Maisaa

I remember on the 1^st of August 2014, the situation was incredibly tense, people were stock piling food in their homes. People thought they had to hide in their homes and there will be not enough food to go around.

No one thought they will have to flee their homes.

We were getting ready for our Eid (Eid Chele Haveny/ the summer Eid) which was on the 2^nd of August but it wasn’t the same, there was an eerie feeling around despite the rituals and preparations for Eid.

Nevertheless, on the morning of the 2^nd of August 2014, my aunts and their families and all of my family gathered at my maternal grandfather’s house which was a few minutes’ walk away from our house. A few of us were cooking on the barbeque and others were playing cards.

My maternal grandfather’s house got overcrowded so my sister and I and one of aunts, decided to go to my other aunt’s house, nearby, we were also joined by three of my cousins. So, we were six girls in my aunt’s house. After we finished our lunch, my cousin who is similar age to me, went to my house to pick up a cake that I had baked with my mother.

It was about 6pm, my house is very close to the main road that takes you into Khanasor. There is one road that separate us from the main road and our house. We were on the roof, and we heard, I think, the Kurdish police entering the village.

My cousin started crying and panicking, she wanted to get back to my maternal grandfather’s house to be with her family. I tried to calm her down, shortly after, we ran back to my maternal grandfather’s house.

When we got there, the news had reach them and each family was grabbing their children to get out. The men who were on the lookout called to say that the military forces were withdrawing from their positions. No one knew what was happening exactly.

Everyone got scared and didn’t know what to do; however, no one expected that we would be forcibly displaced or a genocide would be committed. We thought we will take refuge in our homes and once the night passes, we will return back to normal life in the morning.

It was summer so we decided to sleep on the roof as this is what people do in the summer due to the heat, we started hearing bullets being fired repeatedly but we couldn’t recognise in which direction that was. I remember praying for an end to this nightmare, I was hoping that I would wake up in the morning to a normal life.

At 7am in the morning of the 3^rd of August, I woke up hearing women baking bread (Iraqi bread) in the clay oven (tandoor) outside in the street, I heard someone selling vegetables and heard a car horn too. It sounded like a normal day. I sat at the top of stairs and I was looking down checking what was happening in the street.

We didn’t have a car. When we needed to go somewhere far, we used to hire a car. My mother said, people are leaving, those who have cars have already started leaving the village. By 9am, we were still at the house. My father called someone to come and pick us up and take us wherever people were going.

People that my father was speaking to had already left and they said they were either heading to the mountain or Kurdistan (Iraq).

It was already extremely hot by 10am, and the village looked abandoned, like a ghost town.

Our house was close to the edge of the village, I looked around and there was no one left in the streets apart from one family which looked like they were waiting for someone. I saw sheep without their shepherd. Houses were open and people just left in a hurry.

We walked heading towards the mountain. My uncle called us saying we shoukld head towards the small chicken farm that my aunt had outside of Khanasor, He asked us to wait for him there so that he return back to pick us up.

So, we changed our direction towards the chicken farm. The weather was very hot and we were only carrying the bottles of water that we had on us when we set off.

We walked for about an hour and a half before being able to see the house that we were heading towards. A car with one person speaking Arabic intercepted us and started asking us suspicious questions and then offered to drive us to where we wanted to go.

My mother was very suspicious of him so we were trying to tell him no, and told him that the place we are heading is close by and we don’t require his assistance. He insisted despite the attempts by my mother and father trying to convince him otherwise.

In the end my maternal grandfather, my young uncle and my three-years-old cousin went with him in the car.  My two of uncles’ wives were with us and one of them had a one-year-old boy, and the other had two children, 9-month-old boy and a three-year-old girl. We were all petrified for their lives. But thankfully when we got to the house, we saw them all safe and the driver had left them.

We stayed in the house waiting for my uncle to pick us up in his car. Meanwhile, I received a phone call from a friend of mine who told me that we need to leave. The situation is very dangerous and they are hearing of terrible atrocities being committed not that far from where we were. She suggested that we try to reach the mountain. I felt scared. I was thinking of that stranger who dropped off my grandfather and other relatives, and was wondering what will happen if we keep waiting.

All of a sudden, we heard a car approaching. My father checked and confirmed that they are Daesh members. They were wearing black clothes and had long beards and were carrying weapons.

My mother told us not to scream or make a noise. I felt frozen with fear, a paralysis of the thought of how will we escape this situation. I remained very calm, while my younger sister who was 11 at the time and my uncle’s wife, were crying. My uncle’s wife kept on repeating what they will do to us, catch us, kill us, do other obscene things to us.

So my father, older brother, and my uncle decided they will go out to distract them away from entering the house.

The house had a small storeroom near the kitchen, which some of us hid in, that room had a small window and we watched what was happening. My uncle’s wife covered the mouth of her boy to stop him from making any noise. I could just about hear what my father, uncle and brother were saying to Daesh militants outside.

They got into an argument with my father on the reasons behind our escape. they told him, Daesh has come to protect you so why are you leaving your villages? They also said they won’t harm us and that the situation is fine right now and we should return home. They requested from my father to get in the car with them. they could tell that there was a family in the house.

We suspected that the man who gave my grandfather and a lift earlier is one of them or has told them about our location. Speaking in Arabic Iraqi dialect, they even asked my father if there is any family in the house, any girls or children. My father told him, this is also one of our homes, we will remain here for a while and then get back to our homes. My father even had to lie and told him that we know they are here to protect us, just so that he doesn’t agitate them.

It wasn’t until they received a phone call from other Daesh members asking them to urgently go to another place, that we were spared but they said that we either go back to the village or remain in the house for them to get back to us.

My father, brother and uncle returned to the house and we all thought there is no way we should wait for anyone.

We had to leave right away.

We took some khubez (Iraqi bread) and water and left the house heading towards the mountain. It was about 4pm. I remember we walked and walked for a long time until it was dark and we couldn’t see in front of us anymore. We had children and elderly grandparents with us so we weren’t walking fast and we didn’t reach the mountain yet by night time and we didn’t want to use any light to guide us because we were worried that Daesh will be able to locate it easily if we do.

We saw a house in the bottom of the mountain, it belonged to a family we knew. It was a mud house with 3 bedrooms and a courtyard. We didn’t enter the house; we went straight to the flat roof top taking with us a few blankets.

I remember my grandfather’s words as he was contemplating what will happen to us if we get caught, he said: They will probably ask us to renounce our religion and convert to Islam, or kill us, but I am worried about the fate of our women and girls.

When he said this, I remember thinking what would they do with us women and girls? Why wouldn’t they kill us too if we reject converting to Islam. I had no idea what was happening.

As we were on the roof top, we received a message from my other uncle, and aunt who had made it to Kurdistan and my sister’s friend who told us about relatives and other Yazidi women and girls who were kidnapped by Daesh. They told us we need to stay safe in the house for tonight only and then head to the mountain. They warned us from leaving the house or going to Kurdistan because they heard of many who were captured on that route.

The night was very dark, there were no houses nearby, we didn’t put our head above the parapet to see what’s going on if anything and we didn’t use any light.

I remember there was a white flag on the house. This used to mean that the family inside the house is surrendering to Daesh so my mother went and grabbed that flag off the side of the roof. We saw from a distance nearby my aunt’s chicken farm that we left, a Daesh militant car steeling from the empty houses and then torching the houses down.

Around midnight, we heard ululation and Daesh cars entering the village, ululation was a sign of victory, were Daesh members entered houses and took anything and everything they can. Lots of cars were revving and gun shots fired in the air. They were breaking the shop fronts, steeling what they want and destroying what they don’t like, alcohol for example.

We felt petrified thinking they might come near us next. But they didn’t, probably they didn’t think anyone was there.

About 4am we left the house quietly and started walking towards the mountain. We arrived at 12 noon where we saw more Yazidi families sheltering. We weren’t carrying any food with us, we only had the small bottles of water and by the night we ran out of water too. We had no idea how long we would remain in the mountain, when should we leave or what should we do. We all lived a struggle with no choices to make or decisions to take.

On Sinjar Mountain there was a big pot filled with water where people would go to fill their bottles but even that ran out after the first day in the mountain. I felt even my father, who is always optimistic and we usually would find strength in him, looked helpless. I saw it in his eyes. I heard him blaming himself for not being able to protect us, his children and family. It was a misery. We all tried to be strong for each other.

My mother cooked the dry lentils that my sister managed to grab from our house before we left. She collected dry sticks and lit a fire and borrowed a pot from another Yazidi family in the mountain and cooked us soup.

We each had only a small portion of soup for the whole of that day. Looking at people around me, I felt thousands of stories of pain and suffering written all over their faces and in their eyes.

The next day, everyone ran out of water and food. There was a well deep inside the mountain which was about two hours walk both ways from where we were. My mother and aunt went to get us some and came back with dirty water because of how many people have tried to use the well.

It looked awful and I felt that even my mother didn’t want us to drink it, so she then found tea leaves (chai) and used the same pot to make us chai which we all drank. On the mountain there were not that many trees, there were large boulders and people were taking shade near those boulders.

People were losing their temper quickly not only from the heat but also from the desperation. We stayed there for four nights and people were pleading with women and girls to get into the depth of the mountain because from the top they can see Daesh advancing.

Men were asking whoever can fight or had a weapon to get to the front of the mountain to fight Daesh and to protect others especially at night.

The mountain protected us, we knew the mountain well but they didn’t know it as well as we do. We slept on the bare ground. There were lots of children with and around us who had no idea what was going on, you see them lost. I feel that we were all bodies without souls. People started running out of their phone charge, we stopped being able to tell the time and day or what is happening elsewhere around us.

On the last day on the mountain, my mother and aunt had gone on their way to pick up water for us from that well, and we started hearing gun fire. We didn’t know what it was, we thought Daesh had reached the mountain, but it turned out that the route through to Syria is now open and we could all walk across the border. They were trying to alert all the people in the mountain by firing gun shots.

People in their thousands started walking towards the border. I had no idea how many or there were as many, the mountain is huge and there were large swathes of people emerging from the mountain and walking towards the border. A chilling scene of mass displacement. Everyone was walking.

There were very few cars. My uncle was standing next to a tractor and there were discussions on who gets in with him. Loads of people were scrambling to get a ride on the tractor. My younger sisters got on board. Three of us wanted to walk but my mother said she won’t leave us behind and we have to stick together.

So we had to get on the tractor. There were more than 60 people on board. I remember my legs felt numb as I stood all the way from the mountain till we reached the border with Syria. Loads of other young men and women standing. My younger sister was so scared, and hungry and from the heat too she started gagging and throwing up.

The way to the border was on dusty unpaved land, we were all consumed and covered by all the dust from the cars in front of us. we had only one bottle of water left. I remember we all shared that bottle of water drinking a little like a bottle cap worth.

My uncle’s wife was carrying her baby and he was covered in dust. I couldn’t see her face well but I saw her tears falling on her son as she repeatedly was saying that he has died. She passed him on to my mother sobbing saying she doesn’t know what to do. My mother checked and found that he was still just about breathing so she asked the woman in front of her for a little water and she used a cloth to wipe his mouth and his nose to clear his airways.

There were huge pot holes on the road, and the tractor couldn’t pass over with all of our weight so we had to hop off and then hop on once the tractor is over the pot hole. I remember every time I hopped off, I as looking around me at the number of people walking, others near their cars that run out of petrol, and others who had stopped not knowing where they are heading.

I spotted among the people my history teacher carrying one of his sons and looking exhausted and I started crying thinking back to how I usually see him, full of life and in tidy clothes, he had taught us the difficult history of the country and now I feel we are living it.