A Young Woman Survives and Escapes Brutal Slavery By Her Determined Character and Math Skills
Now That Should Be A Movie.
Today’s Book I would like to pitch as a movie is The Girl Who Escaped ISIS: This Is My Story by Farida Khalaf, with Andrea C. Hoffmann, from Thorndike Press.
The movie would open in 2014, with Farida living in the village of Kocho in northern Iraq with her father, mother, one older brother, and three younger ones. Her family are Kurdish-speaking Yazidi. They are surrounded by Muslim Arabs, with whom they have friendly and commercial relationships with the Muslims. The Yazidi boys have Muslim godfathers, who are meant to protect them. Yet the situation is still dubious. The Yazidi see themselves as children of God and the Muslims as children of Adam and Eve. The Muslims call Yazidis “devil worshipers” since they worship the sun and the Peacock Angel. Yazidi girls walk through the markets without the head coverings required for Muslim women.
The first few minutes of a film based on Farida’s experience would explore the beautiful and little-known culture of the Yazidi, including a look into their religious ceremonies. We meet her cousins Nura and Pevin at one of these ceremonies. We see her father training her to use an AK-47 to defend herself. We also get to know Farida as she pursues her love of math. She is so good at the subject that her classmates call her “Calculator.” She astonishes Mr. Ahmed, the man responsible for providing the annual math exams, by scoring 99% on her examine. She dreams of becoming the first teacher from her village, which is considered to be in the lowest class of the Yazidi caste system.
But dark clouds are on the horizon as civil war spirals out of control in neighboring Syria. Farida’s father, a border guard, talks of having to turn Syrian refugees away. Then in June 2014, car bombs began exploding in northern Iraq as Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – ISIS – attacks. The Iraqi army retreats after three days of fighting, leaving Mosul to the terrorists. By August 1st it became clear that the advance of ISIS was not going to stop at the city. The family remained glued to the news. Farida used her math skills to figure that if 100 ISIS fighters had been killed as the news reported, then the actual number of fighters must be much larger than those the media reported. After the Iraqi army fled, only the Kurds are left to defend the Yazidi. But then they too retreat, abandoning northern Iraq.
Farida begin having nightmares about what might have happened to Nura after receiving news that her cousin’s village was captured. In a movie this would be a scene similar to the nightmare about concentration camps in the 1959 adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank. Then she starts having epileptic seizures, which she has suffered from since childhood. Finally, the villagers began to flee in a convoy. As they were leaving, the mayor received a call from a Muhammad Salam, the Emir in charge over the region. The emir claimed that he had made a deal with ISIS that no harm would come to the Yazidi if they stayed in the village. If they continued to flee, they would pay with their lives. The mayor tells each family they can make their own decisions. Farida’s family decides to stay. As they are return to Kocho, they hear gunshots fired at the families that chose to continue.
Two days later, a delegation of Arabs from nearby villages arrived, announcing that they had come to an agreement with ISIS. The terrorists would not take the village if the Yazidi gave up their guns. The villagers agree to this proposal, taking the Muslims at their word of honor. Some think they made the right choice since the refugees who had fled to the neighboring Mount Sinjar were now dying of thirst and hunger.
When Salam returned, he offered the Yazidi an “Invitation” to believe in Allah and renounce their religion. They are given three days to become Muslims before ISIS enters the village, which was sealed off so no one could escape.
On August 15, ISIS arrives. They told the villagers to bring them all their valuables, cash, gold, jewelry, cell phones, and identification and credit cards. Then the men and older boys were separated from the women and children, who were then herded into the school building. Farida and her family were imprisoned in the math classroom, where the blackboard still displayed a mathematical equation. Then She watched from a window as Emir Salam, now wearing an ISIS robe, asked the men to convert to Islam. The mayor announced that the men had decided not to renounce their religion. Then Salam went to the women and promised them they could take their children and go free if they became Muslim. The women also refused. Then Farida watched as the men were put on trucks and taken out of the village. Minutes later, she hears gunfire.
Then the girls were separated from the older women and boys. Farida tried to make a run for it but was caught. Then the ISIS fighters put the girls on buses and drove off into the desert.
What follows is a harrowing odyssey of physical and sexual abuse and mental torture that only the darkest of souls could commit. Farida endures this horrific treatment with her schoolmates and cousins as they are transported across the desert to places like Deir Ezor, and the Umar Gas Fields. They watch as the younger girls are always sold off first, since the Prophet Mohammed’s youngest wife was only nine years old. They are sold in the marketplace in Raqqa. The young women are whipped with cable cords and are forced to pray to Allah and towards Mecca. Eventually Farida finds herself belonging to an ISIS fighter as an unwanted gift, worth only 50 dollars.
While the story of the persecution of the Yazidi deserves to be told in a movie like Schindler’s List or 12 Years A Slave, I believe that a film about Farida’s story should focus on the endurance of the women rather than what they endured. Farida and her friends are strong women who continued to resist throughout their ordeal. The first time she was hurried off a bus by the terrorists, she took her friend Evin’s hand and looked for a way to run, but the terrorists blocked their way. Without her medication, she used her epileptic seizures to her advantage, making the terrorists think she is crazy and thus harder to sell. Whenever a man touched her, she would start screaming and hitting herself. When a possible buyer tried to check the quality of her teeth, she bit his hand. She plotted with her friends to rush the doorway and grab the guns of the terrorists, but her friends, and her math brain, dissuaded her. Whenever they were put into a new building, they looked for windows. At one house they were able to heave a shutter upward and squeeze out, but their owner had stepped outside for a smoke and sand saw them. He yelled “Stop,” alerting two terrorists on patrol, who caught them. When a terrorist with a British accent tells them to become Muslims, Farida replies, “if your state is so pious and just, then set us free! Let us go back to our families, where we belong!” Girls smashed their heads against the glass of the bus windows in attempts to escape. One young girl, Besma, tried stabbing her assailant with a pair of scissors. When one of Farida’s “owners,” who she had tricked into buying her and a friend at a bargain, complains about her medical condition causing him nothing but problems, she replies that she is not happy with him either.
…I think he was already having regretting have gone into the deal without thinking. “I really bought a pup with you, didn’t I, girl?” You’re causing me nothing but problems!” he cursed.
“Tell him that I’m not happy being with him either,” I said to Evin, who as usual was acting as my translator, because I supposedly didn’t speak a word of Arabic. He went into a rage.
“Tell her to keep her trap shut!” he barked at us. “She’s given me enough grief already!”
P. 228
She uses her condition as an invalid to avoid work. Farida even gets her hand on a gun at one point, threatening shoot the fighters, but is quickly disarmed.
She did try suicide, considering death before the dishonor of sexual assault the best way out. One time when the terrorists were bathing the girls, Farida reached up and unscrewed a lightbulb and attempted to stick her finger in the circuit. In the ensuing beating she received from the terrorists, she felt herself floating in the air in an out of body experience. She tried hanging herself with the vail the ISIS fighters forced her to wear. She tried cutting her wrists with broken glass, but her friend Lena saved her life by alerting the terrorists. This saved her cousin, Evin, from being raped since the fighters were interrupted when they had to rush out to get Farida emergency medical help. Later Evin tells her never to leave her again and she promises to never desert her, especially to never commit suicide.
It is through solidarity with her cousins and school mates that Farida finds strength. In secret they pray in their religious traditions. When forced to participate in Muslim ceremonies, together they recited the suras wrongly or prayed half-hardily. One time they all turned up to the ceremony without their veils on, causing the fighters to cover their eyes. Because Farida’s reputation as being crazy proceeded her, she was able to stay with Evin because selling them both was the only way fighters could get rid of her. Together they agreed to never give a man power over their lives. And ultimately, they dream of home and escape.
The girls do meet some people with consciences. A soldier left along with the girls at the beginning lets slip, while none of the other terrorists around, that if it was up to him, he would let them all go.
We were still standing there rigidly, waiting for him to decide [which one of them to buy]. But he just stared at us sadly, making no move to come closer.
“You poor creatures,” we hear him say all of a sudden, when he was sure that no one apart from us could hear him. “It if was up to me I’d let all of you go. I’m really sorry that you have to put up with all this.”
We thought at first that we’d misunderstood him. Evin, who was standing beside me, was the first to grasp what he actually said. Falling on her knees before him, she begged, “Please, good man, take us with you. Me and my sister. She’s ill. She needs help.”
I kneeled before him too. “Please save us!” I implored him. “We’ll serve in your house.”
Page 132
But he refused, saying his family would pour scorn on him if he brought home Yazidi girls. The doctors and their families to whom Farida is sent for medical treatment express sympathy, even admitting that they have only become Muslims in pretend. However, when the girls ask them to buy them, they reply they cannot because they are in the same boat. One fighter offers to buy both Farida and her cousin, but only if she will marry him. She refuses. In the end, it is up to the girls themselves to be their own saviors.
The girls’ escape starts when a fighter leaves a bag unattended with them. They rummage through it and find a phone. They take the SIM card and leave the phone. Later they go to a warehouse where the possessions of dead fighters are kept. After rummaging through the possessed, they found a phone and inserted the SIM card. It was a match. Back in their hidden under sheets back in their container, they decided to call Evin’s uncle in Germany, Khalil. Because of Farida’s math skills, she was able to remember his phone number. They reach Khalil, who tells them he will get help. He calls back later and tells them that a man, Mustafa Hamu, has offered help but cannot reach their location. They will have to escape on their own and travel to his location. Some girls choose not to escape out of fear that ISIS will retaliate against family members still in captivity. For the group that chooses to escape, Farida becomes their leader. They call her Barack Obama as she hatches a plan. The door at the back of their container is only tied with wire, which could be easily moved. Once outside, they would break up into three groups of two and head northeast. The abayas, full-length black garments, they wore would camouflage them in the night. It rained the night of their escape, helping to muffle the sounds of their movements. The escape goes off almost without a hitch. There is a tense moment with Farida accidently knocks over a pot. And then when she hears the barking of dogs, she breaks into a run with her friend and disappears into the night.
The six girls reunite far away from the camp and then follow a highway. They eventually see a sign pointing the way to Hasakah and know they are on the way to Kurdish territory. In the shelter of an abandoned building, they pull out the phone and see that the battery is running low. They call Mustafa Hamu, who still says it is too dangerous for him and they will have to continue their journey to his location. In a nearby house, they meet a family that is also under ISIS oppression. The father, Abu Yousef calls Uncle Khalil and Mustafa Hamu and arranges to bring the girls to them. Abu Yousef puts the girls in the back of the truck and places a plastic tarpaulin over them. Then he drives them over two hundred miles through the Iraqi desert. There is tension when he must stop at ISIS checkpoints and greets the guards like friends, making Farida wonder if he can be trusted. Eventually the truck comes to a stop and the tarpaulin is pulled back. “Welcome, dear girls,” said Mustafa Hamu. “My warmest congratulations! You have made it!”
Farida and her friends, Nase, Pervan, Sila, Besma and Evin were free. They made it to the refugee camp at the Kurdish city of Dohuk. Here Farida is reunited with her uncle and eventually her mother and three younger brothers. The brothers had survived the mass executions of Yazidi males. She learns that her father and older brother are dead.
The last few minutes of a film should focus on the girl’s recovering from their psychological wounds and the Muslim woman who helped them. In Yazidi culture, when a woman has sex out of marriage, even if she was raped, she is tainted forever, and no man would want to marry her. The girls knew that other people would considered them sinful women even though they had resisted. Farida overhears women in the camp referring to her and the other survivors as “poor girls” who would never be able to start families. It takes Afrah Ibrahim, a social worker with the German organization Wadi, and a Muslim, to help Farida and her friendships overcome their shame. At first, they were cautious of her, her religion being a trigger of their trauma, but she eventually wins them over. She tells them to not allow themselves to believe they lost their honor during captivity. “You didn’t lose your honor. On the contrary, you were brave and have every reason to go through life with your heads held high.”
In response to reports of Yazidi women committing suicide in captivity due to their perceived impurity, The Yazidi Supreme Spiritual Council declared that rape victims were still pure and could be welcomed back. Farida now lives in Germany, where studied math before becoming a human rights advocate. In 2018 she married Nazhan Hassan in the German city of Cologne in front of 500 guests.
To honor the bravery of the Yazidi women and other victims of ISIS is why The Girl Who Escaped ISIS by Farida Khalaf should be a movie.
