacies the garden had to offer.
Nura particularly loved our raspberries, which glowed in soft hues. ‘Your roses are even more beautiful this year,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I replied proudly. ‘But have you seen our lilies?’ I pointed to the precious blooms that grew in the widest array of colours. Nura sniffed them and gently stroked a petal.
‘They’re really extraordinary,’ she had to admit. I broke off a yellow flower and placed it in her maths book. ‘So you’ll be able to do the next test blindfolded,’ I promised her.
She plucked a flower too and put it in my book. ‘Even if you don’t need it, it’ll remind you of me.’
At that moment I heard my mother’s footsteps behind us. A checked scarf was tied around her head and she was carrying a mattock. She must have been weeding in the vegetable patch behind our house. ‘You two aren’t thieving again, are you?’ she asked. We held our maths books up to our chests and shook our heads in sync.
My mother eyed us suspiciously. She knew how much we enjoyed giving each other flowers. But she couldn’t convict us of any crime. ‘You should at least give them a chance to grow,’ she said, to be on the safe side.
We looked indignant. ‘But that’s what we’re doing!’
Shortly before the summer holidays a maths teacher from another village came to our school. Mr Ahmed was responsible for examining us. He was a vertically challenged, bearded and very portly man, who had a reputation for being particularly hard to please. And he took pains to convey this impression. ‘If just one of you in this class manages to get 70 per cent in my test then you’re not so bad,’ he bragged.
Along with his tests, Mr Ahmed arrived in our village with a whole host of prejudices too. Like so many Muslims, he probably thought that we Yazidis were completely uneducated because we lived here in such isolation.
All my classmates quivered in awe. Nura’s face was as white as a sheet. But I pretended to be unimpressed. ‘What are you talking about? I’m brilliant at maths. Of course I’ll get more than 70 per cent.’
Mr Ahmed looked at me in amazement. ‘Hmm, you seem to be very sure of yourself,’ was his not very friendly reply. ‘But we’ll soon find out how good you actually are.’
He collected our maths books so no one could cheat. When Nura held out her book the pressed lily fell on the floor. The colour of my friend’s face turned from white to bright red. She hurriedly picked the flower up and put it on the desk. I took the flower she’d given me from my book, too, before handing it in, and placed it right beside hers. ‘Nothing can go wrong now,’ I whispered to Nura.
Mr Ahmed handed out the test. ‘It’s really very difficult. So don’t fret if you can’t manage it,’ he reiterated. He did seem to think we were idiots.
I was determined to prove the contrary. Focusing myself, I got stuck into the questions. Obviously the format of the test was somewhat different from the ones Mr Siamand set us. But all the same it was far from impossible. He really hadn’t concocted anything devilish. I worked everything out and then checked my answers. A sideways glance revealed that Nura was, as usual, struggling with the questions. I tried to arrange the sheet of paper with my answers on it in such a way that she might be able to take a peek. But Mr Ahmed’s eyes were vigilant. He’d already noticed that I’d stopped working. ‘Well, well, given up already?’ he sneered.
‘Absolutely not. I’ve finished.’
He raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘You can hand your paper in, then,’ he said, and ordered me out of the room. Nura followed soon afterwards.
We waited anxiously for the results. A few days later Mr Ahmed returned our marked papers. He grinned beneath his beard as he handed mine back. I found this hard to gauge – was his smile malicious or benign? There were lots of red ticks on my paper. Right at the bottom he’d scribbled my mark: 99 per cent. My heart leapt for joy. Nura had actually managed to do a third of the questions – and she passed too.
After the lesson Mr Ahmed beckoned me over again. ‘I’ve seldom encountered a maths genius like you,’ he told me. ‘Have you ever considered becoming a maths teacher when you’re older?’
‘That would be my absolute dream,’ I stammered in delight. ‘Do you think it might be a possibility?’
‘Of course. Mr Siamand or I could nominate you for a grant.’
I nodded enthusiastically. What a fantastic suggestion! I considered it a great distinction that this strict teacher thought me capable of becoming a maths teacher myself. No one in my family had become anything like that before.
I come from a modest background. My ancestors were small farmers and had never received any sort of formal education, as we belong to the lowest of the three Yazidi castes. Among the older generation, even learning how to read and write had been frowned upon. Hymns and prayers were simply passed down orally from our sheikhs and pirs. It only changed in 1970, when Saddam Hussein introduced compulsory school education. After this a school was built in Kocho too. But the teachers had always come from outside – until now. Would I, perhaps, be the first person to become a teacher in my own village?
I hurried home as proud as a peacock, looking forward to telling my parents the good news. This summer was going to be terrific, I thought, throwing my head back and shouting with sheer delight. Life was being kind to me.
In the holidays, things proceeded at a leisurely pace at home. I relaxed, had long lie-ins and met up with Nura and Evin. We’d organise picnics, browse fashion catalogues together and dress each other’s long brown hair, pinning it into elaborate updos. We would keep our hair like this all day until one of our mothers put her foot down. ‘Farida, untie that bun and give your hair a good brush!’ my mother might remonstrate. ‘Or are you going to wait until you’re infested with lice? You’ll bring bugs into this house!’ I’d grumble as I brushed out my hair and bid goodbye to my dream of not only being the first maths teacher in my village, but also the most elegant.
I was helping Mum with the housework as well. As a daughter this was my duty, but I enjoyed it and didn’t consider it too much of an effort to lend a hand with cleaning, washing, chopping wood or weeding.
But most of all I loved cooking for the family. Mum began teaching me at a young age how to prepare a variety of dishes, so that later on my husband would be pleased with me, as she put it. I was particularly good at making a local dish we call kamalles, fried chamomile flowers. And my kebab of fresh lamb was also famous – in the family, at least. When the spit sizzled over an open fire its enticing aroma wafted through the entire house, making everyone salivate. My four brothers would buzz around me like pesky flies and could barely wait for me to announce, ‘It’s ready!’
Unfortunately, our father didn’t spend as much time with us as usual that summer. All the soldiers along the 605-kilometre border with our neighbour Syria had to do extra shifts, as the situation was tense due to the civil war raging there. Over the past two years Sunni terrorist groups had conquered large swathes of northern Syria. The central government of President Bashar al-Assad now only controlled the area around Damascus. The Islamists, who had seized power in the north, were forcing the population to follow strict Islamic codes of behaviour, while also hunting down all Christians and those of other faiths.
The most successful and brutal of these terrorist groups was an organisation called al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil Iraq wa’al Sham – Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – or Daesh for short. In Europe the abbreviation ISIS or IS is more common. These terrorists had more money and better weapons than all the other Islamists. In the past few months they had conquered many cities on the other side of the border. Large numbers of Shias, Christians, Druze and Alawites tried to flee their rule of terror, otherwise they risked being killed.
‘It pains me terribly to have to send these people away,’ I heard my father despondently tell my mother on one occasion when he was at home briefly. ‘These fanatics show no sympathy to them.’
‘Isn’t it our duty to help them?’ she asked.
‘We have to be very careful,’ he replied. ‘ISIS has grand plans. Some of these supposed refugees are their Trojan horses. It’s their job to start new terror cells in Iraqi cities.’
‘Do they intend to seize power here too?’
‘They certainly would if they could. They want to bring the whole of the Middle East under their control and here in Iraq they’ve put out feelers. They’re already established in Fallujah and Ramadi. And apparently they’ve also got sympathisers in Mosul among former Saddam loyalists.’
My mother shook herself, as if to shoo away an ominous feeling. ‘Who on earth are these people?’
My father sighed. ‘The same lot who made our lives hell during the American occupation. Remember al-Zarqawi, who carried out bomb attacks and murdered Shias and Christians a few years back?’
‘Yes,’ my mother said – even I knew him, his name was well known and infamous in Iraq. ‘He was the former al-Qaeda chief in Iraq, wasn’t he? Didn’t he die some time ago?’
‘He did,’ my father confirmed. ‘But he has a successor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. And he’s every bit as brutal as his predecessor. This man comes from Samarra in southern Iraq and he spent five years rotting in an American military prison. His movement was as good as dead when the Americans pulled their troops out. But then the civil war broke out in Syria and al-Baghdadi sent the few remaining militias to the battlefield on the other side of the border. There they and other jihadis were given support by the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular. But Turkey sent weapons too, because they wanted to topple al-Assad and strengthen the radical Sunnis in the country. And they succeeded! Today al-Baghdadi’s men wield more influence than all the other groups in Syria. They’re battle-seasoned and just swimming in money and arms. That’s why they’re so dangerous.’
‘But not for us, surely?’ my mother asked anxiously.
‘No,’ my father laughed nervously. ‘It may be different in the south, but here they don’t have a chance – my colleagues and I will make sure they don’t come over.’
My mother fell silent; she didn’t seem entirely convinced.
‘Or do you think that 350,000 armed men can’t deal with a small bunch of terrorists?’ my father said to reassure her.
I was surprised by the undertone of concern in my parents’ conversation. It had never occurred to me before that jihadis could pose a threat to us in the village. The Syrian–Iraqi border that my father guarded was only about fifty kilometres from Kocho. But these were light years for me. I’d never been to Syria. And the civil war there was taking place on television, far beyond my own reality and my everyday life.
This began to change when the flashpoints got closer. ‘Have you heard?’ Nura asked just as Evin and I were coming into the house from the garden to deposit our apricot harvest in the kitchen. ‘What do you mean?’ I said, carefully flapping my left hand to shoo away a pesky bee, which was showing an interest in our fruit. We were planning to make jam from the sweet apricots today. But our friend was fixated on the television in the sitting room, and had put her bowl down on the floor. ‘Turn it up a bit,’ she instructed my little brother Keniwar.
The news was on. ‘The Golden Guard has flown in helicopters to the city,’ I heard the newsreader say. The camera showed soldiers leaping from Iraqi helicopters, dressed entirely in black. The elite forces of the Iraqi army were carrying machine guns.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked.
‘Shh,’ Nura said, staring in concentration at the screen.
The footage was from Samarra in the Iraqi province of Salahuddin, which is in fact a Sunni metropolis, but it houses one of the most important Shia shrines. Trouble had often broken out there in the past between Shias and Sunnis. So at first I suspected that Sunnis might have attacked the shrine. But from what the newsreader was saying, I gathered that a convoy of vehicles carrying heavily armed terrorists had invaded the city that morning. Now the soldiers were trying to retake control of Samarra. There was probably already a number of killed and wounded on both sides.
‘I hope nothing’s happened to my cousin,’ Nura whispered. ‘They only recently transferred Ibrahim to Samarra.’
Evin and I looked anxiously at Nura. We could well understand her unease. As working for the Iraqi security forces was a much sought-after job among Yazidis, almost all of us had relatives in the army. And I was also afraid that the terrorists might attack the border posts and something would happen to my father. Over the last few weeks and months there had been several attacks and skirmishes there with jihadis. It seemed as if the area controlled by the Syrian terrorists was not big enough for them. As if they were determined to carry the conflict over to our side of the border too.
‘Why don’t we go and see your aunt?’ I suggested. ‘Maybe she knows more about it.’
‘And maybe she knows absolutely nothing,’ Nura said, by which she meant the onslaught itself. ‘If she’s heard nothing about it, we’d only be worrying her unnecessarily. If something has happened to Ibrahim, we’ll find out soon enough.’
‘Better not upset her,’ Evin agreed.
We left the television on in the sitting room and went back to the kitchen to wash and stone the apricots. Some we cut into small pieces, sprinkled with sugar and put them in the fridge to have later for dessert. But most of them ended up in a large cooking pot, which we heated on a gas flame with kilos of sugar. The combination gave off a tantalisingly sweet and fruity smell, which became more intense the longer it simmered away. It was going to be a wonderful jam.
On television they reported the latest developments. In Baquba, north-east of Baghdad, a car bomb had exploded. And in Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar province, where ISIS was well established, their fighters had occupied the university campus. Although the newsreader tried not to make the events sound too dramatic, the fact was that the terrorists had taken hundreds of students hostage.
‘That’s unbelievable,’ I said to Evin – and decided there and then that, if the grant worked out, I wouldn’t study maths anywhere but in the Kurdish area. Maybe in Sinjar or Dohuk, where distant relations of ours lived. The Sunni south was definitely too unsafe for me. I could see that now.