In Search of Safety: Voices of Refugees

In the previous chapter, Nyarout, who has lived in the United States for many years, is able to describe how she changed from an African girl to a South Sudanese American woman. Meet Shireen. Shireen has lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, for only three months and has not yet had time to adjust to a new way of life. She is still struggling to cope with the enormous brutality inflicted on her and her family. All the other participants in this book were resettled along with family members. Shireen came alone. Shireen is Yazidi.

The Yazidis (also known as Yezidi or Eˆzidî) are an independent ethnic society that mostly inhabited the Sinjar region in Northern Iraq. Throughout their long and fabled history, they have survived seventy-three genocides. Theirs is an ancient religion, spread orally by holy men, that is related to Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. According to Yazidi belief, God created the universe from fragments of a pearl globe. He painted the earth in the bright colors of a peacock’s feathers and sent his chief angel, Tawusi Melek, as a link between Himself and the people. On earth, Tawusi Melek took the form of a peacock. When some Iraqis heard about the Peacock Angel, they misinterpreted the imagery and called the Yazidis “devil worshippers.” This led to extreme violence directed against the Yazidis, from the time of the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922) to the rise of ISIS (also known as ISIL or Daesh).

Shireen and forty-seven members of her family were caught in the net of ISIS terror that began in August 2014. Eighteen are still missing. She speaks Kurmanji, a Kurdish dialect. Hadi Pir, the vice president of the Yazda Cultural Center in Lincoln, Nebraska, acted as our interpreter. Later, Saad Babir and Laila Khoudeida graciously translated our recordings and correspondence. Laila also provided additional material.

Though reliving the details of her life in captivity is extremely painful, Shireen continues to courageously speak out so that the massacre of her people will not be lost in history’s dustbin. Shireen says, “We Yazidis are a simple and peaceful people. We don’t hurt anyone. Throughout our history, we have faced persecutions. For this reason, I ask the international community, especially the United States, to protect us. Continue to liberate our abducted people from ISIS captivity. Don’t forget us.”

Shireen continues, “Anytime I meet someone who escaped from ISIS, I ask them about my family members. Are they still with ISIS? Are they dead? No one has seen them. I keep these pictures with me always because I miss them.”

My name is Shireen. I am twenty-six years old. I was born in Rambossy, a village south of Sinjar, in Northern Iraq. I lived on a farm with thirteen members of my family. I am the third child in my family. When I was ten years old, not quite ten years old, my father died of a cardiovascular disease and my mother died from a cerebral vascular sickness. My older sister was married with kids and living away from home. I was the next oldest female at home. I stopped going to school to take care of my younger brothers and sisters. My uncles, aunts, and cousins all lived nearby. We worked in the fields together, growing tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, onions, barley, and wheat. Our life was good. We were satisfied with what we had.

On August 3, 2014, ISIS attacked the Yazidi land in the Sinjar district. We were on our farm near Rambossy. My uncle was away, fighting ISIS militants on the border of the Gerzarek village. He called and said, “We are leaving the town because we cannot hold it anymore. You need to go to Sinjar Mountain.”

Throughout the Yazidis’ history, Mount Sinjar has been their shelter. ISIS already controlled much of the surrounding area.

I prepared food and other necessities to take with us. I baked bread and placed it in a bag. Then I locked our front door from the inside and jumped over the wall. At this point, we didn’t know what ISIS would do to us, but I heard rumors that they were taking girls and women to be sold as sex slaves. I asked my brother Ali to kill me and my sisters before anyone could ever touch us. Ali thought I was crazy and told me to stop saying such things. We got in our little pickup truck and headed toward Sinjar Mountain. By the time we arrived at the foothills of the mountain, our car broke down. Ali told the rest of us to start walking up the mountain and that he and his family would follow us later.

My two youngest brothers, Qahtan and Adnam, tried to take our sheep to the mountain. ISIS appeared and shot some rounds to scare them. The militants said, “Don’t go anywhere. We’re not going to hurt you.” My brothers hid among the sheep and then ran away. ISIS captured them, but that was later.

A lot of our men were with us, but they did not have guns. It wouldn’t have been so easy to capture us if the men had arms. Some of the men had guns, but they spent all their ammunition earlier, fighting in the town. I was captured with my brothers Dakhil, Hadi, Hadi’s son Delhat, and three of my sisters — Nerges and her four children, Khefshe, and Sahera. We were terrified. I called my brother Ali on my cell. He said he couldn’t make it to the mountain any faster. We thought that Ali would be captured. He was. Ali, his wife, and his daughter Laila were caught by ISIS at the root of the mountain.

Our family tried to stay in touch with each other. One of my uncles called another uncle on his cell. “Where are you?” While they were speaking, three trucks, each carrying three ISIS men, arrived at the bottom of the mountain. Everything happened quickly. There was chaos as we tried to stay together and seek safety on Mount Sinjar. These men were very dirty. They had black clothes and long hair. Some of them were wearing a sort of sandal. One of the militants had only one eye and a long beard.

They demanded our cell phones, our jewelry, and our weapons. They said they would torture anyone who refused to give them their stuff. I turned off my cell phone and put it in my sock. My sister also turned off her phone and placed it in between her clothes.

The militants ordered the men to take out their personal identification cards from their wallets. My cousin had two phones; he broke one because he did not want ISIS to have access to our phone numbers and the names of our family.

They forced us into their vehicles and drove to a wedding hall in Sinjar, at the bottom of the mountain. There were so many of us. It was very hot, and people suffered from thirst and hunger. Later I heard that a lot of kids died on the mountain because of dehydration and lack of milk and food.

Men and women were separated. Boys older than twelve years were put with the men. I was with my sisters and other family members. My uncle told them, “My family doesn’t speak Arabic. I want them with me.” One of the ISIS militants put his gun to my uncle’s head and said, “I will kill you if you speak any more words.” Another man cried, “I want my family.” They ordered him to kneel, and they shot him from the back and threw him over a cliff. They did this right in front of us, right in front of his mom and his family.

We started crying, and they told us, “If you cry, we will kill you. Anyone who cries or screams, we will kill you.”

My uncle whispered, “Just calm down.” There were hundreds of ISIS members threatening to kill anyone who had phones with them. The ISIS fighter, who killed the man, gave his gun to another fighter, who had long hair and was barefoot. The militant was about to kill all the men, but his phone rang. After the call, he said that he was not going to kill any more at this moment.

We were all in a government office inside the city of Sinjar. All the men were put in rooms, and the women stayed in the corridor. At night, they came to take women. My sister Sahera was fifteen years old. She hid behind me and started to vomit because she was so frightened. They took her anyway. I held tight to her hand and begged them not to take her. One of the ISIS militants hit me on my shoulder with the back of his gun and took her. She was a child. I raised her when our parents died, and it was so hard to let her go. She was wearing a dress I had made for her. I thought I must die because I could not bear losing my sister.

A master is prohibited from having intercourse with his female slave who is married to someone else; instead, the master receives her service, [while] the husband [gets to] enjoy her [sexually].

— ISIS pamphlet on the treatment of female slaves

When they started taking all the single women, I put my three-year-old nephew, Delhat, on my bosom. “I’m married, and this is my son!” They left me. But then they came again to take me. I begged them to leave me, and they did. They tried to take my brother’s wife, who has a baby. She was crying, “I’m married! I’m married!”

After some days, ISIS took all us women to Mosul. I begged them to take me to my sister Sahera. They just laughed at me.

ISIS used a government facility to distribute the Yazidi women to their fighters. ISIS men came and bought women and girls. We were given black clothes, long dresses, and head covers [hijabs]. I was able to stay with my family because I claimed I was married to my cousin, Khairy, and that my nephew Delhat, my brother Hadi’s child, was my son. [ISIS had separated Hadi’s wife from the rest of the family.]

The next day, the ISIS militants walked us back to the PDK [Barzani Party] headquarters. They put the Kurdistan and PKK flags on the ground and made everybody step on them. [The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê in Kurdish), is a leftist organization based in Turkey and Iraq.]

Airplanes overhead were bombing all around the building, and glass from the windows started to fly at us. The bombs were too close. Pieces of glass injured two sides of my nephew’s head. We all tried to run through a small door. Once we were outside, we didn’t see any ISIS fighters. It was a chance to escape, but after a moment, they came at us from all sides and we were abducted again.

They put us in trucks and moved us to an area close to the Mosul city called Badoosh. There was a huge prison there that had been run by the Iraqi government before ISIS came. It smelled terrible. Much of Badoosh was burned and we saw blood on the ground. We thought that ISIS killed people there.

My nephew was still with me. We stayed in the Badoosh prison for about seven days. We were given food once a day, one samon [Iraqi bread roll] for each person, and one piece of cheese. Because we were so frightened and scared, and worried about the kids, we didn’t eat that food at all. We gave it to the kids.

There was no drinking water for two days. Kids were crying for water. I think some of the kids died of thirst.

My uncle’s wife, Junay, my brother Ali’s wife, Layla, and my sister Khefshe were with me. We didn’t know about anyone else in the family. My sister and I scratched ashes from the wall and put them on our faces so that we wouldn’t look pretty and would not be selected by ISIS fighters.

The ISIS fighters brought us the dirty water that they used to wash their bodies. They made us abducted people drink that dirty body water. Because of the thirst, some people were obligated to drink. I could not drink. They brought us rotten grapes to eat. The smell all around us grew worse because there were no restrooms; there were feces everywhere.

In the morning, they brought a girl that was covered all in black clothes. She could barely walk. I ran toward her and asked her about Sahera. She said she had not heard Sahera’s name. The girl was telling us that the ISIS militants raped her and that they had been raping all the girls, especially those who resisted reading the Quran.

Then the ISIS fighters took all the kids and put them in a pen outside. They laughed and told us that they were going to kill the kids. Women and girls started crying and screaming. “We’re not going to kill them.” The ISIS fighters laughed at us more. They said that it was time to give the kids an Islamic education, teachings from Islamic religious texts from the Quran. We stayed in that terrible prison for about a week.

When an airplane flew overhead, the abductors brought the kids back inside the building. The next day, the ISIS headquarters that was close to where we were staying was hit by a bomb. Bombs fell all around us. The militants got buses to move us to another place. As we were taken outside, airplanes appeared to drop more bombs. All the ISIS militants disappeared again. They just left us there, out in the open. We couldn’t tell who was bombing the area, the Iraqi forces or the U.S. We wanted to hide, but where could we go? Once the airplanes left, the militants came back and started loading us into buses. They moved us to a city close to Sinjar called Tal Afar.

Just before we reached Tal Afar, the ISIS militants separated all the old women from the younger ones. If a woman had gray hair, they took her away. We thought that they killed them all, but once we reached Tal Afar, they were all there.

In Tal Afar, there was another building, like a jail, where they put us. Five ISIS fighters were at the door to the prison. They asked again if we had cell phones, money, and jewelry. They said that they would punish and harm anyone who didn’t give them those things. I hid my cell phone in my nephew’s diaper. As each woman went inside, they put a light on her face because it was nighttime. They picked women who were pretty and young. One of them wanted to take me, but his colleague said, “Leave this one. She’s married.”

Because I claimed I married my cousin and he was among the abducted men, they left me alone.

They took a lot of women that night. They took anyone unmarried, including my sister Khefshe. I was crying. I wanted to beg them to bring my sister back, but my uncle’s wife said, “Calm down, or they will take you too. They will separate you from us.”

The women and girls taken by the ISIS fighters were sold and used as sex slaves. I’ve seen women sold for as little as one dollar. I later became one of the women. I was sold five times.