Yazidis freed from ISIL captivity are still haunted by their memories and wondering about the fate of their loved ones.
![While younger Yazidi women were taken as wives or sex slaves by ISIL fighters, many men were killed [Mohammed A. Salih]](https://i0.wp.com/www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2015/1/20/201512012225203580_20.jpg "Yazidis tell horror stories about ISIL captivity")
Ayshan Feli, 52, and her husband lay down on a white mattress on the floor of a building inside the complex of the Yazidis’ holiest temple site, Lalish. Their faces were at times expressionless, and at other times gripped with sorrow.
When the couple was released on Saturday night along with nearly 200 followers of the ancient Mesopotamian faith, the fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) took away their one-year-old granddaughter.
“They asked me to give them my granddaughter. I refused,” recalled Feli, who was wearing the typical Yazidi black dress and white scarf. “They pulled her out of my arms and said if you protest, we will kill you.”
Hama Faris Khudeda, 58, Feli’s husband, who lay covered in a blanket with only part of his face visible, added: “I said, ‘Why are you taking away our granddaughter? She is ours.’ One of them said, ‘Shut up or I will shoot you. If you talk more, we will take your wife too.'”
The family was abducted from the Nisiri village, south of Mount Sinjar, by a group of ISIL fighters in early August. The villagers were allowed to stay at their homes for a few days if they converted to Islam to save themselves from ISIL’s wrath.
“We converted so they wouldn’t harm us,” said Khudeda, a disabled man sporting a thick white moustache.
But one day, ISIL fighters ordered Khudeda and other villagers into trucks and stripped them of all valuable belongings such as money and jewelery, and took their cars.
They were kept for three months in the nearby village of Kucho, the site of a reported massacre where hundreds of male Yazidis were slaughtered by ISIL in August.
Then, along with scores of other Yazidis, the couple was moved to Talafar, a town northwest of Mosul, which has witnessed its share of ISIL brutality as many Shia Turkmen residents were killed and the rest had to flee.
Later, the family was moved to Mosul, the largest urban centre under ISIL control with a population of nearly two million.
While younger Yazidi women were taken as wives or sex slaves by ISIL fighters, many men were killed. Younger boys have been put through ideological training by the group in the hopes of detaching them from their roots and turning them into future fighters.
The group that was released on Sunday was a mix of elderly, ill and mentally or physically disabled individuals.
The area of Sinjar, in the western part of Iraq’s Nineveh province, had the largest concentration of Yazidis in Iraq and the world until last August, when the area was attacked by ISIL fighters. The group has been subjected to extensive brutality by ISIL, which deems them “infidels”.
Maltreatment was the norm for the freed Yazidis, who were held in a wedding hall in Mosul for the last month of their captivity.
Those Al Jazeera spoke to unanimously said they were given “dirty”, low-quality food, often improperly cooked. They were scarcely allowed to take a shower. One woman said she did not get a chance to shower for 28 days, and even when they were allowed to do so, there was no warm water.
As a result, some of the detained Yazidis developed skin diseases. Some of the children and elderly could be seen with skin ulcers. As aid workers roamed around to distribute food and water, some of them covered their faces with masks for fear of contagious diseases among the released Yazidis.
Mayan Faris Qassim, 45, and her two sons were among the group released by ISIL while her husband, three sons and two daughters, one aged nine, remain in ISIL detention.
Qassim and her two sons have all developed skin ulcers. Her four-year-old son is in serious condition as his cheeks, forehead and nose are covered with severe ulcers. Now free, the priority for Qassim is to get her sons and herself treated.
For a community whose identity has been shaped for millennia around their religion first and foremost, being forced to change that religion has been psychologically and emotionally devastating.
For a community whose identity has been shaped for millennia around their religion first and foremost, being forced to change that religion has been psychologically and emotionally devastating.
Qassim says her nine-year-old son even went to the mosque to pray, but she did not. “We never converted deep in our hearts. We are Yazidi,” she said.
The members of the group were notified on the night of their release that they would be set free “because Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi [ISIL’s leader] had issued a pardon”.
Many did not believe the fighters and as they were forced into buses, they feared something ominous was awaiting them. But relief took hold when the Yazidis were ordered off near a position of Kurdish Peshmerga forces in Kirkuk province, a key battleground between ISIL and the Peshmerga.
The trauma they endured and the painful memories of loved ones still in captivity has left the Yazidis here overwhelmed with sorrow, despite being free at last.
As she sips from a small water bottle, Feli sums up the mood here.
“Our life is no more,” she says, overwhelmed by emotions. “We cry so much. We grieve so much.”
In October 2013, al-Ajami’s 15-year prison sentence — ostensibly for a 2010 poem that criticized Qatar’s emir — was upheld as “final.”
At the time, al-Ajami’s lawyer, Najib al-Naimi, still held out hope for a pardon from the emir. But more than a year has passed with no sign of a pardon.
Still, al-Ajami is not forgotten, and on Feb. 27, and poets — includingImtiaz Dharker, Sabrina Mahfouz, and John Paul O’Neill — will mark two years since al-Ajami’s sentence was reduced from life in prison to 15 year.
The event is set to begin at 7 pm, with doors opening at 6.30pm. It will be held at Amnesty International UK, The Human Rights Action Centre, 17-25 New Inn Yard, London EC2A 3EA
The event is free but people are asked to reserve a place online.
Al-Ajami was arrested in November 2011 after the YouTube publication of his “Tunisian Jasmine,” a poem that praised Arab uprisings and criticised governments across the region. The case against him was ostensibly about the 2010 poem that criticized the emir, but many believe authorities are punishing al-Ajami for his Jasmine poem.
Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s free translation of the Jasime Poem, which was read at an event in support of the poet in San Francisco:
Jasmine Revolution Poem
By Mohammad al-Ajami Ibn al-Dhib
Prime Minister, Mohamed al-Ghannouchi:
If we measured your might
it wouldn’t hold a candle
to a constitution.
We shed no tears for Ben Ali,
nor any for his reign.
It was nothing more than a moment
in time for us,
historical
and dictatorial,
a system of oppression,
an era of autocracy.
Tunisia declared the people’s revolt:
When we lay blame
only the base and vile suffer from it;
and when we praise
we do so with all our hearts.
A revolution was kindled with the blood of the people:
their glory had worn away,
the glory of every living soul.
So, rebel, tell them,
tell them in a shrouded voice, a voice from the grave:
tell them that tragedies precede all victories.
A warning to the country whose ruler is ignorant,
whose ruler deems that power
comes from the American army.
A warning to the country
whose people starve
while the regime boasts of its prosperity.
A warning to the country whose citizens sleep:
one moment you have your rights,
the next they’re taken from you.
A warning to the system—inherited—of oppression.
How long have all of you been slaves
to one man’s selfish predilections?
How long will the people remain
ignorant of their own strength,
while a despot makes decrees and appointments,
the will of the people all but forgotten?
Why is it that a ruler’s decisions are carried out?
They’ll come back to haunt him
in a country willing
to rid itself of coercion.
Let him know, he
who pleases only himself, and does nothing
but vex his own people; let him know
that tomorrow
someone else will be seated on that throne,
someone who knows the nation’s not his own,
nor the property of his children.
It belongs to the people, and its glories
are the glories of the people.
They gave their reply, and their voice was one,
and their fate, too, was one.
All of us are Tunisia
in the face of these oppressors.
The Arab regimes and those who rule them
are all, without exception,
without a single exception,
shameful, thieves.
This question that keeps you up at night—
its answer won’t be found
on any of the official channels…
Why, why do these regimes
import everything from the West—
everything but the rule of law, that is,
and everything but freedom?
Lord Robert Skidelksy’s keynote presentation – “The Future of Work.” Presented at the 12th International Post Keynesian Conference. Recorded Saturday, September 27, 2014. More details at pkconference.com
by mlynxqualey
Algerian novelist Assia Djebar — frequently mentioned as a Nobel Prize contender and one of the “immortals” of the Académie Française — died in a hospital in Paris:
According to Algerian state radio, Djebar — whose given name was Fatima Zohra Imalayène — will be buried in her native Cherchell, where she was born in 1936.
Djebar wrote novels and short-story collections striking for their wide historical sense and their female focus. They included: The Thirst, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, A Sister to Scheherazade, So Vast a Prison, Algerian White, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment and The Tongue’s Blood Does Not Run Dry. She also wrote poetry.
She moved to France to study at 18 and began her life as a bearer of many “firsts” when she became the first Algerian woman to be admitted to the country’s top literary university, the Ecole Normale Superieure. She published her first book in 1957, at just twenty-one.
Dejbar, like many Algerian authors, was criticized for continuing to write in French after her nation’s independence. Although she never wrote in Arabic, she did study the language, and attempted to use French to “reproduce Arabic rhythms.”
In a 2010 interview, Djebar said that she writes “against erasure”:
In some of my earlier books (So Vast the Prison, Algerian White, etc..) memory was often the first impulse to write, or rather the sudden urgent need to record the spontaneous testimony of someone close … Because a sudden fear seized me of seeing this shard of life, this moment of real life – with its grace, or the hollow of despair in an anonymous story, yes, sometimes fear grips me that these fragile moments of life will fade away. It seems that I write against erasure. Most often, in this flow of a past life, of desperate or brilliant experience, illuminating, a spark, shy at first, then hardened obstinacy makes me say: “this must be fixed, this should not plunge into the night, into oblivion or colorless indifference! This need to inscribe: at least it doesn´t matter if it’s me who takes the pen, or some other suddenly arising to whom I could pass the lightning glimpse (pain, rebellion, or short joy) …
She won a number of other prestigious prizes for her writing and cinema including the International Critics’ Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1979, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1996, sometimes called the “American Nobel,” and the Frankfurt Peace Prize in 2000.
In 2005, Assia Djebar became the first woman from the Maghreb to become an “immortal” — or life-long member of the prestigious Académie Française.
Works available online:
L’Amour, la fantasia — Excerpt of the novel in English translation
Algerian White — Excerpt of the novel in English translation
“Women of Algiers in Their Apartment“
| Commentaire | Voir tous les commentaires | J’aime |
One minute all was fine and the next minute I couldn’t log in. It was as simple as that. I think it has something to do with the fact that I exposed an Israeli plant, or troll or paid collaborator or maybe he (or she) was all of the above. The person’s name is not relevant because it is most likely fake anyway, and the names change constantly. This one is called Trevor something.
How do we know someone is an Israeli plant? Easy. Read the content. They go from Palestinian solidarity to Nazi ideology very fast. In fact they go from one to the other so fast, it becomes obvious it’s an Israeli intelligence plant. Shutting me down is not Israel’s primary objective, but delegitimizing the Palestinian cause is. The case that Israel wants to make is that the Palestinian cause is anti semitic, that it is aligned with the Nazi ideology and Islamic fundamentalist international terror networks and Iranian nuclear ambitions. Well, something like that.
So this one character on FB, who had befriended hundreds of my FB friends was spewing Nazi ideology and trashing me in the process, mostly for being Jewish and therefore not being sincere regarding the Palestinian issue. He was claiming that I was a Zionist plant and since you can’t trust F’n Jews anyway… well, you get the idea.
The important thing is that Israel is on the defensive. Israel is trying to change the subject and is failing miserably. The Israeli military is weak. It is no more than a brutal, over-armed, over-financed and overly confident terror organization. The legitimacy of the IDF is being put to question by everyone except for the greedy dealers who provide it with weapons. Israeli politicians and army commanders, when from time to time they lift their heads out of the sand, see a grim sight and they are worried.
They are worried about the effects of BDS, they are worried about the growth and the influence of the Palestinian solidarity organizations around the world and they are very worried about the growth of SJP and other students groups on campuses in the US. They know that no matter how many marches Bibi Netanyahu may walk and how many speeches he may give in US congress, the world is going to side with the Palestinians and Zionism will be be thrown out along with all the other racist, colonialist movements.
Since there is little Israel can do to make things better, they spend their resources on putting out little fires, and my FB pages were the little fires they can put out. It is pathetic, it will make no difference whatsoever. The voice of the Palestinian solidarity will not be weakened, my voice will not be weakened and the struggle will go on. In other words, with or without Facebook the struggle continues until the Zionist regime is behind us and Palestine is free, until every prisoner is freed, until Gaza is free and rebuilt and until every refugee is allowed to return and is given restitution.
band annie's Weblog 