In the Shadow of Sinjar: A Decade of Trauma and Resilience

August 3, 2014, ISIS invaded the close-knit Yazidi community in and around Iraq’s Sinjar mountain. Ten years on, this war still feels so raw, like an open wound – many are still missing, many are yet to see any justice not accountability for what was done to them.

I returned to my notebook this week to remember. Words are just words. Their power is limited. But they live in the crevices of our conscience…

I drive for hours and hours north to reach a Yazidi displacement camp crammed into the wedge where the corners of Syria, Iraq, and Turkey coincide. With the sight of white spots masked as homes rising before me, a mist of acrid air coating the landscape, I feel the weariness before I see it.

What strikes me most about this stuffy Yazidi space is that – unlike the other camps, where people animatedly voice their anger and wail about the lack of water, sharing conspiracy theories about who was really behind ISIS (the CIA, the Iranians, the Damascus regime of Bashar al-Assad) and detailing what had happened to them in the flashes after they realized they could no longer stay – the Yazidis are so far beyond grief that they say very little.

They don’t complain. Each of them had seen their loved ones gunned down in broad daylight less than a year earlier. Their mothers, daughters, sisters, sons, fathers, and brothers are all missing. It would do no good to complain; everyone is stuck on the same surreal boat. I think of all the times I complain about stupid things, how much we all complain about stupid things, and bow my head in shame. As soon as we arrive, dozens of curious faces crowd around, grabbing at my oversized shirt, and staring at me with light eyes of agony bright enough to pierce even the hardest hearts.

All the Yazidis speak very delicately and explain in their own way that all they want is for their family members to return, to feel safe in their ancestral homeland in and around the storied Sinjar Mountain, located on the rim of Iraq, kissing the Syrian border.

ISIS continued its barrage against the Yazidi villages in and around Sinjar, known by Kurds as Shengal, less than two months after it captured Mosul. ISIS had strangled all it could around the mountain until the good people inside were left blue with death, slavery, or forced conversion.

I am escorted into a tent where a woman with a thin wavy body has burrowed herself into the corner, sobbing silently into a silky black scarf, shoulders slouched and trembling. She is a survivor of sex slavery. Although she is alive, she is barely living, and grief hangs over her like a mantle. I had never felt the presence of grief in such way, in a way where he paints your bones and pushes your shoulders into the earth like a ton of bricks. Girls and women tiptoe into the tent behind me. No one wants to remember this ordeal, this loss of honor and dignity. Although rape has long been taboo and terrifying within the staunchly conservative Yazidi community, the silence is slowly, remarkably shifting.

There, inside that suffocating room, the women hold each other up, their embraces reassuring each other that they are now safe, even if only for a moment. Some managed to escape when coalition forces pounded ISIS from the air and broke its siege of Mount Sinjar. Despite withdrawing all troops from Iraq more than three and a half years earlier, it was the painful plight of this mysterious, peaceful minority that compelled President Obama to order a return. But before this could happen, many thousands of Yazidis died. As for the individuals captured before they could even make the run up the overwhelming Mountain, gut-wrenching atrocities awaited.

Women and men considered too old or too young to be sold into sexual slavery or into a battalion were systematically slain by the terrorists. Children were kidnapped and carted away in open trucks to be brainwashed and abused as child soldiers. Female captives are forced to convert to Islam, subjected to forced marriages, and repeatedly raped. Some are given to high-ranking foreign fighters. A handful have broken free after being sold to low-level fighters, while families scraped together ransom monies for others to be returned. Khatoon points out that some imprisoners were once their neighbors.

Sexual activity outside of marriage and outside of the sealed, close-knit Yazidi community is akin to death: losing one’s honor means being cast into a gloom of eternal loneliness, stripped of all stature, subject to execution by stoning. In spite of this, the ISIS onslaught has helped to fragment a little of those traditional taboos. Religious Yazidi leaders have sought to reconcile what happened by declaring that the women are not to blame, mandating that survivors be welcomed back without shame.

I realize that the most valuable thing I own is my 99-cent notebook, with which I can try to pass on the plight of these survivors in the hopes that somehow, they will not slip from the world’s oblivion. I feel as guilty to be there inside the most intimate moments of their lives as I am grateful. I did not have to do anything to earn their trust, except arrive from America. Yet I sure as hell would do everything I could hidden behind my notebook to make sure I did their stories and vulnerability justice.

In the chasm of the door flap, I see scores of men and boys in line outside: maintaining a respectful distance from the troubled women, but with curiosity etched on their faces. It’s as if they want to be involved somehow, part of the healing process, reminding me that men aren’t enemies. Malevolent men are the enemy. These are the fathers, brothers, sons, nephews, and neighbors. In the same way that the women in their lives are profoundly wounded, they too are stung by what happened. Men and boys long to protect their female counterparts, yet when ISIS came, their innate duty was yanked from them. They had been helpless during those lurid days under attack. That helplessness will remain with them forever.

“Have you ever heard a man like us cry?” one Yazidi asks me, his throat catching as tears trickle down his leathered face.

Esma, a little girl with straw-like hair and scraped knees, wriggles into my lap. She cannot speak, and nobody is able to explain why. Yet she communicates powerfully with her eyes, vacillating between melancholy, excited, and confused all in a matter of breaths.

I ask if the strain of the ISIS invasion has affected Esma’s condition. My interpreter Haider, a kind man from Baghdad, translates her father’s words with a glazed, faraway look, as if trying to conceal the dried emotions of a grown man in a macho society.

“This is how she came into the life,” he says.

Sometimes, words are lost in translation. Other times, they are even more poignant. How differently I came into this life compared to all these listless faces. How much I have taken for granted growing up in a place of peace. Yet I also feel as though these people possess a strength, a will to survive, that would never belong to my DNA. They are born strong, there is no other alternative.

Their stories are told to me like fables without anger, their voices persisting until the sun starts to dip below the mountains, and my driver informs us we have a long journey ahead and I need to wind the interviews down.

I pause, cross-legged on the hard earth, trying to jot down every final story, every phrase, every detail. High-ranking officials can talk for hours and hours in rooms without ever saying a word. It is the stories of these people, the ones who live through brutality and loss day in and day out, that reveal the true impact of this war. I am intoxicated by their courage and determination. I relate to Yazidis not because I can in any way understand the depth of their suffering, but because they felt so authentic, so raw, so honest. It is a far cry from my urban American life. Nobody here is asking me what I do, who I work for and providing me with an elevator pitch as part of their subconscious social climb.

Yazidis claim the Peshmerga – along with the Iraqi forces – abandoned them when ISIS arrived, leaving the unarmed and highly persecuted minority to face the bitter, drugged-up enemy, forcing many to run up the mountain into the lair of heatstroke and dehydration, or cross into war-ravaged Syria. To the Yazidi community, the world abandoned them on August 3. And the world continues to abandon them. A decade on, many are left to languish with little to their name. New conflicts emerge. Attention shifts. The media leaves. The aid is distributed elsewhere. But the pain does not dull. The memories are not erased.

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