Michelle Moquin's "A day in the life of…"

Good morning!

Readers: What are your thoughts from Obama’s address last night? What’s on your mind?

This is what’s on mine. From the Wash Po.

I am a 14-year-old Yazidi girl given as a gift to an ISIS commander. Here’s how I escaped.

“Narin” was deeply scarred by her ordeal. (Hassan Haji for the Washington Post)

This is the story told to me by a 14-year-old Yazidi girl I’ll call “Narin,” currently staying in northern Iraqi Kurdistan. I am a Kurdish journalist with a journalism degree from the University of Missouri at Columbia who covers northern Iraq as a freelancer for several international news outlets. I heard about Narin’s tale through a Yazidi friend who knew her. Aside from translating from Kurdish and excerpting her story in collaboration with Washington Post editors, the only things I changed are all the names, at Narin’s request, to protect her and other victims from reprisal; many of her relatives are still in captivity.

*       *       *

As the sun rose over my dusty village on Aug. 3, relatives called with terrifying news: Jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) were coming for us. I’d expected just another day full of household tasks in Tel Uzer, a quiet spot on the western Nineveh plains of Iraq, where I lived with my family. Instead, we scrambled out of town on foot, taking only our clothes and some valuables.

After an hour of walking north, we stopped to drink from a well in the heart of the desert. Our plan was to take refuge on Mount Sinjar, along with thousands of other Yazidis like us who were fleeing there, because we had heard a lot of stories about Islamic State brutality and what they had done to non-Muslims. They’d been converting religious minorities or simply killing them. But suddenly several vehicles drew up and we found ourselves surrounded by militants wearing Islamic State uniforms. Several people screamed in horror; we were scared for our lives. I’ve never felt so helpless in my 14 years. They had blocked our path to safety, and there was nothing we could do.

The militants divided us by gender and age: One for young and capable men, another for girls and young women, and a third for older men and women. The jihadists stole cash and jewelry from this last group, and left them alone at the oasis. Then they placed the girls and women in trucks. As they drove us away, we heard gunshots. Later we learned that they were killing the young men, including my 19-year old brother, who had married just six months ago.

That afternoon, they brought us to an empty school in Baaj, a little town west of Mosul near the Syrian border. We met many other Yazidi women who were captured by Islamic State. Their fathers, brothers and husbands had also been killed, they told us. Then Islamic State fighters entered. One of them recited the words to the shahada, the Muslim creed – “I testify that there is no God but Allah, and that Muhammad is his prophet” – and said that if we repeated them, we would become Muslims. But we refused. They were furious. They insulted us a lot and cursed us and our beliefs.

A couple of days later, we were taken to a large hall full of a few dozen more Yazidi girls and women in Mosul, where Islamic State has its Iraqi headquarters. Some of the fighters were my age. They told us we were pagans and confined us for 20 days inside the building, where we slept on the floor and ate only once per day. Every now and then, an Islamic State man would come in and tell us to convert, but each time we refused. As faithful Yazidis, we would not abandon our religion. We wept a lot and mourned the losses suffered by our community.

One day, our guards separated the married from unmarried women. My good childhood friend Shayma and I were given as a gift to two Islamic State members from the south, near Baghdad. They wanted to make us their wives or concubines. Shayma was awarded to Abu Hussein, who was a cleric. I was given to an overweight, dark-bearded man about 50 years old who seemed to have some high rank. He went by the nickname Abu Ahmed. They drove us down to their home in Fallujah. On the road, we saw many Islamic State fighters and remnants of their battles.

Abu Ahmed, Abu Hussein and an aide lived in a Fallujah house that looked like a palace. Abu Ahmed kept telling me to convert, which I ignored. He tried to rape me several times, but I did not allow him to touch me in any sexual way. Instead, he cursed me and beat me every day, punching and kicking me. He fed me only one meal per day. Shayma and I began to discuss killing ourselves.

We were given mobile phones and instructed to call our families. Their journey had been almost as hard as ours: They’d made it to Mount Sinjar, where ISIS surrounded them and tried to starve them to death. After five days under siege, Kurdish rescue forces evacuated them to Syria and then brought them back to northern Iraq. If they traveled to Mosul and converted to Islam, our captors had us tell them, we would be released. Understandably, they did not trust ISIS, so they did not make the trip.

On our sixth day in Fallujah, Abu Ahmed and the aide left for business in Mosul. Abu Hussein, Shayma’s captor, stayed behind. Around sunset the next evening, he went to the mosque for prayers, leaving us alone in the house. Using our cellphones, we had contacted Mahmoud, a Sunni friend of Shayma’s cousin, who lived in Fallujah, for help. It was too dangerous for him to rescue us from the house, so Shayma and I used kitchen knives and meat cleavers to break the locks of two doors to get out. Wearing traditional long black abayas that we found in the house, we walked for 15 minutes through town, which was quiet for evening prayers. Then Mahmoud came and picked us up on the street and took us to his home.

That night, Mahmoud fed us and gave us a place to sleep. The next morning, he recruited a cab driver to take us all on the two-hour ride to Baghdad. The driver said he was afraid of Islamic State but offered to help us for God’s sake. We dressed like local women and covered our faces with a niqab, leaving only our eyes visible. Mahmoud gave us fake student IDs in case we were stopped at checkpoints.

Islamic State militants shot Narin’s brother and still hold her sister-in-law captive. (Hassan Haji for the Washington Post)

I had never felt so much anxiety. At each checkpoint, I was sure we’d be discovered. At one – I cannot recall if it was controlled by Islamic State or Iraqi forces – Mahmoud bribed the guards to let us through. We had contacted Yazidi and Muslim Kurdish family friends to help us in Baghdad, and I cannot describe the dizzy sense of relief I felt when we arrived at their house.

In Baghdad, the family friends gave us another pair of fake ID cards that enabled us to board a flight to Irbil, the capital of Kurdistan in the north. I still couldn’t believe we were free until our plane touched the ground. After staying in Irbil overnight at the house of a Yazidi member of the Iraqi parliament, Vian Dakhil, we traveled north to Shekhan, to the residence of Baba Sheikh, the spiritual leader of the world’s Yazidis.

After so much fear for so many days, hugging my dad again was the best moment of my life. He said he had cried for me every day since I disappeared. That evening, we went to Khanke, where my mother was staying with her relatives. We hugged and kept crying until then I fainted. My month-long ordeal was over, and I felt reborn.

But there more bad news to come. That’s when I learned that Islamic State had shot my brother at the oasis. My sister-in-law, a very beautiful woman, is still captive somewhere in Mosul. Now I am trying to come to terms with what happened. I can never again set foot in our little village, even if it’s freed from Islamic State, because the memory of my brother who died nearby would haunt me too much. I still have nightmares and swoon several times a day – when I remember what I saw or imagine what would have happened if Shayma and I hadn’t escaped.

What can I do? I want to leave this country altogether. This country is no place for me anymore. I want to go to a place where I might be able to start over, if that is even possible.

*****

Readers: These young girls were lucky they were able to escape. Many girls and women are not so lucky. I don’t know what the answer is nor what actions are needed to take out and destroy this disease, ISIS, but I trust Obama and his advisors will do what is necessary to protect the U.S.

If you didn’t get a chance to watch his address last night or would like to read the transcript, click here. 

With respect to Roger Goodell, after reading the writes from the Huff Po, I have no doubt that he saw that second video of Ray Rice punching his then-fiance.

The Associated Press reported on Wednesday that an unnamed law enforcement official sent an NFL executive the video of Ray Rice punching his then-fiancee in April, months before it was released by TMZ. The report contradicts the claims of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell that no one in the league office had seen the footage before it became public on Monday.

In my opinion he’s just protecting his own interest. Ray Rice is a big ticket for him…so it all comes down to money. Once again money means more than anything. So what if a woman gets knocked out cold by her so-called loving man. If men will take down a country for money and racism (That’s a nod to you Henry and Wendy) a mere woman is expendable. As usual, sickening.

HOPEfully it will all be revealed soon, but as Chris Hayes mentioned on MSNBC, they’ll try to blame it on some guy in the NFL mailroom who didn’t deliver the video.

Goodell should be fired.

Keith Olbermann said it well:

“You have already forfeited your privilege of resigning because to restore just the slightest credibility to the den of liars, CYA specialists and investigators whose job it is to bury whatever they actually find, the owners and the NFL need to publicly and loudly fire you,” Olbermann said.

Debra: I think about that all the time. Not only with Obama but just about any other OTW, that is held back or limited because of racism. We are such a beautiful diverse country that we could be the leaders in so much more if we just nourished the incredible assortment of brain power that resides in the U.S.

It’s really too bad and so sad that the color of one’s skin gets in the way of being truly a great country. Because if we were truly the greatest country in the world, we would love and cultivate the diversity, and be an inspiration to the rest of the world.

I ignorantly thought that Obama, a black man, becoming president, and doing all that I knew he was capable of accomplishing, would break down racism. Was I wrong. Obama becoming president inflamed racism to rear its ugly head. It is more strong than ever before. Or perhaps I should say, if we ever doubted racism was prevalent in this country, what we have been experiencing in politics and the murder of young black boys, etc., should erase that doubt.

As much as I loathe and am thoroughly disgusted by the racism I witness here and in the world, just because we may not have noticed as much racism before Obama became president, does not mean it did not exist or was as rampant as it is. Ask any black person.

In a way, as much as I am sickened by it, the blatant acts of racism that were always there, just not so obvious as they are now, perhaps needs to be exposed and revealed to the world so that we can be sickened and shocked enough to do something. It is a rough way to bring about change but it may be the only way.

Anything else to add…blog me. 

Peace & Love

Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.

Gratefully your blog host,

michelle

Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)

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