Jamila

Our rights

My name is Jamila, I am from Snuny. I am biologist with a degree in Biology from the University of Mosul.I have worked with NGO's and now I am starting a new job in Duhok. I want to do a masters too.

I saw it in Mosul

In 2014 I was a student, at the University of Mosul, I was at the end of my second year. I was doing my final exams in the lead up to the 3rd of August.

I was living with my fellow students, on campus, who all came from different religious backgrounds and from different governorates, from all over Iraq.

We were all living together in peace.

For three days in July 2014, there were clashes between ISIS and the Iraqi government, the Iraqi police. We were unable to go out, and we couldn’t return to Shingal because the head of the university didn't give us permission to leave. He told us that outside of the university campus is a warzone.

Many civilians, the Iraqi police, and soldiers were killed, unfortunately. Then after three days ISIS took control of the Right Coast (Western side of the Tigris river), and they started expanding towards the area we were living in, on the Left Coast (Eastern side) of the city.

We contacted our families, and then we contacted our (late) Baba Sheikh. We told them that we want to leave Mosul, and to come to the safe area because we cannot sleep, eat or do anything with all the fighting going on.

Our Baba Sheikh contacted the person who was responsible at the University, and in the end they gave us permission to leave and sent us home by bus.

We were 50 or 52 Yazidi girls and there were a thousand other girls from the other governorates. When we left the campus, the other girls also contacted their families and they also left.

We did not complete our exams that month, everything was suspended. I completed my university degree in Duhok, as a guest student, but my certificate is from Mosul.

We escaped via Tel Kayf, which is a village about twenty minutes from the city.

On the way we saw how people were running from their houses. They were mostly Kurdish people, but there were also Christians, and Shia'a too. They escaped from their houses. They brought some stuff that they could carry, like documents, water, some fruit, and others were holding their children.

They just escaped and ran. It was a frightening thing to see.

In Tel Kayf there were religious Yazidi men there who were waiting for us.

We went with them to Ba’ashiqa. We stayed there for a day, then our families came to pick us up, and we returned back to Shingal.

I came back to our house in Snuny.

My family lived between three places, we had our home in Snuny, our home on the mountain, and a farm just outside Snuny.

I grew up on the mountain, in a village called Waree Khudree.

Our old house collapsed long time ago but we built a new one next to it.

We had our animals there. I like animals very much. This donkey was always with me and my sister.

The three children playing ball in the yard are my sister, me and my brother.

There is also this clay oven, my mother was baking bread here in this tandoor.

We go up to the mountain to collect figs. That is our source of income in the summer and then in the winter season we return back to Snuny.

This house is like our second home.

Now our relatives are living there.

We also have our farm where we plant our olive trees and cultivate vegetables and breed animals. My father made this pen for our goats. He also really loves animals.

This was my home before 2014.

I have many brothers and sisters, one of my sisters is two years older than me and I have a brother slightly older than her while all the others are much older.

Reliving trauma

On the 3^rd August,

I was sleeping, along with the rest of my family and I heard my brother talking on the phone with our relatives from the south of the mountain. They said that ISIS was attacking their area, and that they were escaping and coming to us, to our home.

I when I heard that call, I was already thinking, how can we escape from ISIS again, because what I saw in Mosul when there was a big army, and the Iraqi police who were struggling to control a small city, made me think, how can we escape now? How can we survive this one?!

We took with us only our documents and some food and water.

We had a small car, a little pickup truck and it can only hold two people in the front, and also we had a small tractor.

We have a big family, and my two uncles didn’t have a car, so they came with us, and we escaped all together in this little pickup and the tractor.

The thing that we couldn’t bring was our cattle and our goats.

We also had a small horse and we had to leave them all. We opened up their pens and we gave them a lot of food and water. We were hoping that we can come back.

I could see that it would be impossible for them to survive this. I had seen the horror in the faces of the people who ran out of their houses in Mosul. It was frightening.

We escaped from Snuny to Rabia and from Rabia to the Kurdistan area and on to Sharya.

Many people were kidnapped and many of them were killed or sold as hostages. It was genocide against an entire community.

Everyone from the villages, were all leaving together. There were a lot of cars all at once on the road.

When we got to Rabia there was a clash between the Iraqi army, I think and also there was a checkpoint from Peshmerga there too.

The Peshmerga also had come to the Sinjar area to protect the area, they were also leaving their checkpoint. They were leaving in their cars.

So when we got to Rabia District, there was this clash with ISIS, I don’t know if it was the checkpoint of Peshmerga or the Iraqi army, but they were fighting and we were really scared.

We came to Sharya. It’s a Yazidi area, and we stayed there for a day in a house. But then the people from Sharya said that ISIS is advancing towards Sharya.

The next day we left from Sharya to Zakho. We were thinking that because Zakho is on the border with Türkiye, if ISIS manage to reach Zakho, we could go to Türkiye.

The people from Zakho helped us, and supported the families by giving shelter and by giving stuff like clothing, food and water. We stayed there in a school for about a month.

I stayed with my family, with my older brother and with my father and stepmother. But some of my family, like my uncle and their families, went to Turkey. They stayed for about five months, a few of them went abroad to Germany and Sweden, and a few to Belgium too. Others spent some time in Turkey but then returned to Sharya.

My Uncle's family on route to Turkey

My Uncle's family on route to Turkey

Sharnakh Camp in Turkey where my uncle's and my brother's family lived

Sharnakh Camp in Turkey where my uncle's and my brother's family lived

We stayed in Sharya until 2017, and during this time I contiued my studies at Duhok University as a guest student.

We were living in an incomplete abandoned building, pretty much open to the elements. In the winter we suffered from the cold and in the summer we suffered from the heat, also the electricity situation was not good.

We made some improvements to the building by adding a few doors and shutters. But even then, we were a big family and we all lived together in the same house, sometimes my uncle's family lived with us too.

You cannot sleep well in these circumstances, and even the kids couldn't have their naps. They didn't live like other kids.

My nephew and cousins found work on the farms in Sharya.

Then, two or three years later, we returned back to our home in Snuny. My father and my older brother's family returned back first in 2016, and my other brothers and their families stayed in Sharya till 2017 and then they went back too.

When we came to Snuny there was nothing. Our home was destroyed, completely destroyed.

There is a building shell, but there were no doors nor windows, nor furniture, nothing.

We lived on our farmland, and went back to growing crops.

ISIS had destroyed so much, not only buildings, but also our heritage. There was this holy tree in Rambosi village which is to the south of the mountain; I visited Rambosi when I was working with an NGO in 2021 and I saw this tree, which had begun to re-grow, it was an Olive tree, and ISIS had been bombing there.

There was also a building there too but it was totally destroyed. It made me feel incredibly sad, because so many things had been destroyed, even the trees.

People, when they visit this place they take a piece of cloth and tie it to the tree for good wishes.

We began the process of rebuilding our old house and finally we completed it in 2023.

Fighting two fronts

I have something to share that is consuming all my energy, I am getting divorced.

I have a lot of appointments with the courts which started back in 2023 and still ongoing. Here, with our traditions in my area, if a woman like me asks for a divorce, people say it is like caritha (Jamila said it in Arabic, it means disaster). They say that women have no right to ask for divorce, only men can. When I decided I wanted a divorce, the first Mukhtar [the Mukhtar is like a solicitor within a social context but not necessarily qualified as a solicitor] was against me, and also most of the community joined him too, unfortunately, but I told them that it's my decision. It's my life!

I know I have rights and I see that men like the Mukhtars and others hurt women by taking difficult decisions against them and they think that the only role for the women should be in the kitchen, inside the house. But I told them that they cannot rule and decide for my life!

If you come one day to my area and ask where is Jamila, they all know who I am! They will tell you that she does not respect Mukhtars and the community! Even the Baba Sheikh asked to see me! I went and told him, that there is nothing that can change my mind, I will not give up.

I have made this drawing to express how I feel.

The figure with moustache represents the patriarchal society we live in watching over women.

The woman figure is watching the clock with reference to time passing.

While holding a sword with one hand, she attempts to cut the strings of control over her held by the hand with ropes, representing men's control.

And with the other hand she is holding a balance scales of justice for equality and freedom.

I feel that my experience in Mosul has made me more careful and more thoughtful and reflective about my life, than what happened to us in Sinjar. The decision to leave our home in Sinjar wasn’t easy but my previous experience from when I was in Mosul certainly made us think to act quickly. I find parallels with my divorce case now, I feel I am not only fighting for my rights in court but also fighting my way through a society that still doesn’t value the opinion of women the same way they do for men. I feel like as if I am fighting Daesh once more. Although I am one of them (part of the Yazidi community) and my family are from them too, the pressure that they have put me and my family under is colossal.

I feel my family are torn between the old and backwards traditional social values and caring for my health and wellbeing and supporting me. They tell me that they support me but we are under extreme pressure from social relations and the community that we are living with. My father was told that if your daughter doesn’t go to court and surrender her rights and withdraw the divorce case then we will shun you from the community. I told my parents, nobody can make me give up my rights and make me withdraw the divorce case even if I end up being shunned from home and the community. I told my family that they can say to those people we couldn’t control our daughter. I have been threatened with my life many times by my ex-husband and his relatives and I had been fired out from my job because of their threats to me and now they have threatened to kill my lawyer if he didn’t withdraw from my case in court. Now that he said he will continue to defend me, they began to fabricate lies about him trying to drag his reputation around in my community.

Mukhtars impose stringent rules that serve their power and control over communities. They invent patriarchal inhibiting rules that make divorce impossible for women and profitable for men. For example, if a woman gets the divorce she asked for, then she has to return all the gold and cost of wedding and everything the man had spent on her. On top of this, the Mukhtar in Snuny has forced a horrible restriction stating that if a woman is divorced in Snuny, she will not be allowed to marry another man in Snuny and if there are children then the woman will be forced tribally, not legally, to give up her children. None of these stringent unequal rules between men and women exist in our Yazidi faith.

I feel like I am not just standing up for my rights for myself only. I am witnessing a lot of oppressed women in my community and I feel that a lot of them are being treated the same way that Daesh treated women.

Some women in my community are living unhappy lives just so that they won’t upset the community they call themselves part of. If any of them ask for divorce then she’s always assumed as the one to blame, that she is the one who is having an affair behind her husband’s back, she is the one who is not respected anymore. Even if she sees her husband cheating on her, she will have to be patient. So instead of staying with the community with all that pressure on my family and myself, I decided to leave.

The community is not only oppressing women, they are oppressing those who don’t speak, who have no voice and scared to oppose the injustice that is happening to them. Even Baba Sheikh (highest religious figure in the Yazidi community) knows my story. I told him, I just want a divorce, I don’t want anything from my husband. Although I was prepared not to ask for anything in return for the divorce, they would still not solve my case and instead they asked me to pay a huge sum of money to my ex-husband just because I asked for divorce formally in court as I have already been divorced tribally but they insisted I pay in return for my ex-husband attendance in court to divorce me legally.

I thought my only way through this is the court. At the hearings in court, ten people, mostly men and there were two women (I don’t know most of them) came to testify against me. They even swore that they are telling the truth, all lies. I ended up telling the courts that I will have to put another case against those people who are faking stories about me. Obviously if the court finds them lying they will go to prison, so the pressure became even harder for my parents to bare, so I just decided to leave to protect my family from the amount of pressure that they were facing.

I just want to have a quiet life, with no problems. I have been involved in advocacy work and reconciliation efforts and I would like to support women and make their voices heard in our society. I also want to develop myself further, I want to work in my discipline (biology).

I want to live with other people in peace, for example, I have a lot of friends from different religions. They are open minded. I feel like people in Iraq need psychological rehabilitation to make them empathise with others regardless of their religion. I want to live a simple life and I want no one to intervene in my personal life.

I don’t mind where I end up. I just want to have control over my life and live it to the full. I want to be mentally happy wherever that might be. Even if it is outside Snuny. I can be in Erbil, Mosul, Duhok, I don’t mind, as long as I am mentally free.

My only regret is that I didn’t start this fight, four or five years ago. I feel I had no confidence then. You have to be strong to face your fears. And I only just managed to do that now. If you want to make something happen, you have to face your fears. Now I feel more ready than ever to face my problems and fears and I will develop myself further and I will work hard to make my dreams happen.

I am grateful to all those who believe in me and support me.