The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity and My Fight Against the Islamic State

by Nadia Murad

But when there was fighting in Iraq, and there always seemed to be fighting in Iraq,

But war changed people, especially men.

Yazidis are among the poorest communities in Iraq, and my family was poor even by Kocho’s standards,

She joked about everything—about being abandoned by my father, about my fascination with hair and makeup, about her own failures.

She laughed because of how she had loved me the moment I was born, and because I would spend each morning warming myself by our clay oven while she baked bread, talking to her.

It’s not the last place I saw her, but it’s where she is when I think about her, which I do every day.

Prayer is meant to be a personal expression, not a chore or an empty ritual. You can pray silently by yourself or out loud, and you can pray alone or in a group,

Walaa, Kathrine, and I would play a game with a few of the other girls called bin akhy, which in Kurdish means “in the dirt.” All at once we would each hide something—a marble, a coin, even just a soda cap—in the ground, then we would run around like crazy people, digging holes in the garden until the teacher yelled at us, caking our fingernails with dirt that was sure to upset our mothers. You kept whatever you found,

All I knew during that time was that it was ordinary Iraqis, not the political elite and certainly not Saddam himself, who suffered the most under the sanctions. Our hospitals and markets collapsed. Medicine became more expensive, and flour was cut with gypsum, which is more often used to make cement. The deterioration was most clear to me in the schools. Once Iraq’s education system had attracted students from all over the Middle East, but under the sanctions it crumbled. Teachers’ salaries were reduced to nothing, and so teachers became hard to find, even though nearly 50 percent of Iraqi men were unemployed. The few teachers who came to Kocho when I started—Arab Muslims who lived in the school, joining the Yazidi teachers—were heroes as far as I was concerned, and I worked hard to impress them.

I became addicted to a Turkish soap opera where the characters constantly fell in and out of love.

“At least the only reason they don’t like us is because we are poor,” she said. “And there is nothing wrong with being poor.”

According to our culture, if two people are in love and want to marry, they can elope no matter what their families think. This proves that they value each other more than anything, and after that it’s up to the families to reconcile themselves to the match. It can sound old-fashioned, even backward, the way the custom is sometimes described—a woman “running away”—but it is actually liberating, taking power away from the parents and giving it to the young couple and specifically to the girl, who has to agree to the plan.

Our faith is in our actions. We welcome strangers into our homes, give money and food to those who have none, and sit with the body of a loved one before burial. Even being a good student, or kind to your spouse, is an act equal to prayer. Things that keep us alive and allow poor people to help others, like simple bread, are holy.

Yazidi girls were considered infidels, and according to the militants’ interpretation of the Koran, raping a slave is not a sin. We would entice new recruits to join the ranks of the militants and be passed around as a reward for loyalty and good behavior. Everyone on the bus was destined for that fate. We were no longer human beings—we were sabaya.

ATTACKING SINJAR AND taking girls to use as sex slaves wasn’t a spontaneous decision made on the battlefield by a greedy soldier. ISIS planned it all:

Rape has been used throughout history as a weapon of war.

“God wants us to convert you, and if we can’t, then we can do what we like to you.”

Men joined it for obvious reasons—they wanted money, power, and sex. They were too weak, I thought, to figure out how to get these things without using violence,

people have throughout history, that violence toward a greater good is acceptable.

I have never admitted this to anyone, but I did not fight back when Hajji Salman or anyone else came to rape me.

Being dead was better than being sold like merchandise and raped until our bodies were in shreds.

their deaths took just a moment. When you are a sabiyya, you die every second of every day, and just like the men, we would never see our families or our homes again.

Families in Iraq and Syria led normal lives while we were tortured and raped. They watched us walk through the streets with our captors and gathered on the streets to witness executions.

I felt like crying because the farmer saw us this way—that he thought because we were so poor and we lived in the camps, he could feed us anything, and we would be grateful.

We are human! I wanted to tell him. We had homes, we had a good life. We are not nothing. But I stayed quiet and ate what I could of the disgusting food.

“Nadia should tell the world what they did to us!” he said, and one of the Yazidis started laughing. “She said that from the beginning, and we were all fired because of it!”

That was the moment I knew that my family was truly destroyed.

Former sabaya, they announced, would be welcomed back to society and not judged for what had happened to us. We were not to be considered Muslim because the religion had been forced upon us, and because we had been raped, we were victims, not ruined women.

Some countries decided to keep refugees out altogether, which made me furious. There was no good reason to deny innocent people a safe place to live.

Most of the stories are bitter and sad, but sometimes my lively sister makes me laugh so hard that I roll off my couch. I ache for Iraq.

It never gets easier to tell your story. Each time you speak it, you relive it.

trial. There is still so much that needs to be done. World leaders and particularly Muslim religious leaders need to stand up and protect the oppressed.