The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity and My Fight Against the Islamic State
This month we’re looking at women’s history, making this weeks book The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity and My Fight Against the Islamic State by Nadia Murad & Jenna Krajeski. So let’s do this.
Nadia Murad is Yazidi, and she was born and raised in the Yazidi village of Kocho, Sinjar province, Iraq in 1993. She was the I believe the youngest child of her mother. Her father took a second wife not too long after she was born, which was not against Yazidi custom. And Nadia says in her book that even though this broke her mother’s heart, she couldn’t really blame her father. When you’re very poor and a farmer, the more hands you have to help the more you can plant and then harvest. Many children makes this possible.
Eventually her parents would divorce, leaving Nadia’s mother Shami to see to the 11 children they had...15 total. Shami was the second wife, after her father’s first wife had died, leaving four children who needed a mother.
Despite being incredibly poor, the family was happy. And they had something many American’s don’t….a happy family, who actually loved each other, and were very close. Now, the book is broken into three parts. Part one describes her childhood, the world she grew up in, and peppered throughout the whole book are pieces of what it means to be Yazidi, which is a very misunderstood religious minority.
The only way to be Yazidi is to be born Yazidi. You can’t convert into it. And they don’t proselytize. So, other than the fact their not Muslims, which is basically enough to make Muslims hate anyone, why were the Yazidi’s specifically targeted by ISIS?
They are monotheistic, they believe in one god, who is more or less remote and doesn’t really have much to do with the running of planet earth. But he does send his supreme angel, Tawûsî Melek, aka the Peacock Angel, to rule over planet earth and the seven other angels. Now, that is about as far she goes with the core theosophy, but she does mention Tawusi Melek many times throughout the book, especially when things got really bad.
But this faith that an angel watches over them is anathema to Islam...just like freedom of religion is anathema to Islam...and so when the US troops withdrew, allowing ISIS to flood into the power vacuum that was left behind...the Yazidis were targeted for extermination, through execution or through forced conversion.
Now, some of the Yazidis got ahead of this and ran for the mountains, where they remained hidden. Some made it to Kurdistan, the section of northern and Eastern Iraq that bridges parts of Syria and Turkey. It’s sort of an unofficial state, and very much a safe zone for Yazidis, who are all Kurdish speakers. This map is great, because the yellow part shown is more or less where the Yazidi communities of Iraq lived.
Late July/Early August of 2014, ISIS invaded the region of Iraq where Kocho was located and the village was put on lock down. Anyone trying to escape after that was executed by ISIS. After they had finished with the surrounding villages, ISIS came specifically to Kocho and rounded up the approximately 600 residents of Kocho on August 15, 2014. This is where part two starts, and it is as terrifying and horrifying as you could possibly imagine.
They separated out the women and young children. The older boys and men were taken outside and shot en masse. Two of her brothers managed to survive, but not uninjured. The bullets missed their vital organs, leaving them with severe wounds to their arms and legs. They waited until ISIS had left and made their way to Kurdistan.
The women were taken to a second location, and further separated into unmarried, and married...and old. If they were married and/or married with young children, they were allowed to keep their young children with them. Married would still be taken, just a little later. Long enough to ensure they were not pregnant. If the children were fairly young but not toddlers, they might be taken in by ISIS and raised to be martyrs to the cause. If the women were older than X...whatever ISIS decided X to be...they were executed. And if they were unmarried, they were immediately taken to Mosul, where they were sold as sabaya...singular sabiyya. Sex slaves.
Nadia was initially picked by a large man, Salwan, who took her and Rojian, also from Nadia’s village...I don’t think she was related, but I could be wrong. Rojian may have been a cousin or niece. On the way to the...well, cash register, for lack of a better terminology...she threw herself at another guy, begging him to buy her. It is unclear if this was better or worse than her initial purchaser. The new guy was Hajji Salman. Hajji is a title or rank. And he had the authority to take Nadia from Salwan, who was not pleased, but had to accept it.
Hajji Salman forced Nadia to convert to Islam...and then proceeded to rape her for a week or more. Time kind of lost all sense of meaning, so Nadia is not entirely sure how long she was with him. After some days, though, she did attempt to escape, by climbing out an upstairs window while Salman was having a meeting. She was spotted and ordered back to her room, after which she was gang raped as punishment on Salman’s orders.
And then Salman sold her or gifted her to other ISIS fighters. And yes, they all raped her. And then one day, her chance came. Her newest owner went out to get her food or medicine...after all the abuse, she was consistently sick to her stomach and something about vomit was just a turn off for her would be rapist. And when he left, he forgot to lock the door. And Nadia made her move.
And that’s how part three starts. With her jumping over the wall and making her way to freedom. And, here’s the thing...After everything she went through, it might be really hard to keep believing in a God who would allow such evil to happen. But when you realize that in a city with a population between 1 and 2 million, when you have no way of knowing who supports ISIS and will return you for a promised reward, and who might have a conscience, and be willing to help….Nadia found her way to helpers.
She describes walking randomly through an encroaching evening, crossing streets, keeping her eyes down, avoiding people, and realizing that she doesn’t know which way lays safety. And so she’s going to have to make a leap of faith, that goodness still exists in the world. So she walks up to one house and...hesitates. No idea why. But some sense told her “not this one.” And she quietly returned to the street, and kept walking. The second house she decided to approach, was filled with a good family. Who were terrified of ISIS, and rightly so. But were more concerned with justice. And they helped smuggle her out of Mosul. First to relatives of theirs in the country just outside the city. And eventually out of Iraq into Kurdistan. Which does tend to make one think that maybe there is a God, and he was watching out for Nadia that day.
I read this entire section, about her escape, a little over a hundred pages, in an hour. It was riveting and I read with my heart in my throat, praying that none of this go sideways and see her back in the hands of ISIS. Which I logically knew it would not, because there is no way ISIS would have allowed her to publish anything, but I was worried there would be setbacks, and maybe this is not the time she escaped.
But she was eventually safely escorted to her brother, Hezni, who had been in Kurdistan when ISIS invaded Kocho. And unbeknownst to Nadia, working with the family who helped her, Hezni was about to launch on his life’s mission: That of helping to smuggle kidnapped Yazidi girls out of Iraq. And he would build up quite a network over time, that would see at least hundreds of girls, if not thousands, freed from torture and rape. But It more or less started with Nadia.
Eventually, some of her sisters and cousins would also make their way to freedom. But not all of them. Some died while trying to escape, like her closest friend and niece Kathrine. Some remain in ISIS hands.
After some time in the refugee camps, Nadia and one of her sisters would travel to Germany to start new lives. And there, Nadia would become goodwill ambassador to the UN, speaking about what life was like under ISIS control. And she would join Yazda, a not for profit built of Yazidi survivors whose goal is to help protect and champion those who survived the Yazidi genocide, I’ll throw a link to their website in the description.
At first, Nadia did not want to admit to her family about her rape. Which I get. Women everywhere have a hard time admitting to such a thing, one of the many reasons rape is under-reported. But a lot of that had to do with the psychological aspect of ISIS attacks. All of her rapists, every single one, warned her that if she told her family she’d converted to Islam and been raped, that she’d be honor killed because she was no longer pure.
Eventually, she realized that was her attackers, throwing stones through their own glass houses. THEY would kill their daughters and sisters for having been raped. Yazidi’s are considerably more forgiving.
After ISIS had been pushed back...not eliminated, they are still working in terror cells to today, but pushed back….Nadia and other survivors made a pilgrimage to Lalish, the valley in Northern Iraq where Tawusi Melek first came to earth to connect human beings with God. Naturally, this is a sacred place to Yazidi’s. The Baba Sheikh...their highest holy man...will come for important events. The returning of so many once thought lost daughters to Lalish was one such important event.
And he met with them. And heard their stories. And told them each that forced conversion was no conversion at all, they were all still Yazidi. And being a victim of rape did not make them less worthy or ruined women. And that the Yazidi community welcomed them back with open arms. A lesson in mercy and compassion that many of the so called advanced western civilizations struggle to learn.
This book was heartbreaking to read through. It’s gut wrenching to read about what Nadia lost, her family, her home, her peace...all she wanted was to open a salon, to make the women in her village beautiful on their wedding day. And evil...decided otherwise.
And this book, Nadia’s story, is a bellwether for the West. She is trying so hard to warn the rest of the world about the catastrophe that is bearing down on us all by the flood of Muslim refugees who are invading Europe, Canada, and America. One that is largely ignored by ivory tower academics who preach on behalf of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Ayatollah’s, who would see us all enslaved to an ideology in the name of tolerance, a tolerance which will never be extended back to those of us who raise doubts. We’re told we’re simply too stupid to know what’s going on or to form the correct opinion.
This book, while undoubtedly not the correct opinion, will help you make an informed opinion. I highly recommend it.
