This text of Fouad el Hassan was shortlisted to the Samir Kassir Award for the Freedom of the Press
They said that the city of Sinjar[1] has nothing to tempt ISIL, with its mud villages and houses, its unpaved roads, and dead gardens, as every other city had been opened to them by a presidential, republican, and divine decree. What would make them invade a city that borders Syria, whose people speak an unintelligible language? A people who live in complete seclusion, which preserves the spirit that inhabits their cemeteries, draping the city like sand?
They said that, like its predecessors, this war was sent from above to test our patience, fortitude, and attachment to our ancestors’ land, in which they suffered 73 genocides. That its mountain –seated upon the horizon like a seasoned knight with his invisible spear, ready to dig into enemy chests with enough might to outdo the weapons manufactured beyond the borders– will not fail them, and will keep watch over them like a gallant father.
They said that life ends where the city ends, and that any land, even if it be a paradise, beyond one’s home, is useless, as is any other language besides one’s own, even if it trickles of honey. And that one has no family beyond their own village, even if others swore allegiance to brotherhood a thousand times.
They cannot be blamed; they live in a fundamentalist tribal environment. Its members pride themselves on their clannish, tribal, and religious affiliations, all of which have involuntarily happened to them, effectively achieved by none of them. They were murdered, individually and collectively, by the next of kin and strangers alike.
They said that those would enter the city to assert their authority over unpaved streets, to take revenge on the kofr that prevails over the earth, to reap the hasanat that would qualify them for paradise. Qualify them by cleansing the land of the prophets from elderly women who wore white dresses and wrapped orange kufiyahs around their waists, facing the sun every morning to pray to the Lord and intertwine with nature. Women who knew that they’re on this earth for a short while, for a war or two. Time is no longer measured by hours, but wars. How old are you? I’m three wars old.
They said that those would leave the city as soon as they’ve seen its inhabitants, known for their nonviolence, show no resistance – assumed by some to be foolish – for if we are trees who think of the world as a forest, a blazing wind is inevitably coming, and will turn us all to ashes. We must therefore become armed – with mistrust and Kalashnikov(s).
They said that they’d survived more than seventy decrees, along with the “Lord Commander” dictator’s attempts to Arabize them, their liberator from life. Just another war cannot break them. Wars are an eternal presence in human history, even if deluded “adults” acknowledge no more than two world wars. Every war is a world war. Since the dawn of time, there have been ongoing individual, collective, religious, national, and cultural wars. There’s also the war one wages on oneself, which is the most important and most overlooked worldwide. Our work as soldiers is to survive, every time, and maintain the areas of our lives. The only way to confront death’s tyranny is to live, and to partake in life in every way possible.
And there are women who returned to Şingal, corpses roaming the city. Those are corpses that shop and meander the streets; corpses that visit their relatives in cemeteries; corpses that prepare food and eat little of it; corpses that marry and give birth to more corpses. Corpses that do not know to whom to pass on their death – to the army or the militias that fill the city. Corpses that watch pictures of the dead hung on every pole in the city and its villages, as if they were birds without nests that chose Şingal for one. Corpses everywhere, and corpses that welcomed women in.
Perhaps paradise was that village, and the only righteous path was to leave their simple lives behind. The fathers of the world, however, wanted to do the Lord’s work and rectify Him, saving Him from killing Himself. They even punished us in ways worse than the Lord’s. While He rained sulphur and fire down on Sodom and Gomorra, they added cluster bombs, chemicals, and militias to the mix.
They said that the city was derelict, with mud streets and no electricity, jolting it back to the cave ages. But they forgot that it contained the most precious object on earth: infidels, with no affiliation to the official state religion,[2] and “loose” women, creatures of sin who roam the streets, holding the key to paradise and its houris. They forgot it contained children, beheld in the emirs’ eyes as fruit gardens that would ripen as soon as they’re irrigated with holy water, turning them into caliphate cubs.[3] Children programmed to hate their parents and appointed to kill them, to be awarded with obedient righteous wives, who will mount them in bed like the Amazonas, and who will raise caliphate cubs and girls, who will become suicidals-making machines or, perhaps, one day, members of the Hisbah.[4]
Rumours abounded before ISIL’s occupation. But after the occupation, and as the army withdrew, morbid silence prevailed, and no one said nothing – it was clear that a lucrative deal was made, even if no one voiced it. We knew that we were goods to be sold, though I don’t know who gave the merchants the rights to sell. Many inhabitants weren’t registered as citizens, while others obtained the privilege of citizenship through bribes. One history teacher in the village school once said: to become the grandsons of Gilgamesh, to continue the Hammurabi lineage, to deserve the membership of Mesopotamia, a clerk whose origins are known to none must be bribed.
The Night Nineveh Fell
20-01-2015
The inhabitants resisted with their rusted weapons, of which the venerable government tried to rob them a few times, perhaps because it didn’t want anyone else to control death. They resisted until dawn, when ISIL agents entered the villages and liberated them from their local god, with black banners affirming God’s oneness and that there is no other God but God. They executed the men who refused their rightful God and their paradise. And perhaps paradise was that village, and the only righteous path was to leave their simple lives behind. The fathers of the world, however, wanted to do the Lord’s work and rectify Him, saving Him from killing Himself. They even punished us in ways worse than the Lord’s. While He rained sulphur and fire down on Sodom and Gomorra, they added cluster bombs, chemicals, and militias to the mix.
There were those who remained home and those who evacuated to the mountains. In mid-summer, children died of thirst, the adults among them endured by drinking the dirtiest of water, while babies died of hunger because their mothers’ nipples had dried up and their bodies withered. Young men would carry the bodies of their fathers and mothers on their backs and head to the mountains on foot, like someone surprised by death before dying, appearing before them in full form, like French noblemen, dressed up, perfumed, and prepared. The brown mountain swayed in the horizon as the sun flogged their backs with its whips. Transparent circles formed behind their eyelids, some closed forever, as their bodies were left along the road. Perhaps I was amongst them, and fatigue closed my eyelids forever, so my father dug a grave for me in the middle of the road, with his bare hands and tears, until he perished in turn, and lay down by my side. He kissed my head for the first and last time there, and wept. Perhaps my father showed his love for me by digging my grave on his way to seek refuge in the Sinjar Mountains, perhaps one of us had stayed to dig the other’s grave and lie down next to him there, to cry each other, for the first and last time.
I am two. A child who remained there, following his crying father, rushing from one place to another in search of a means to survive, and finding none. His father who begs car owners to save his wife and children, his tears springing because he grew old before buying a car to help his family escape death. His father who asks a Lorry truck driver, carrying Sinjari goods about to perish, headed nowhere, for help. His father who raises his head with sweat flowing down his every pore, down his eyes with painful tears, only for the driver to shake his head. And so, my father wipes his eyes and continues his search. He stands in the way of another car and asks, with eyes drowned in tears: “Brother, take the children with you, just take the children. I won’t come, even if it means I die, just take the children!” The driver shakes his head and gestures towards the car anguished with the weight of bodies stacked onto it. “It looks like we shall remain. If anything happens, kill me first. I don’t want anyone else to kill me but you.” He told me.
And I am a child who survived, and lived in the camp for a decade, writing to an illiterate world that knows no other language but murder. Had it learned how to read words, we’d have all survived, perhaps. But it knows not!
And there were those who defied the news saying that the road to Kurdistan was closed, and evacuated. I still remember my father’s tears. We followed him like little dead people, him, the big dead person whose eyes were eroded by tears of helplessness till his tears’ storage ran out. I’d never seen him cry before. He’d look at my siblings and mother and cry and cry and cry. He’d cry for fear, of them becoming goods sold in slave markets, or bodies for the emirs of the Organization, ever hungry for little girls’ bodies, as it turns out.
Fatigue closed my eyelids forever, so my father dug a grave for me in the middle of the road, with his bare hands and tears, until he perished in turn, and lay down by my side. He kissed my head for the first and last time there, and wept. Perhaps my father showed his love for me by digging my grave on his way to seek refuge in the Sinjar Mountains, perhaps one of us had stayed to dig the other’s grave and lie down next to him there, to cry each other, for the first and last time.
There were those who defied the news saying that the road to Kurdistan was closed, and evacuated. I still remember my father’s tears. We followed him like little dead people, him, the big dead person whose eyes were eroded by tears of helplessness till his tear storage ran out. I’d never seen him cry before. He’d look at my siblings and mother and cry. He’d cry for fear, of them becoming goods sold in slave markets, or bodies for the emirs of the Organization, ever hungry for little girls’ bodies, as it turns out.
We rode a Mitsubishi car along with dozens of families and caught up the displacement convoy, as weapons played their symphony on heaven’s strings. We carried our identities and a house we built in our chests – for birds kicked out of the city to make a nest of it and for us to inhabit by arid roads.
I don’t remember my mother’s face during the voyage to escape death. I don’t remember my sisters’ faces either. I avoided looking at them, as I avoided looking at my grandmother and uncles’ wives and daughters. I’d bury my face in between my feet as the car shook and the sun scorched my back. I heard children crying hunger, the hushed wailing of women, and the mute tears of men, but I never lifted my head. I vomited air as my empty stomach turned, and I stared at the saliva until it dried up between my feet. I often explain not looking at them as avoiding to imagine them in the hands of ISIL and the slave markets they organized, crying and screaming, calling my name. I never explain it as my own cowardice, though, although I know that it is cowardice, and nothing but.
We arrived to Kurdistan with a miracle. In the middle of the road, all cars headed back into the city now under ISIL control, as the road was blocked, and panic took over the people. I heard women’s lamentation, growing stronger. They weren’t crying, it was more like howling. Each woman howled differently, as men looked around, bewildered. I didn’t lift my head. My grandmother shook my body to make sure I was still alive and, when I vomited my saliva once again, she turned to the others to take care of them. I didn’t lift my head. I vomited my saliva for the third time, and the sounds grew louder, the sound of shooting grew stronger from every corner. We were in a battlefield, we were a flock of sheep in a wolves’ arena, as axes fell from the skies on necks like mine, as I stared into the saliva between my feet. Eternal minutes continued to welcome death as the earth shook underneath its footsteps. I thought it a heavenly creature; a decree like this one, with a force bigger than an entire country’s, must have been sent from above. I was naïve, I was a child staring into the saliva between his feet as he returned towards his certain death.
ISIL queued women to register them as “halal” goods. The virgins were their favourites. Each of them received a abaya beneath which she would guard her honour, so that an ISIL man can purchase and have sex with her in accordance with the sharia. So that all her sins are washed away and the heavens pardon her. And perhaps she’d actually make it to heaven if she were to become pregnant with caliphate cubs. Then, if she happens to be under fourteen, to bleed, to cry, her screams dissipated in the occupied cities, if she happens to die, it doesn’t matter…
The numbers tell that 3548 women were taken into captivity by the Organization, some of whom gave birth to ISIL babies. Who labels these children? If they were indeed “ISILs”, does that mean that they’d decided to join the Organization while in their mothers’ wombs? They’d just arrived into the world – why does none of them belong to their mothers then and go visit Şingal? Perhaps because the roads are full of ISIL families, which the Iraqi government repatriated under its special “protection”.
They then started the cars again and headed, once more, to Kurdistan, and the world loomed on the horizon, melting in the mirage as if it were a Sohrab Sepehri, a watercolour painting in gradual disappearance. And we escaped death twice.
People slept in the streets, and then it happened. Let there be queues, and there were queues. Queues to receive food, beds, and to beg for new guises of displacement. Whenever I saw a man with a withered body, wrecked by fatigue, I’d instantly know he was from Sinjar. I didn’t have to listen to his accent or know his name. Pain was an identity we carried with us, on our faces and in ways we spoke.
So, they built camps? Entire cities inhabited by the undead. They surrounded them with fences and registered their information.
On the other side, ISIL queued women to register them as “halal” goods, fresh meat. The virgins were their favourites. They wrote down their names, and each of them received a abaya beneath which she would guard her honour, so that an ISIL man can purchase and have sex with her in accordance with the sharia. So that all her sins are washed away and the heavens pardon her. And perhaps she’d actually make it to heaven if she were to become pregnant with caliphate cubs. Then, if she happens to be under fourteen, to bleed, to cry, her screams dissipated in the occupied cities, if she happens to die, it doesn’t matter… She must simply be purified with a halal male organ before she dies, so that she earns heaven.
They locked them up in schools in Tal Afar and Mosul, where they lived in spacious halls, where dozens of them would urinate and defecate in their places. They would cry, smells merged, as the world idled by. Their bodies would remain soiled until displayed in the market, until one was coveted by an emir or a commander, or when one wanted to gift one of his friends a girl as a token of amity. The least an ISIL emir could give a friend was a delectable “prisoner”, capable of rejuvenating him and restoring his youth as soon as he panted over and entered her. Elderly emirs possibly felt like studs as the young girls screamed, crying to the heavens that had abandoned them.
Perhaps this was another lesson. To learn how to live in a world that men in power turned into a toilet. Where ministers and directors live in green areas and complete luxury. Then, having removed all flesh from the state body, they’d throw us the remaining bones, for us to be killed as we proudly carried them on our shoulders. Then, as soon as we leave their area, what remains of the country is their toilet. Their areas are never dirtied. But then again perhaps this is proof that they failed to manage the country. They didn’t know about democracy until Uncle Sam’s forces came in 2003 and occupied the country, bringing along professors of democracy to educate the people and government alike.
ISIL’s families have a right to return to the country because they were “victims”. The Iraqi people, and the abovementioned humans, on the other hand, are guinea pigs. We, in this geographic spot of the world, are nothing but a circus to make them laugh.
The slave market they organised in Syria, to which they shipped the “goods”, was frequented by a number of different ISIL elements. They bought women whose hands were tied and hid behind the niqab. Perhaps a lawful peep was permitted? Who knows. Someone could gift an infidel to his friend, or sell her for infidel currency in return. Those were women of all ages. Women who cried, screamed, committed suicide, sold, given as gifts, burned alive, or raped. Women, women everywhere. Women whose scorched bodies were left on the ground, for the sun and wind to eat away at them. Women who decided to commit suicide, because death was more intimate at the time than the commander of armed forces. Women who stole phones to call a man who said he’d sacrifice all he’s got to liberate them, but then said he was sorry. Women, women, women.
In summer nights, they rebel against the world; they take strolls in the camp streets to move their limbs. And yet, after almost ten years in camps, none of them has managed to move her heart – for if she does, it would flee her chest and fly beyond the camp walls. It would fly out like a bird that just discovered the skies. None of them has managed to live, even though death was far away.
If life were a beautiful woman, with the smile of a sun, the eyes of heaven, and the gait of leaves, then death, too, is a woman, a woman from Şingal.
The slave market in Syria was more like a virginity-sale carnival. A woman’s value lies in her virginity, which made them choose the younger ones, fourteen or less, to “raise” them the right way and instil values in them. Each would then be transformed into a maid to older wives who hailed from various Arab countries and a sex machine for ISIL men. And perhaps they still are, as some were never freed. Humanity, brandished by Europe and cited by the Arab World, has become a shit cake offered to men in power.
The numbers tell that 3548 women were taken into captivity by the Organization, some of whom gave birth to ISIL babies. Who labels these children? If they were indeed “ISILs”, does that mean that they’d decided to join the Organization while in their mothers’ wombs? They’d just arrived into the world – why does none of them belong to their mothers then and go visit Şingal? Perhaps because the roads are full of ISIL families, which the Iraqi government repatriated under its special “protection”.
ISIL families can return. But they need not; the government will do the job for them and repatriate them. But what to do with the kidnapped women? Therein lies the question. What a tough, bewildering pickle they’re in. Each of them will need special care, a rehabilitation program, special attention, and thousands of dollars to free her, as has been determined. Yet all that the government has to offer is a tent.
There are women who were freed, by paying their way to freedom. A ransom was paid to ISIL traffickers or money given for others to kidnap them and bring them back to Iraq in some other way. They were being sold for one last time, we dare say. And the woman would be sold to… her own family, for thousands of dollars. That is, if she’s lucky enough or still alive in the Organizations’ prisons, camps, and houses, spread across many different countries.
And there are women we know nothing about, as if turned into moons eclipsed by a dark winter night. Women from Şingal swallowed up by a world that creaks under its wars. Those are women who could have each planted trees and roses had they been left to just be. They could have given birth to children and coloured life for their family. But if they’re there, then I know that they’ve each transformed into a burning forest, their breasts fig trees that bear embers to sting their hearts.
And there are women who made it to displacement camps in Kurdistan. They have become sculptures of pain covered with white tents, with nylon doors and windows, schools, police headquarters, and areas to queue to receive food baskets. So that starvation doesn’t finish them off, so that they remain too busy to think of suicide as a way out of prison. In summer nights, they rebel against the world; they take strolls in the camp streets to move their limbs. And yet, after almost ten years in camps, none of them has managed to move her heart – for if she does, her heart would flee her chest and fly beyond the camp walls. It would fly out like a bird that just discovered the skies. None of them has managed to live, even though death was far, farther away than the houses from which they were displaced. Farther away from the smile that dropped from their bodies and decomposed on the ground.
There are women who were freed, by paying their way to freedom. A ransom was paid to ISIL traffickers or money given for others to kidnap them and bring them back to Iraq in some other way. They were being sold for one last time, we dare say. And the woman would be sold to… her own family, for thousands of dollars. That is, if she’s lucky enough or still alive in the Organizations’ prisons, camps, and houses, spread across many different countries.
Women in camps have become sculptures moved by nothing but the desire to protect their families. If the world were a hand that juices a human heart, women would be the beats that flee and keep it alive. And the women of the camp will not cease to live just because the world had decided to kill them.
And there are women who returned to Şingal, corpses roaming the city. Those are corpses that shop and meander the streets; corpses that visit their relatives in cemeteries; corpses that prepare food and eat little of it; corpses that marry and give birth to more corpses. Corpses that do not know to whom to pass on their death – to the army or the militias that fill the city. Corpses that watch pictures of the dead hung on every pole in the city and its villages, as if they were birds without nests that chose Şingal for one. Corpses everywhere, and corpses that welcomed women in.
“Welcome to Şingal. What took you so long? But better die late than never, right?”
Translated from Arabic by Yasmine Haj
Published in Assafir Al-Arabi on 13/03/2024
- Or Şingal. ↑
- Yazidis make up the majority of Sinjar’s population. ↑
- ISIL worked on brainwashing children, indoctrinating them with what they called the “Caliphate Teachings”, pushing them to carry out suicide missions. ↑
- The Women of the Hisbah is a religious police force founded by ISIL when it controlled vast areas of Iraq and Syria. It was behind the crimes and assassinations committed in Al-Hawl Camp, a refugee camp in Syria inhabited by ISIL families and people displaced from war zones. ↑
