It was unusually cool and quiet, aside from the hum of the trucks and discussions about tying down the last box, bit, pot, or pan atop piles of pillows, baskets, and blankets ready to flap in the wind as the trucks went west. The little ones, scrubbed down and spruced up, were lively and ready, bunched together in the backseats with breakfast in hand.
Some of them hadn’t seen Mosul since August 2014 when they received a tipoff that ISIS was en route. They'd fled east and made it out two hours shy of ISIS’ arrival.
They’re Shabak Kurds of the Shiite faith. They had no place to go, no friends to fall back on, and certainly no confidence in what lie ahead.
So, by September, Mayor Krmanj of Soran generously gave them tents and land. For two years, eight months, and 15 days or so, they lived in Soran. But just after 5am this morning, they headed back to Mosul.
To leave is to finally go home and rightfully retrieve that which has been stolen. But it is also to realize utterly all that will never be taken back; it is to say goodbye yet again and start anew. Everyone knew that this morning—you could feel it in your gut and see it in their eyes. It seemed even the wind worried and hoped, worried and hoped.
So, most everyone stayed busy. But others? Well, they wept.
Still, it was right and good and, actually, beautiful. And by now, they're finally home . . . where they ought to be.
21 June 2017
Arabs and Kurds are both tribal people. They are both primarily Sunni Muslim, family-centric cultures that often intermarry. Compared to the West, their customs are similar. The cities and towns they occupy are virtually indistinguishable. Even their cuisines are interchangeable.
These commonalities predict a harmonious relationship, yet the two remain endlessly dysfunctional.
Arabs, like these living in Soran Diana, fled to safety northward with the exodus out of Baghadad's 2014 violence. They now live as unwelcomed neighbors surrounded by Kurds and Chaldeans.
This Arab family from Baghdad often invited me and the four other ex-pats in town over for dinner that lasted past midnight. Sometimes they would lament their isolation and the pain of still-missing loved ones.
18 June 2016
She was swaddled and waiting with her grandmother. Her mother and aunt were inside sweeping and dusting their newly built cinder block home at Azadi refugee camp for Syrians in the Rwanduz region of Iraq.
It was move-in day. And they had a small truckload of essentials brought from the nearby shelter they had been living under since they fled Kobane, Syria in 2014.
15 September 2017
Nofa, a 24-year-old Yazidi girl survived not only ISIS’ imprisonment but life as a sex slave after ISIS’ 2014 invasion of her town, Kojo, in the Sinjar region of Iraq. She was kidnapped along with her mother, five sisters, and six brothers before they separated the men from the women. At the time this photograph was taken, Nofa had not heard from five of her brothers since that day.
ISIS hand-picked girls they deemed most beautiful to serve as slaves; Nofa was one of them.
She was taken to a house in Mosul by her “owner.”
“He beat me until I fainted,” she said. “I woke up with him raping me. I was kept as a slave, working for a family and being constantly raped. Every morning,” she lamented, “I told myself it was all a nightmare.”
8 August 2017
Shot for Grazia UK - After Unimaginable Trauma, a Thread of Hope
It is a difficult thing for us all to feel at home with people different from ourselves, and further unthinkable to bear hug them while sobbing. Perhaps it's one's kooky religious persuasion that you could do without, or one's take on fixin' eggs, or even fixin' the world and all her bloodshed. Maybe it's just one's pronunciation of the word "envelope" that makes you come unglued.
But these two gentlemen, one a Muslim from Mosul and the other a Yazidi from Shingal, wrecked my notion of what is possible when it comes to two groups expected to hate one another.
You see, both men are family leaders; both men lived through the horrors of ISIS ransacking their homes and snatching loved ones out from under them. Yet surely it is because of such affliction that they carried one another, fought for one another, and stood together like brothers while living side-by-side for nearly two years at Kawlokan refugee village in Northern Iraq.
This is dawn the morning Abu Raeed's family left to finally return to their recently liberated city of Mosul from control of the Islamic State. Iraqi Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, officially announced the city's liberation on 10 July 2017, although heavy fighting and resistance persisted until 21 July.
Sahdo Alias, the Yazidi man with the red scarf, quietly waited and watched as Raeed's family packed up until only the two of them remained.
And this? This is their goodbye—for now.
Indeed, there is hope for their land. And it is good.
21 May 2017
Wreya’s little sister whisked me upstairs to her closet after the Maghrib sunset prayer. She carefully sorted out a suitable dress color for my complexion and pinned my hair up at her vanity into a tall bun beneath a hijab. It felt more like childhood dress-up to me, but her sisters down the hall beamed wide-eyed when I walked out of the bedroom.
They said I looked better than I ever had before. I laughed. I felt sillier than ever had before.
Wreya then drove me to Isha prayer after dark so I could see it with my own eyes.
“I’m not Daesh (ISIS)!” the imam said with arms wide and proud at the door of the mosque.
I grinned. “Oh, I know,” I said, making my way through the entry to a massive assortment of shoes. I could feel as many eyes on me as there were shoes long before I looked up from adding mine to the pile. I walked over to watch the men wash their feet in the neon light. I may have been covered head to toe like the gals in Soran, but I was still a gal—and this was a fella’s place and a fella’s-only prayer.
20 April 2016
Gawaré and her granddaughter in the doorway of their home at a refugee camp in the Rwanduz region of Kurdistan.
Indebted—that’s what I am. I sat with them and a few others from their family that day to record their story of fleeing ISIS in Sinjar. Perhaps it all sounds like humanitarian hogwash because everyone says this when they visit the places of the world where people have so little. But try your best to hear me now.
They said they were grateful.
And when I asked if they were mad at God for all that they had seen and all they had lost, they replied unanimously and without hesitation, “No? No?!”—as if my question were absurd.
They agreed that God has taken care of them; and that they are grateful.
So, I sat quietly. I looked at them looking at me, trying to give that some time to move from my head down to my heart.
9 April 2016
A Kurdish man stands behind his house that overlooks the Rawanduz Gorge on a hot summer day. New Zealand-born civil engineer, A.M. Hamilton, notable for engineering the strategic British-built Hamilton Road through Iraqi Kurdistan in the late 1930s, called the gorge the finest in Asia.
Hamilton Road winds across Iraqi Kurdistan, from Erbil, through Rawanduz, and up to the Iranian border near modern-day Piranshahr.
In his 1937 book, Road Through Kurdistan, Hamilton describes his hope that the road would unite the diverse peoples of the region, including Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Armenians and Turks, who he employed in its construction. But the road has been fought over many times.
19 July 2016
A boy from Mosul sits in the back of English class at his school built in Soran City for children displaced in the region by war at home. Together the children recite the English names of fruits in vegetables drawn on the whiteboard by their teacher.
16 May 2016
Four Kurdish men sit atop a car engine just before dusk on a Friday evening in the Sorani Region. 125,000 people thereabout populate the land, of which 65% of them are refugees who’ve come back to Iraq over the past decade. Diana is the capital, meaning “Christian” in Kurdish—as it was historically a small village of Chaldeans long before the refugees came. To this day the Chaldeans still inhabit an area of the city and continue to live in peace with their Muslim neighbors.
Those that fled Iraq to Iran decades ago during Saddam's regime later returned and settled in and around the district of Soran, as their home villages were unlivable piles of rubble still threatened by the PKK and bombs from the Turks.
Three years ago, the Yazidi people of Sinjar in Nineveh were added to the montage of folks in the district. Following ISIS’ Yazidi massacre in August of 2014, they too found safe harbor in Soran. And though Soran is lacking in funds from the Iraqi government to support even themselves, they are doing anything and everything to accommodate the influx of people—knowing full well more are expected to arrive in the coming months and years. Unarguably, Soran's hospitality towards the newcomers can be attributed almost entirely to having been alienated once themselves.
Could it be that suffering can deepen us as people, perhaps soften us to empathize with others in such a way that can light the darkest valley—that what is meant for evil, what is meant to destroy, what is meant to kill can somehow become a thing for good?
16 June 2017
Her chador was longer than she was tall. She came and sat close to me after this in silence while we listened to the imam teach over the intercom. He was upstairs with the men. It was Friday prayer, and I loved the light through those windows, and how soft and white and clean the fabric wrapped around her was.
25 May 2017
An abandoned soccer stadium serves as the playground between two refugee camps in Rwanuz, Iraqi Kurdistan. Five Yazidi girls with their English-speaking Kurdish teacher delight in the English words “I Love You” scratched large on the sidewall of the bleachers.
2 May 2016
It was eight days before Iraqi Kurdistan's Monday 25th vote to negotiate independence from Iraq. These pro-referendum Kurds gathered at Soran University’s soccer stadium to celebrate the coming vote along with a visit from the then President of Kurdistan, Masoud Barzani. And although a resounding "yes" was forecasted then, no one knew exactly what Tuesday and the months thereafter held for the country and her neighbors.
The international community, including the U.S., feared Kurdistan would not only hurl herself in the throes of civil war but quicken the "countermeasures" Turkey and Iran said they were prepared to take. We all hoped for a mere shortage of gasoline at worst, milk at best. That would have made for an unfortunate bowl of morning cornflakes, but at least no one would be running for their lives (again). . .
Turns out, Abadi, the Former Iraqi Prime Minister, saw control of the Kurdish airports as a punitive measure following the vote for independence. So, the last international flight to leave the Erbil and Sulaimani airports until mid-March 2018 was that Friday the 29th.
I packed my bags on the 27th, and flew out on the 28th.
19 September 2017
Hundreds gather in Soran City for the opening of a memorial dedicated to the Peshmerga military who have died so that others don’t have to. There were photographs of men and women, young and old, pinned to nearly every inch of that four-corner room—a sobering indication that the battle in Mosul, and in the region, continues to rage day after day.
18 June 2017
A Yazidi family pose together for a photograph at the temple of Lalish—a miracle, indeed. Less than two years prior they fled for their lives home in Sinjar and found refuge in Northern Iraq.
The Yazidis are a small Iraqi ethnic minority whose ancient faith is a largely misunderstood blend of Assyrian and Mesopotamian pre-Islamic traditions, Christianity, and Islam. For centuries they have been a target of hatred for their reputation as ‘devil worshipers.’
In 2014 ISIS raided the Sinjar region, abducting 7,000 women and girls as sex slaves and massacring 5,000 civilians who refused to convert, which led to the expulsion of nearly 500,000 Yazidis from their ancestral land. Thousands were entrapped on nearby Mt. Sinjar, the highest peak is considered to be the final resting place of Noah’s Ark.
Lalish is the holy heartland of the Yazidi people, tucked in the valleys of the Nineveh Province of Iraqi Kurdistan. It is a place all Yazidis are expected to pilgrimage to during their lifetime. Barefoot, they kiss the doorframes, walls, and grounds of the shrine.
16 May 2016