Motel Kurdistan
Watching the War on ISIS with Iraq’s Displaced People
DOHUK, Iraq — Meryem has renamed the 3rd floor of Motel Kurdistan. “Welcome to Bayt al-Sinjar!” the 8-year-old shouts, flinging her arms open as the elevator door opens. I follow her down a dim hallway to number 308, the 110-sq-ft room where her family of six has lived since fleeing ISIS’ advance on their village in August.
“You can come here, but not Daesh,” Meryem says, using the Arabic name for ISIS as she opens the door. “No Daesh allowed.”
I’m visiting Meryem’s family, one of 90,564 displaced families – 543,384 individuals – seeking refuge in Dohuk, a small city 170 km from Sinjar and 77 km from Mosul in northern Iraqi Kurdistan. They are part of some 1.8 million Iraqis displaced since January, half of whom are seeking refuge in the Kurdistan region. Most are Christians and Yezidis from the Sinjar area and Ninewah plains, where ISIS has massacred minorities in an ethnic cleansing campaign throughout the summer. Convert to our interpretation of Islam or die, the extremist group says, and then goes through villages killing men, kidnapping women and children, selling them into slavery and proclaiming an Islamic State.
Those who can flee have come to places like Dohuk, where displaced people live under trees and bridges, sleeping in churchyards, unfinished buildings, parks and schools. Telltale cardboard boxes and plastic tarps with WFP and UNHCR insignia hang over balcony railings, squashed for space alongside strings of laundry and children crowding every window. 17,346 families are occupying the elementary schools, which means 224,191 local students haven’t yet begun the semester. Another 47,831 displaced kids are living in the classrooms. They don’t even have enough food, toilets or blankets, let alone opportunity to learn.

Motel Kurdistan is among the best of situations, a temporary home for Meryem’s family and twenty others, displaced Iraqis with enough savings to afford a motel room for $700 a month. Displaced families occupy the entire 3rd and 4th floors, some living 2–3 families in one room. The motel had only been open for 3 months when the ISIS crises began, says Jihad, the Kurdish owner’s son.
“It was like a new car that had only run 1 km. Then we got flooded by naziheen [displaced people].” He pulls out a registration book in the hotel lobby, flipping through pages of names and figures. “We’re going crazy. Our whole hotel is naziheen. They come with money for 1 month, then run out and beg to stay.” The displaced people have no money, Jihad says, but neither do the local Kurds. “Have you seen Dohuk? Look, God willing we will destroy Daesh. God willing everyone will go home.”
Upstairs, Meryem’s mother is stirring a pot of bulgur on an electric cooking heater. Her neighbor Fatima comes over, an unmarried Sunni Arab woman taking care of two nephews whose parents — her brother and his wife — are trapped in Mosul. Half her family is living under ISIS, too afraid to leave, Fatima says. “The women hide inside all day,” she tells me. “My sister is sick but they forbid male doctors to see women. You think this is Islam? Daesh are garbage. Dogs. God damn their souls.”
Meryem’s mother is quiet. Earlier she’d told me, “Daesh is Islam. We cannot live with it. Muslims always kill Yezidis.” This genocide is just the latest in centuries of Yezidi targeting, she’d said, as Muslims forever persecute the minority, accusing them of worshipping the devil.
But Fatima is her neighbor and guest, so she nods as the Sunni woman curses Daesh. Meryem and her brothers are jumping on the bed with Fatima’s nephews, laughing and throwing pieces of bulgur at one another. “Who says Yezidis and Muslims cannot live together? What is wrong with these lunatics?” Fatima goes on. “Damn them and damn their father’s souls.”

The motel women don’t go outside during the day, but they visit each other in the hallways. We walk to the 4th floor to see another Yezidi family: Basima, Ali and their five children, all from Sinjar, living in a motel room with Ali’s cousin and his family — 11 people in all. They walked through the mountains for 8 days without food or water, Ali tells me, eating leaves and watching the weakest starve. “I saw mothers crying and feeding the tears to their children,” Ali says, “So they wouldn’t die of thirst.”
Ali had Arab neighbors living 50m from his home, he tells me. “We grew up like brothers, playing, eating, even sleeping together. Then Daesh came and they looted our homes.” What about Fatima? I ask, and the neighbors from Mosul all around them? “They can’t do anything to us here. We believe in the Kurds and they believe in two things,” Ali says, pointing upward. “First, God — and second, America.”
But no one in the motel believes in America’s airstrikes. “If they were serious, we would have Sinjar back in a day,” Jihad says. “The international community doesn’t care — look at Kobane!”

Back in Meryem’s room, we watch a TV broadcast about Shi’a militias killing Sunni Turkmen and Arab civilians. “This is a Sunni channel. We can watch a Shi’a channel and it’ll say the opposite,” Meryem’s father tells me. We switch to another channel. A woman academic and male parliamentarian are engaged in heated debate. “Security Strategy,” the title reads at the bottom of the screen. Both have their voices raised, slipping in and out of formal Arabic, almost in tears.
“I don’t want anyone coming into our country,” the woman says. “What do Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, America, all of them want? It’s politics, manipulation, we’ve seen this before — [she slips into heavy Iraqi ammiyah] — the whole world is coming for their own benefit. Who will protect Iraqi people? They are ripping us apart.”
Kurdistan’s naziheen ask me too many questions. “Why are all these foreigners joining Daesh?” Fatima asks.
“I saw a Facebook post saying the U.S. was dropping weapons to ISIS,” Meryem’s father says. “Is that where they get their arms from?”
“Do you know the NGOs here? Can you find me a job?” Ali asks.
“We’ll be out of money next month and the camps aren’t finished yet,” Basima says. “Where should we go?”
“Will you write down the names of my kidnapped relatives?”

The last question comes from Layla, a Yezidi woman living in a half-finished building in Shariya, a town 20 minutes from Dohuk that I visit the next day. I take out my pen, thinking I can at least fulfill this request. Layla starts listing names, ages and family relations, spelling each one, 22 in all. I write: Musou, 45, brother. Ammu, 43, brother. Falah, 25, nephew. Fahd, 20, nephew. Hafsa, 45, sister-in-law. Nisreen, 30, sister-in-law. Shereen, 30, sister-in-law. Fadia, 18, niece (sold). Vinal, 18, niece. Mouna, 18, niece. Ayman, 12, nephew. Anwar, 8, nephew. Elias and Hudr, 10, nephews (twins). Yazid, 4, nephew. Mirna, 3, niece. Rami, 4, nephew. Rania, 2, niece. Feryal, 25, niece. Asma, 3, niece’s daughter. Ashem, 1, niece’s son. Rena, infant, niece’s daughter.
Halfway through the list, my translator starts to cry.
“Fadia called me two weeks ago. Daesh sold her in Tal Afar,” Layla says. “She’s a slave but said the women and children are OK.” Layla hasn’t heard from the four men, she says, but they are also alive.
How do you know? I ask.
“They’re alive.”
But how do you know?
“They’re alive.”
But how do you —
“They’re alive.”
I stop.

My translator rants as we drive away: “I swear this land is cursed.” It’s 5 p.m. and sunlight is spilling, soft and gold, across rolling open fields. The Kurds have seen it all before, he says — chemical weapons, forced displacement, massacres, ethnic cleansing — Kurdish history is soaked in blood. None of this is new. “I was born in a refugee camp,” he adds. “My parents also walked 10 days in the mountains, fleeing to Turkey from the Ba’athists.”
We go to Khanke, a sprawling camp that’s taken more than 70,000 displaced Yezidis since August. People are placing cement blocks around the perimeters of their tents, trying to build a blockade before winter rains flood the dirt floors. There’s a distribution going on, and a mob of fathers and brothers is crowding, pushing, yelling at the volunteers and trying to grab boxes for their children. A policeman swats them back with a stick, and I catch the eye of a small boy squeezed amid the shouting men. His mouth is moving. I nudge my translator and he bends down to listen.

“He’s saying, ‘Please take me with you.’”
How is Kurdistan surviving the displacement crisis? Haval Mohammed Amedy, head of the Dohuk Governorate’s Emergency Operations Committee, answers: it isn’t. The central government in Baghdad hasn’t sent funds to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) for months. Government employees, including himself and the Peshmerga, are working without income. Meanwhile, the KRG splits what funds it does have between the ISIS frontline, held mostly by Kurdish forces, and the naziheen.

“We had more than half a million people flee here in 15 days,” Amedy says. “Our people are donating electricity, manpower, services, our own resources — Baghdad is not helping us.” The UN and NGOs are here, Amedy says, but money is not reaching those in need fast enough. After 3 months of emergency response, displaced people still don’t even have one blanket each, and winter is approaching.
“Tell the UN to push Baghdad seriously, not partially so they can prolong their stay,” Amedy says. “Tell them people will die if they don’t get enough kerosene heaters by the end of the month. Just send us blankets! Don’t send money to the UN and have them slowly purchase things over 2 months. Send half a million blankets to the airport today.”
Back in the motel, I go to the roof with the women and children. Clotheslines are strung from satellites to water tanks, crisscrossing the area with all the displaced families’ laundry. It starts raining. The women rush to collect their clothes while their children shriek and spin in circles under the night shower.
Meryem tiptoes to the edge of a wall, peering at Dohuk in the night, its neon lights a rainy blur. The city stretches across a valley, dark mountains standing guard all around. From above, you can’t see the people crammed into classrooms and onto church floors, having nightmares of dying children, suffocating with thought of their wives and daughters under other men’s fancy and force. “The children understand. They know what’s happening,” Meryem’s mother says to me.

But Meryem points at a ferris wheel glowing across the street, at a string of lights leading up the mountain highway, at the moon, the stars, at Mazi Mall and Dream City, the shopping center and amusement park downtown.
“Can you write about this?” she asks. “Write about the whole world! But not about Shingal,” she says, using the Kurdish name for Sinjar. “Just wait. You can write when we see Shingal. Maybe we’ll go there in the morning.”
Originally published at The Atlantic.com on October 21, 2014.
