Ghazi

Before 2014, almost all the Shingali people had simple lives, we were living in different small villages and life to us was only this village. I don't know if it was only because I  was young at that time, or that’s just the way life was, but, we didn't go to different areas. We didn't visit anywhere else, not even inside Shingal. We were just living in the village, and that village was the whole world to us.

Khanasor was a place that I thought I would spend my whole life in. I never thought about going anywhere else. We had our house. It was a clay house (made of mud) with clay rooms, and we had one concrete room. That room was the same age as me - my mother told me that the day they finished putting the roof on, was the day I was born.

In the middle of our yard we had this pistachio tree.

We had many trees in our yard, my family cut some of them to make room to build rooms for us. I spent some of my childhood on this tree. I was always climbing it to get the pistachios.

We had animals and we looked after them. With my grandfather, we used to take the animals, the livestock, goats and sheep, out to the fields.

We would also harvest these plants, called Bivok.

We were very young, and sometimes we were going with my family to Rabia to work on the farms there.

This is me in Rabia with my sister Layla and my younger brothers Mahdi and Mugdad when we were little.

There's always something you miss about childhood, whether it was good or bad.

I spent a lot of time outside in nature with my grandfather, sometimes with my mother, too, in the fields to collect grass for our livestock, a lot of it. We used the donkeys to go there, and most of the people from the village were also doing the same, because almost all the people in the village had some livestock. We brought this grass, and my grandmother would roll it out and put it in the sun to dry, and then we used it in winter. 

Gas was rationed before 2003 (due to the UN sanctions) and then it wasn't immediately available after the US-led invasion, so the only way to make bread was to bring some wood and dry grass, and we would bake the bread in clay tandoors.

We had a communal tandoor that we used together with our neighbours in the village

Just a short walk from the village, you see farms, and beyond these farms, you see green fields. In spring, everywhere was green. Sometimes I yearn to the smell of nature - There was this plant called Hardel (Mustard Seed). It has these yellow flowers and the smell is amazing, and it was mixed with the smell of the field and the smell of nature in general. I have been searching for that same smell anywhere I go, but so far haven't not found it.

In 2013 I was in the fourth year of secondary school.

It was a really good year for me, studying-wise, for my education. In the years before that, I had some setbacks due to some personal issues and some bad friendships that affected my progress. But that year and the one after that, I started shining. I studied really hard.

I started to have some really good friends and we all studied really hard together. Then, the year after that we were supposed to enter the last year of secondary school, and we were really looking forward to it. And that was a very important stage of school, because based on the score that you get from that year, it determines whether you go to a good college/university or not.

Some days before the third of August 2014, with some friends we decided together to pay for a private tutor to teach us English– because we were really bad at it.

 On the third of August, we were supposed to start our first lesson. I remember I went that day to school as normal, most of my friends were also there and we didn't expect a life changing event to happen. We had heard already that ISIS had been attacking some areas, and we knew that was happening for a while now, but that the police and the army were fighting them back and not allowing them to enter Shingal, although they had already entered Mosul some months before that.

That day, many people started leaving the village.

We still didn't know what was happening,  So we went to have our first class with the English tutor and he said let's just wait. So we went back home. I think my mother was baking some bread, Iraqi bread. And she said that everyone was leaving, even our neighbours, and most of the people in our street, had already left.

Shortly after, we couldn't see any people on the streets. Almost all of them were gone, or preparing themselves to go.

We didn't have a car at that time, and actually we didn't know what to do. So we called my aunt, and they said we could go with them, as they had a car. A pickup. They also said that many people were leaving from their other side of the village.

So we went with them. We were six people in our family, and they was ten of them. I don't know how we managed to fit all of us in that pickup. Most of us were in the trunk.

When I eventually went back to the camp, I didn't know where my family were. I was just walking around, and I called them to show me the way, I said I'm lost!

I spent one year in 2014 and 2015 without going to school, because we didn't have any schools in the camp then. We had nothing.

In 2016, they opened a few schools, at first I went with some friends to join a school in Duhok, and after that they opened one in Sharya , which was easier to get to. Also the materials, the topics, the books were easier.

I rented a house there with eight friends. We were nine in one house in Sharya during that last year of secondary school and we got on really well, we were like, on fire! I don't know where we got that energy from! We were studying from five or six in the morning, until we fell asleep. Like sometimes I swear we were studying and falling asleep with our books in our hands.

All the teachers, who were Yazidi, were telling us that we are the future of this community. This community went through a genocide and we have a responsibility to keep the community alive, It was not purely a religious thing, in fact I'm not that religious, but we come from a community that has always been targeted before and we had some kind of energy that was incredible to make this community proud. Each one of us was studying eight to eleven hours a day.

And there was another house nearby of Yazidi girls from Shingal, and they were the same, like most of the people in that school. They were all Shingalis and all of them were studying incredibly hard.

In 2016 I had been going to the school for one month. Everything was going really well, and then my family called me, and said that everyone is going to Türkiye. They wanted to go to Greece using the illegal routes. My brother, was already in Germany. So my mother said if all of us go to Germany, then we will have a good life and we will be united with my brother.

I didn't want to go.

My mother said if I was not going to leave with them, they will also not go.

But they were just there in the camp and feeling very lost. None of us knew anything about our future.

So I agreed to go.

We went to Türkiye.

 I remember saying goodbye to my friends. It was the beginning of that time when people started leaving Iraq. Everyone was crying.

I couldn't cry. I didn't cry for many years.

We didn't have our passports that time, as it was really difficult to get them, so we went from Duhok to Türkiye through the mountains.

And it was unbelievable. Because it was winter, and the mountains were covered with snow. There were families, and children with us beside our family, My mother was walking with us, and she was doing well. But then, after sometime it became very difficult for her to keep going.

I cannot say exactly where we went or what route we took, because we just followed these smugglers who told us it will be two hours, and then one hour walking, but we walked for seventeen hours. For seventeen hours in these mountains.

And the paths we took were steep, narrow and slippery. It was really dangerous.

I don't know how we survived.

The children with us, who were from some other families, I carried a few of them as they were shivering.

At one moment one woman passed out. She couldn't walk anymore. So we put her on a blanket and we carried her with us. At all times there were four of us carrying her. Then my mother couldn't walk anymore. I was in between helping my mother and carrying the woman on the blanket, sometimes carrying children.

I had a bottle of water with me in my bag, but I had not drunk any, we were not thirsty as it was winter and snow everywhere, and when we arrived to a small house, and I checked the bottle, it was frozen. It was that cold!

We arrived in Türkiye and then we heard that some Yazidi families had died in the sea trying to cross from Türkiye to Greece.

So we got scared and decided to head back to Iraq. My family went back to Khanke Camp and I went back to Sharya.

I started studying again.

Everything was good.

I did my final exams, I went to the college I wanted, and I was living in the dormitories there.

We went back to Khanke. I finished college in 2020, in Duhok, and during those years I was also doing some work with Yazda as a translator, and working at a hotel, and until now my family are still in Khanke camp.

I moved to a rented apartment in Khanke nearby, because it was so loud for me in the tent. We had two tents and I shared one with my two brothers and they were staying up and playing dominoes but I was going to work.

I've been living here for almost one year and a half now.

Life in the camp is unreal, but people get used to places and things, no matter how difficult they are. People have been living in the camp for almost ten years now,  and they got used to it, they don't want to go back to Shingal now. In the beginning they didn't want to live in the camps. But now they don't want to go to Shingal.

I ask my mother sometimes to join me in my apartment, it's big for me and there is space for everyone. But she doesn't want to. She wants to stay in the camp close to the other Yazidi families, besides she doesn't like apartments at all. I think this is a thing with the Yazidi  community. They want to be close to each other, especially the older people. I will try to find a house for us since she doesn't want to leave the camp for an apartment.

People also made gardens in the camp, there was a charity (Lemon Tree Trust) which is an NGO that I have been working with for years now. They give seeds and small trees to people and also they organise annual competitions and give financial awards to people with the best gardens.

The tents themselves are made of tarpaulin. No one is allowed to make their tent into a permanent structure, but we Shingali people are creative, we make bricks from clay to turn our tents like a room and make them safer so that they don’t burn, and then cover it in a tarpaulin roof.

Yazidis are simple people. They don't harm anyone, but they are always being harmed by others, only for our identity and for the things that we believe in and for our religious beliefs. I think most of the Yazidis are not even that religious. They are not that strict with rules. Some people, they will tell you some crazy things about the Yazidis.

But it's not true. This is something I like about our religion. We go with the world, when there's something that generations before us did that now just seems bizarre, we think and say, this is not normal now, this is something we don't need to keep doing. We don't have any strict rules. No one forces us to do anything. I think the culture needs to keep existing because the beauty of the world is in the different things that we bring to life.

I feel a sense of belonging to this community, but not as a religious entity.

I like to be in our religious places. There is a spot in Lalesh that I go to, It's on top of a really high hill that when I sit there, I can see everything. It's a valley full of trees and it’s really peaceful there.

I used to think that Sinjar Mountain was a safe place for us; like a home that we would always survive in, but now I feel even the mountain is taken away from us with all the conflicts happening in Shingal and political parties trying to take charge it for its strategic location.

What happened to us (the genocide that was committed against us) will always be a black stain on the face of humanity.

We as the Yazidi community deserve to have a normal life like everyone else; a better life in which we are no longer targeted for our identity, religion, and beliefs. We deserve to have a home!