The Last Girl

Nadia Murad grew up in Kocho, a small farming village of about 200 Yazidi families in northern Iraq's Sinjar region. The Yazidis are an ancient monotheistic religious community whose faith centers on Tawusi Melek, the Peacock Angel, whom outsiders have wrongly equated with the devil for centuries. This mischaracterization fueled repeated persecutions that Yazidis call firmans; before 2014, outside powers had attempted to destroy them 73 times. Kocho sat far from the protective shelter of Mount Sinjar and dangerously close to Sunni Arab villages, but the community maintained neighborly friendships and lived a modest life of farming and family.

Nadia, the youngest of 11 children, was raised primarily by her mother, Shami, after her father, Basee Murad Taha, took a third wife and left the family. Shami was deeply religious, practical, and humorous, turning years of poverty into motivation. The family's circumstances improved after 2003, when the American invasion toppled Saddam Hussein's regime. Kurdish political parties expanded influence into Sinjar, Nadia's brothers found work as border guards and policemen, and the village gained cell phone towers and satellite television. Nadia dreamed of opening a hair salon and teaching history.

After 2003, relations with Sunni Arab neighbors deteriorated as extremism grew. In August 2007, truck bombs in the Yazidi towns of Siba Sheikh Khider and Tel Ezeir killed 800 people, the deadliest terrorist attack of the entire Iraq War. After the Americans left Iraq, an extremist group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) gained strength amid the Syrian civil war. By June 2014, ISIS had overwhelmed the Iraqi Army and captured Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city.

That summer, ominous events signaled what was coming: Farmers and a family employee were kidnapped near Kocho. Kurdish peshmerga fighters, sent by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), assured villagers they were safe. Ahmed Jasso, Kocho's mukhtar (village leader), urged calm. On August 3, ISIS launched attacks across Sinjar. Tens of thousands of Yazidis fled toward Mount Sinjar on foot; many died of heat and dehydration. That same night, the peshmerga abandoned their posts without warning, leaving Kocho surrounded. For nearly two weeks the families lived under siege. Nadia's brothers Hezni and Saoud, both outside the village for work, called in agony but could do nothing.

On August 15, ISIS delivered its ultimatum: Convert to Islam or face the consequences. Shami ordered her family to pack bags, dress in multiple layers, and burn family photographs. The entire village was marched to the primary school, where militants separated the men from the women and children. Pickup trucks arrived, and Nadia watched as her brothers Massoud and Elias were driven away. Moments later, gunshots erupted behind the school. Nadia's brother Saeed survived the mass execution by playing dead after being shot six times; he and a wounded teacher escaped to Mount Sinjar. Her half brother Khaled also survived and reached the mountain.

The women and girls were separated further: Nadia's mother was pulled away, and her sisters Dimal and Adkee saved themselves by claiming young nephews as their own sons. Nadia and other unmarried girls were loaded onto buses bound for Mosul. On the bus, a militant sexually assaulted the girls. A commander named Nafah boarded and told them they were sabaya (sex slaves), property of the Islamic State. In Mosul, the girls were taken to a center where Yazidi women were being bought and sold. When a militant selected Nadia, she threw herself at the feet of Hajji Salman, an ISIS judge, who took her instead. The first militant took Nadia's niece Rojian.

Hajji Salman took Nadia to the Mosul courthouse, where she was photographed, forced to recite the shahada (the Islamic declaration of faith), and registered as his property. He warned her photo would appear at every checkpoint if she attempted escape. He raped and beat her repeatedly, forced her to serve his guests, and told her she was ruined and that her family would reject her. One evening, Nadia found a spare abaya, a loose full-body robe, and attempted to climb out a window, but a guard caught her at gunpoint. As punishment, Hajji Salman sent six guards to gang-rape her. She lost consciousness. The next morning, she learned she had been sold.

Over the following days, Nadia was transferred between multiple captors and raped repeatedly. She briefly reunited with her sister-in-law Jilan and niece Nisreen in the Hamdaniya district, where they confirmed that all the men of Kocho had been killed. She became severely ill. A new captor, Hajji Amer, took her to a house in Mosul. When he left to run an errand, he left the front door unlocked with no guards behind.

Nadia seized the chance. She grabbed her bag and niqab, a face-covering veil, climbed over the garden wall, and walked for nearly two hours through Mosul at dusk. She knocked on the door of a modest house, and Hisham, a Sunni man in his fifties, answered. Nadia revealed she was an escaped Yazidi captive and begged for help. Hisham's family sheltered her, contacted Hezni, and devised an escape plan. Hisham's eldest son, Nasser, obtained a fake ID and posed as Nadia's husband for the journey to Kirkuk, a gateway to Kurdistan. They passed through multiple ISIS checkpoints, including one where Nadia spotted her own courthouse photograph on the wall.

Inside Kurdistan, security forces from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) filmed Nadia's testimony and released it to the media despite promising confidentiality, endangering Nasser's family in Mosul. Nadia reunited with surviving relatives, learning the full scope of her losses: brothers confirmed dead, her mother's fate unknown, and most of the women and girls of Kocho still in captivity.

In December 2014, the family moved to a refugee camp near Duhok. Over the following months, Nadia's sisters escaped: Dimal arrived in January 2015 after crossing barbed wire at the Turkish-Syrian border, and Adkee escaped from Raqqa, Syria, weeks later. Hezni became a full-time coordinator of smuggling operations to free captive Yazidi women, each rescue costing roughly $5,000, and later orchestrated an elaborate rescue of his wife Jilan.

Before emigrating to Germany as part of a government program for Yazidi survivors, Nadia and Dimal visited Lalish, the holiest Yazidi valley in northern Iraq, where a custodian called the Baba Chawish listened as each woman recited the names of her dead and missing. Yazidi religious leaders issued an official statement welcoming escaped sabaya back into the community, declaring that forced conversions and rape did not change their identity as Yazidis.

In November 2015, Nadia gave her first public speech at a United Nations forum in Geneva, telling her full story including the sexual violence. She partnered with Yazda, a Yazidi rights organization, and was named the UN's first Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking. That December, a mass grave of approximately 80 women was discovered near the Solagh Institute, confirming Nadia's mother's death. Nadia's niece Kathrine, her friend Lamia, and a nine-year-old girl named Almas were later rescued from captivity but stepped on an improvised explosive device while crossing into Kurdistan; Kathrine and Almas were killed, and Lamia survived with severe burns.

In May 2017, Kocho was liberated from ISIS. Nadia returned to find her home looted and burned but recognized it as home and vowed to return. She closes the book by stating her mission: to bring ISIS to trial for genocide, to protect vulnerable minorities, and to be "the last girl in the world with a story like mine" (306).