Basma

This book is where I will start to tell my story. Through it, I've had wonderful experiences and learned a lot.

It's called Ferman 74, which documents the genocide of the Yazidi people by the so-called Islamic State, beginning with the attack on Kocho on August 3, 2014. It includes over 200 survivor interviews and analyses on various aspects of the tragedy. My contribution to this book was creating the Map of Shingal with the authors.

I worked on it during my second year of University with a group from Germany. I helped with the making of a map of Shingal. I gave them all the details about the villages, and where they are located. Here is a photo of the map I worked on.

Additionally, I participated in another project, "Religious Diversity in Erbil," which documents all religious communities in Erbil. These projects involved mostly the same group of people and allowed me to travel to Germany for the publication and completion of both works.

I went to so many places in Germany during those fifteen days. I went to Sans Souci Park, to Potsdam City, to Berlin, to the Brandenburger Tor, and to Hamburg. I visited some of my relatives there. I was re-united with my cousin who I had not seen for around seven years, and my aunt after nine years.

When I look at this book, I remember so many experiences...

Here is my university in Erbil. It all started from here, by working on that project. This is the yard and the entrance.

On the side of the bookshelf is my desk, where I learned so much. I met so many people just online, and I feel that I really know them. They helped me with my writing, and I was helping them too. So we were all working together.

It made me think about my house, and those days when I was working online.

I drew a tent from when we were in the camp. I was working in the tent as well, and I remember one day I was writing in the tent, but there was so much noise around me. Living in a tent is hard. Because of the noise, I couldn't focus on my writing and that used to upset me, and I end up closing my laptop and giving up.

I remember the days where I gave up on writing. I just couldn't focus.

Many people from the village were going towards the mountain, and we prepared ourselves to follow them.

But my brother, who was working in Sulaymaniyah at the time, called my father and told us not go via the mountain, instead we should continue straight to Kurdistan.

But we said no, all the people were going to the mountain. He said: "No, you will die if you go to the mountain. ISIS will come and they will kill all the people on the mountain. Just please come to Kurdistan".

One of my uncles and his family went via the mountain. My mother ran after him. She tried her best to stop him, but she couldn't reach him.

The road was crowded. No one was hearing anyone. People didn't know what was happening.

We fled via the border road, towards Kurdistan, via Rabia. I remember one of the roads was closed, and there were so many cars on the road. I remember there was a man from Khazuka, just north from of our village. He was a Muslim Arab, and he just opened the road for us and said: "Go!"

We stopped in Rabia. It was very crowded, and the cars were lined up one behind the other. There was no way to go forward, nor to go backwards. We were just stuck by the shopping centre outside Rabia, and the space was also narrow, something like five cars in a row were stopped. Wherever I looked back, I saw cars one behind the other, and the same was to the front of our car.

Then the gunfire started.

Bombs were coming from above us, and there was a man who was in the car in front, he told my mother to make the children sit down and to cover them. The gunfire continued for around half an hour, maybe more than that. We were stuck in that place. Noone knew what was happening.  

There were Peshmerga soldiers and PPK soldiers. I thought they were coming from between the cars and on the sides. But they were just running, from all sides, and gunfire above us.

People were screaming.

I saw military cars, and soldiers, and behind one of the cars I saw a solider who had been shot and was bleeding, his head was hanging down out of the car onto the street, and someone was holding him. I think he was killed.

I looked elsewhere and there was another one also shot. These scenes are still stuck in my mind. The soldiers were also fleeing, they were running.  They didn't fight, they were just going in front of us.

And then they opened the road, and we started to go forward. We didn’t know where we are going.

We just starting moving forward in the direction of Kurdistan and towards Duhok City.

From home to Kurdistan, my uncle was walking alongside the car and sometimes just following the car, there was no room for him in the car. My uncle's wife felt dizzy, she was vomiting all the time the whole way.

By this stage nobody had water or food, and we all were really thirsty.

This journey should normally take around two hours, but I remember we fled the house at around 10am and we arrived in Duhok City at 9pm.

And I remember there was a car that was driving along with us. They had a pregnant woman with them and they were pleading for any water. We had only one bottle of water, but we gave it to them.  

We arrived to the border of Kurdistan with empty bottles. We had no water, so when we saw the river, we just started running. 

People just got out of the car, and ran to the river to drink water.

Our car stopped just after we crossed the border, there was a village there called Derabun.

Along the way we have seen so many cars which broke down, some of them had no oil to continue, and noone was stopping for anyone, they just wanted to save their own lives. Some people were continuing on foot.

But there was one family they helped us in that village. They gave us water. And a bottle of oil to put in the car, and then we continued our way to go to Duhok.

On the road our car stopped again. We asked a man if there are any near places to get oil for the car, and he said, just go on a bit further, there is a village. We asked one of the children to run and check if there was any oil at this place but there was none. Then a car passing by, it was a Kurdish man, he gave us oil from his car, and we continue with that oil to Duhok City.

We arrived in Duhok at 9pm and my uncle was there. He told us that two families from our village’s were still stuck at the border in Rabia. They had to run from their cars. There was fire, there was war.

We couldn't understand what was happening around us.

In Duhok, I remember there was a young girl, she was around ten years old, she had come with people in their cars but she couldn't find her family. She was crying. She stayed with us for around three days until we found her family.

We stayed on the streets of Duhok for two nights, without shelter.

I remember a woman from Duhok who we sat in front of her house, said: "I have no space in my home to bring you in". She gave us a bottle of water and 2 glasses.

I have kept those two glasses to this day.

Some of our family went to Lalish as they heard that people were providing shelter there, and eventually after ten days, the Kurdistan region opened up schools to people for shelter. But the situation was unstable in Kurdistan too. Everyone was worried that ISIS will make it here too.

People were also fleeing from Sheikhan and from Sharya.

We thought, if Kurdistan will also end up invaded, what will we do?

We saw a few families from Sharya who told us they were going to Türkiye.

From all my relatives, we were the only family with passports. So we decided to go to Türkiye too.

I remember we stayed one night on the border between Türkiye and Zakho.

We arrived at 5pm and the border was closed. We remained there till 4am. It was very crowded. We stayed that night on the street.

After that they opened the border and people were just running. We entered Türkiye.

The driver who said will take us to a place inside Türkiye had our passports and at the border he had a fight with the border control officers. They threw our passports.

I remember my mother begging them to stop fighting as we just wanted to escape with our lives. 

They stopped the fighting and checked our passports, and then we left. it was 6am.

We entered the village of Silopi which is the first village after the border crossing into Türkiye. We spent a day and night on the street. We were around ten families.  

My sister and I were with my aunt’s family, my parents arrived two hours later. I don’t know what happened and why we weren’t with them. During all those four days we only had some water and biscuits, nothing else. I don’t think I slept for two days, hunger kept me awake. Then in Silopi, two men came and opened a small camp. First my mother was very reluctant to believe and trust them but we had no choice so we went with them.

There were around thirty small buildings with nothing in them. No water, nothing. Just a small shelter each. They opened them for us. 

Later on, a large number of Yazidi families joined us and these small shelter buildings were not enough and very crowded so they put up large tents for people. They also brought us food and water. 

We had no idea that we will be staying there for five months before returning back to Iraq.

In January 2015, we decided to return back to Iraq from the camp in Türkiye. My father said there is no future for us in Türkiye. We thought that we may have to find a way to go to Europe through Türkiye. There was a UN organisation there. They took all our papers and said they will help us reach Europe. Our papers are still with them, they said it may take eight years to get visas. So we decided to return to Kurdistan.

We went to Zakho, we stayed one day there, then we went to Misurike, a part of Simmel, near Duhok, with our relatives and stayed in a school.

We stayed there for around one week in the school building called Daliva school.

Every two families were sharing  one classroom, all the people in the school were sharing the same bathrooms. There was one cooker only for the entire people staying in the school to make their food.

Here children are playing basketball in the school yard. You can see the shape of the school behind.

This is my uncle's family in their room. My two uncles shared one classroom. Each room was shared by two families along with all their belongings.

After that they created camps for us. Camps started appearing all around Kurdistan in Khanke, in Sharya, and they were taking people's names to send them to camps.

We came to Sharya camp – to these tents.

The camp was made of tents and roads only. We were sharing bathrooms with around 50 tents, bathrooms were in caravans. At the beginning of each row of tents there was a small bathtub filled with water and that was the water we used for everything.