How Nadia Murad’s Autobiography Will Make You Question Your Faith In Humanity
“I want to be the last girl in the world with a story like mine,”
It’s so easy to feel desensitised to tragedy.
Especially if they don’t affect you.
I always knew the Islamic State (ISIS) was committing atrocities around the world, but never knew how much.
Reading former ISIS captive Nadia Murad’s autobiography changed this for me.
The Last Girl is a story of how it feels like to be hated for your beliefs. It shows how a tiny seed of disgust can fester and grow over time to turn into motivations for a full-scale genocide.
On The Last Girl’s cover, Nadia has a worn yet steely gaze.
She has seen and experienced things no one should ever go through.
The Last Girl is not an easy read.
It will make your heart lurch.
You will witness humanity’s darkest moments as a young Yazidi under ISIS occupation.
It will make you scream inside as Nadia describes her moments of inner turmoil as a sex slave under captivity.
Before ISIS, Nadia grew up in the quiet village of Kocho in northern Iraq. She enjoyed a simple, farmer’s life. All she had to worry about was her family, the next harvest and looking forward to the future.
Until ISIS came.
The book gets ominous, real fast.
“You say we came out of nowhere, but we sent you messages,” he said, his rifle swinging at his side. “When we took the hen and the chicks, it was to tell you we were going to take your women and children. When we took the ram, it was like taking your tribal leaders, and when we killed the ram, it meant we planned on killing those leaders. And the young lamb, she was your girls.”
Nadia and her community in Kocho are Yazidis, a minority religion practiced in Iraq. Yazidis worship what ISIS believed to be a fallen angel
Yazidis were ‘luffa’, infidels; unbelievers worthy of killing.
And killing, ISIS did.
It’s heartbreaking to see Nadia face down an endless stream of trauma and sorrow no 21-year-old girl should ever face.
She was forced to leave her village and home under fear of death.
She was given hope, had that hope taken away from her and was abandoned by people by trusted to face ISIS alone.
She had to watch her loved ones be murdered in cold blood in front of her eyes
Nadia and other girls were captured as sabaya; sexual slaves passed around from ISIS militant to ISIS militant. They raped and beaten her countless times.
As a reader, this was a hopeless scene.
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.
With human nature’s darkest and base impulses on full display, you wonder, how low can you go?
Lighter moments are brief but offer a counterpoint to the otherwise dour depiction of human nature in this book.
Nadia is miraculously rescued by a Sunni family who eventually helps her escape captivity in Mosul.
However, Nadia and the Yazidi’s struggles do not stop there. The effects of trauma are forever and all-encompassing.
We see the psychological impact of seeing your family shot dead before your very eyes, the physical damage and disability of war injuries and the damage to the community that will take years to recover from.
The Last Girl raises as many questions as answers.
How can human beings treat other human beings so cruelly? how can other human beings stand by idle when so much pain is being inflicted on others?
The genocide has altered lives forever. Nadia and (what remains of) her family now dedicate their lives to fighting ISIS on every front or surviving.
Even the people whom ISIS hadn’t managed to kill had lost their lives — an entire generation of lost Yazidis like my brothers and me, walking around in the world with nothing in our hearts but the memory of our family and nothing in our heads but bringing ISIS to justice.
Yet, The Last Girl is also Nadia’s love letter to her people, family and faith. Within the dark historical backdrop of massacre and survival, we find fond references to her humble background
The juxtaposition between her hopes and dreams of becoming a makeup artist or history teacher and her eventual fate makes my heart ache.
The Yazidi community is vastly thinned. People have lost their lives. Many are more displaced or remain in captivity.
And for those who remain, they will always feel the effects of the massacre.
“That was the hardest moment of Dimal’s homecoming — waking up that morning on mattresses next to each other and hearing her ask, her voice hoarse from crying, “Nadia, where is the rest of the family?”
The Last Girl will make you think.
It opened my eyes to what it feels like to be hated until someone wants to destroy your entire community on the basis of your religious beliefs.
I have immense respect for Nadia for going through so much and not losing the fight within her.
I cannot imagine enduring all the things she has endured and continuing the fight, or even surviving.
The Last Girl is a difficult book to read and the graphic descriptions of cruelty and hate captured in her story will make you shudder.
But this is exactly why you need to read it.
Nadia’s story takes an ongoing conflict happening somewhere else in the world, cuts past the political environment to give you a bleak picture of the depths humanity can sink to.
It is also a story of hope and determination. It also shows us the strength of the human spirit and drive to persevere in the face of great oppression.
I hope no one else has to experience what Nadia did.
