The Last Girl by Nadia Murad: Book Note
A couple of weeks ago (July 2021) I read The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My
Fight against the Islamic State
(New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017).
Nadia Murad
Nadia Murad is a Yazidi, a member of a small religious
group of about one million members in Northwest Iraq, bordering on what is now
(unofficially) Kurdistan. As readers might
remember, the world because aware of this minority religious group in 2014,
when ISIS conquered this region of Iraq. ISIS did not consider the Yazidi to be
“People of the Book “(Jews and Christians) rather, it considered the Yazidi to
be heretics, whom it was free to murder and enslave. Thus, before the world had a chance to even
know who the Yazidi were, ISIS began a genocide, killing all military-age men
and boys and kidnapping marriageable girls and women, along with small children
whom it could indoctrinate into it fundamentalist Islamist belief system. ISIS
claimed that because they were heretics, Yazidi women could be used as sex
slaves
Nadia grew up in a very large extended family in a
village called Kocho. Yazidi speak Kurdish, and practice a religion which sees
to combine elements of pre-Abrahamic Zoroastrianism with elements of Abrahamic
religions, Nearby there were other villages inhabited by Sunni Muslims or by Christians.
Despite this religious segregation of residential arrangements, everyone interacted
at periodic markets, and her family’s doctor was a Sunni. Nadia’s father had
abandoned her mother and his eleven children with her, to live with his younger
second wife and their four children. Nadia had some education and worked hard
on the family farm as well, Despite this relatively hard life, she describes
her family and village with much love and nostalgia.
At 19, Nadia was one of the young women ISIS
kidnapped. She was taken to Mosul where she was sold in a sex slave market. Her
buyer was a high-status ISIS commanded who took her to a notary where she was
forced to convert to Islam. This
apparently gave him license to rape her. When she tried to escape his clutches,
he ordered six of his guards to rape her as well, then sold her to someone
else. Eventually, after about three months, she managed to escape when her most
recent buyer left the door to his house open. She threw herself on the mercy of
complete strangers, a Sunni Muslim family, who at great risk to themselves
decided to help her escape by sending one of their adult sons to escort her to
Kurdistan, pretending she was his wife. Her oldest brother, who was already in
Kurdistan, helped arrange her escape using a network of Yazidi activists and
paid smugglers.
Unfortunately, factionalism among the Kurds resulted
in information about Nadia and her rescuer – pseudonymously named Nasser- being
circulated quite widely, endangering him. At the time of writing her book,
Nadia still did not know if his family had been found out and punished for
assisting her.
ISIS knew that the Yazidis prized the virginity of
unmarried girls and women, thus they especially enjoyed defiling these virgins.
To their credit, according to Murad, the surviving Yazidi elders got together
and decided that girls and women who escaped ISIS would be welcomed back into
the Yazidi community, as they obviously had neither converted to Islam nor
engaged in sexual activities of their own free will. However, it seems
that despite this, a fairly large percentage of former sex slaves felt rejected
by their communities when they returned. https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-018-1140
As I write this book note, the Taliban have
conquered all of Afghanistan. There are now reports that they have begun to
kidnap young girls to become their “wives”: that is, their sex slaves. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9891953/A-mothers-eyes-gouged-young-girls-kidnapped-sex-slaves-SHUKRIA-BARAKZAI.html
Nadia Murad herself won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018, and is now the UN Goodwill
Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors
of Human Trafficking.
Meantime, as of 2018 Nadia’s rescuer, whose real
name is Jabar, was living in poverty as a refugee in Germany, separated from
his wife and two children still in Iraq. ISIS had come knocking on his door the
day after he returned from taking Nadia to Kurdistan. He escaped by jumping out
a window and joined the long trek of Middle Eastern refugees seeking sanctuary
in Europe. His family managed to convince ISIS that he had acted alone. But
despite his heroism, Jabar was just one of many refugees in Germany. https://time.com/longform/nadia-murad-isis-refugee-omar-jabar/
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