A Yazidi woman's own account of growing up in the farming village of Kocho in northern Iraq, where she once dreamed of becoming a teacher or opening a salon—until 2014, when Islamic State militants attacked her community and upended everything she knew. Amal Clooney contributes the foreword.
A faith can treat everyday decency as worship itself. Welcoming strangers, feeding the hungry, sitting with the dead, studying well and being kind to a spouse are held equal to prayer. Even plain bread is holy, because it keeps people alive and lets the poor help others.
A survivor telling her story in unflinching detail is a weapon against those who harmed her and a step toward holding them to account. But once told, the story can be taken over by others for their own political agendas. Speaking out gives power and also exposes the speaker to being used.
An attack meant to erase a people splits them by age and sex and assigns each group a different fate. Older women are killed, young boys are forced to become fighters, and girls and young women are sold as slaves for servitude and rape. Each fate cuts the community off from its future in a different way.
Atrocity depends not only on those who commit it but on witnesses who go along with it. Neighbours who look away, and a wider world that ignores a small people's plight, let the suffering go on. Silence and acceptance are a form of complicity, not neutrality.