Why doesn't anyone stand up for the Kurds and the Yazidis? Why hasn't every college student heard the story of Nadia Murad?

“I want to be the last girl in the world with a story like mine.” ~ Nadia Murad, The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State

Nadia Murad

You can listen to me read this essay here:

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I am at a loss to know why people are so obsessed with Palestinians and not the Kurds or the Yazidis. I have never heard of a protest at Stanford or Columbia universities in favor of a Kurdish state. Yet, the Kurds are one of the world’s largest peoples without a state, making up sizable minorities in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Their century-old fight for rights, autonomy, and a homeland has been marked by marginalization and persecution.

Since 2011, an estimated 16 million people have been displaced from Syria and Iraq due to civil war and sectarian violence. Over 2 million refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) have fled their hometowns and countries and have found refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan. Despite not having a state of its own, Iraqi Kurdistan’s population of 5.2 million has opened their arms to hundreds of thousands of displaced families of different religions and ethnicities, providing housing, water and electricity services, and constructing schools, health centers, and transport offices. (1)

Every college student should know the story of Nadia Murad, a Kurdish-Yazidi activist who was kidnapped by ISIS in 2014 and sold into sex slavery, escaping three months later. In 2018 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.

Listen to her words:

Thoughts and prayers. Promises of “never again.” They are not enough. Seven years after ISIS committed genocide against the Yazidi community, my ethno-religious minority, in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of people remain internally displaced and more than 2,800 women and children remain missing. Shelter, clean water, health care and education are luxuries, if available at all.

Those of us who were there – who ran for our lives to the protection of Mount Sinjar, who heard the gunshots as men and older women were shot and dumped into mass graves, and who, like me, were sold into sexual slavery – cannot forget what happened or how the world ignored our cries for help.

After escaping from my ISIS captors, I lived in a camp alongside hundreds of Yazidis. I felt the raw humiliation of residing in makeshift tents without privacy, work, or education. I saw these conditions erode our traditions, our way of life, and our communal ties. During that time, I imagined my life swallowed up by a statistic – becoming one of the millions of displaced people who live, on average, 10-20 years in a camp.

Today, much of my family still lives in that same cramped caravan. My niece has never known life outside the camp. When I visit family, the space between us is emptied by an overwhelming silence. We do not need to utter a single sound to communicate our shared sorrow. I can see the pain clearly in their eyes.

The questions that nag at me day in and day out are: Why will the world not act?

Please watch this very short video of Nadia Murad’s emotional return to the village in northern Iraq where she was captured and sold as a slave.

Why indeed? I suppose most people have never met a Kurd. And anyway, it isn’t Israelis that are attacking them. I suppose if it was, they would suddenly become important.

I once knew a Kurdish man quite well. I met him when I lived in London in the 1980s. I met him at Le Relais Basque, the little cafe off Bayswater Rd that I used to frequent. He was a small man, rather ugly and out of shape, but with large, soulful brown eyes and a melodious voice that I never heard raised in anger. He claimed to have fallen in love with me. I was living a nightmare, in an abusive marriage and for a brief time, I consider that he might be my savior.

I will call him Azad. He was a wealthy man, and I was depressingly poor. Many times, we sat in the cafe, drinking tea and talking. Once, he took me to McDonalds with his two sons. They were very nice and polite. He told me fascinating tales of his homeland. He had escaped over the mountains into Turkey with a suitcase holding 2 million English pounds. He was on Iraq’s most wanted list. He didn’t say it specifically because I suppose it was dangerous for him to do so, but it was obvious he was still involved in fighting for a Kurdish homeland. Often, he disappeared for days, back to Turkey. He said it was to visit his family, but I suspected it was for other, more sinister reasons.

When I told him I was leaving my husband and returning to California with my daughter, he offered to set me up in my own apartment in Berlin. He would get me my own car, in my name. He would get me a studio so I could do my art. I suppose he wanted me to be his mistress, although he never said it like that. He wanted me to know what it was like to be free. It all sounded like something out of a novel and in fact, I based one of my characters in my sci-fi novel, Luminaria on him.

As I said, for a brief moment, I considered taking him up on his offer. Honestly, I was so desperate at the time, that if I hadn’t had my four-year-old daughter, I might have done it. But all that talk of freedom, I was afraid I would just be imprisoned by another man and dependent upon him. Maybe he would be nicer than my current husband, but that wasn’t a gamble I was willing to take. In the end, I realized I had to save myself, no one else was going to do it for me.

I returned to Los Angeles with one small suitcase and my four-year-old daughter. I had no choice but to move back in with my parents until I married my second husband. That one didn’t work out much better. I sometimes wondered how my life would have gone if I’d taken Azad up on his offer and gone to Berlin. Instead, I did what I thought was right. I married a stable American man, from an old California real estate family, instead of becoming the mistress of a Kurd. My husband ended up slowly losing his mind, divorcing me and eventually ending up in a facility where he died almost two years ago. It’s a tragic story that I told in Finding Courage in Paradise Lost.

The point is, there is so much suffering in the world. I don’t understand the hypocrisy of our present day. People in the West who really have no idea what it means to suffer, passing judgement on people in far off countries and thinking they have the right to tell them how they should conduct their lives. Like how Israel should fight its war, when it is fighting for its very survival against a terrorist organization as evil as ISIS, in fact, an outgrowth of it.

Please watch the short video below, which tells the story of Kocher and her children who were held captive by the Islamic State terrorist group. They endured rape, losing their homes and being sold into slavery. Kocher's husband Mahmood joined the armed resistance against IS. Since Kocher's rescue, the family has been living on Mount Sinjar, the sacred mountain of the Yazidis. Now, they're afraid to return to their home village, knowing some of their Muslim former neighbors aided IS. The family lives in tents on the mountaintop. Three of their children are still missing. Mahmood keeps a Kalashnikov in his cabinet, just in case he has to defend himself against another attack.

I am sorry, but I cannot take these protests seriously; these self-righteous cries for justice for Palestine from people who have so obviously and so easily been manipulated by the media and by Hamas thanks to their absolute ignorance and disinterest in knowing the truth.

They never protested against ISIS that I can recall. They never demanded a state for Kurds and Yazidis that I can recall. No, they did not protest against ISIS, and they do not protest against Hamas, a terrorist organization that abuses its own people, using them as human shields, keeping them as powerless victims with refugee status—not like the Yazidis—Hamas could end the Palestinians refugee status and give them back their pride, invest in Gaza, but instead they siphon off millions of dollars in aid for themselves, thanks to that refugee status. And then, if anyone complains about it, Hamas tortures and kills its own people.

Why aren’t protestors standing up against Hamas? Because they don’t really care about Palestinians, just like they never cared about Yazidis or Kurds. They just want to jump on the latest bandwagon, especially if it means they can demonize Jews and justify their own hatred that is now coming to the surface.

The people criticizing Israel, saying it doesn’t have a right to exist, knowing full well if it didn’t every Jew in the region would be exterminated, need to stop focusing on a country far away that has nothing to do with them and turn their attention to their own governments’ injustices, their own governments’ stealing of native lands. The Kurds who don’t have a homeland yet take in everyone all refugees no matter who they are, put these fake protestors to shame.

Next time these self-righteous people want to complain, as if they have something to complain about, they should be forced to listen to Nadia’s words:

“At some point, there was rape and nothing else. This becomes your normal day. You don't know who is going to open the door next to attack you, just that it will happen and that tomorrow might be worse. You stop thinking about escaping or seeing your family again. Your past life becomes a distant memory, like a dream. Your body doesn't belong to you, and there's no energy to talk or to fight or to think about the world outside. There is only rape and the numbness that comes with accepting that this is now your life. Fear was better. With fear, there is assumption that what is happening isn't normal. Sure, you feel like your heart will explode and you will throw up, you cling desperately to your family and friends, and you grovel in front of the terrorists, you cry until you go blind, but at least you do something. Hopelessness is close to death.”

Kurdish female fighter and Israeli female soldiers and Kurdish female soldiers

Maybe start protesting against the terrorists and standing up for the people who fight them. How about that.