This is a review of the book "The Last Girl" My Story of Captivity and my fight against the Islamic State, by Nadia Murad, and Jenna Krajeski, published in 2017 by Virago Press, an imprint of Hachette UK.
Nadia Murad Basee Taha is a Yazidi Human rights activist who currently resides in Germany. Before that, she was an ordinary Yazidi girl born on the 10th of March 1993 in Kocho, Northern Iraq. Her book “The Last Girl” is a portrayal of her tribulations as a Yazidi ISIS captive. The book is a memoir of her life, as well as a call for action to the international community for fighting the Arab persecution of the minority Yazidis. The volume of human rights outrages and abuses the Yazidi community suffers is narrated through the length and breadth of this volume.
The book starts with Nadia introducing her family one member after the other and how they survived in pre-ISIS Kocho, a village in the Sinjar district of Northern Iraq. She was born into a family of 11 children and Nadia was the last girl. Nadia also introduces the reader to the Yazidi culture and how they survived among the Arab Muslims who were the dominating population around them. They were farmers who toiled hard to make a living. Though in humble circumstances, they lived a peaceful and contended life something that could be called a bucolic existence, until 2014, when Nadia’s village was attacked and taken over by ISIS. She, a 21-year-old student then, was also captured on the 15th of August 2014 along with the rest of her family and was held captive until she could manage to luckily escape one fine day from one of her captors when she left her alone in the house, unlocked. Until then, she suffered brutal torture both emotional, physical, and explicitly sexual. She was raped by multiple men who held her as her owner(s) as she was traded from one ISIS man to another. She also narrates an awful situation when she was gang-raped by the attendants of one of her owners as a punishment when she attempted to escape and was subsequently caught. Yazidis were subdued by ISIS so badly that the captive young women (mostly Yazidis) whom they retained as sex slaves or sabiyas were traded for as cheap as 20 USD per head. ISIS held high, the motto of “wiping out the (Yazidi) community from the face of the planet.”
Nadia’s account of her capture and subsequent events until she escaped from incarceration on the eve of her probable transportation to Syria (as threatened by her then-owner) is horrific and heart-wrenching. Nadia’s narration is both excessively emotional and truly factual, giving the reader real heartaches as if he were in the middle of the action. Throughout the book, Nadia enlightens us on the life of the Yazidis across the world and how the international community has ignored them which led to the incessant maltreatment and agony of the Yazidis. She states at multiple points in her narration how upset she was that the peshmerga, the Kurdish military forces of the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq along with their intelligence subsidiary Asayish, abandoned them at times of need. The book turns a thriller as one reads how Nadia escaped from the ISIS-conquered Mosul into Sulaymaniyah in Kurdistan crossing multiple checkpoints carrying a fake ID in order to hide her Yazidi identity, with the help of a benevolent, unselfish Sunni Muslim young man Nasser and his family in Mosul who risked their lives to smuggle her out of ISIS-controlled-areas, by mid-November 2014. She also touches on the guilt she feels for surviving when so many other Yazidi women like her did not, and the difficulty of adjusting to a new life in Germany where she was taken over as an ISIS survivor-refugee, after such a ravaging experience.
What we read throughout the book is nothing but a dreadful description of the carnage of the Yazidis, the peace-loving minority in Iraq, mostly traders and farmers who are persistently attacked by the Muslims and forced to convert to Islam. The Yazidi genocide was rationalized by the ISIS Research and Fatwa department stating that they were a Kurdish-speaking group with no holy book and therefore they were as equal to non-believers, whose servitude was in conformity with Sharia Laws. The conservative Yazidis always resisted such attempts to the best of their ability as they claim their religion to be based on strong edicts – they never marry outside their religion and for them, sex before marriage is still considered one of the worst sins ever. Nadia, in her account, has stated at many a point, how she hid the rape part of her story of captivity when she had to narrate it to multiple people immediately after she landed in Kurdistan, for fear of being abandoned later by anyone in her family who were lucky to be still alive.
In conclusion, "The Last Girl" is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand the human cost of conflict and the ongoing humanitarian crisis in post-Saddam-Iraq. Nadia Murad's real-life story is a powerful reminder of the resilience of the human spirit in the face of indescribable terror. Her tale depicts the cost of human barbarities towards a religious and ethnic minority which in her words has once “contributed to making Iraq a great country”. Her attorney, Amal Clooney states in her foreword in the book that “Nadia was one of the thousands of Yazidis taken by ISIS and was sold in markets and on Facebook”. A video where Amal Clooney describes this and all what Nadia faced, at the UN, with Nadia sitting next to her can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf7GOEhK1WI
As a woman who went through the pain of her mother and six of her brothers being killed by ISIS, Nadia’s call to action for the international community to take responsibility for the ongoing genocide of the Yazidis and to provide support for the victims of the conflict is a compelling message that can never be discounted. She states in the epilogue that she was “born in the heart of the crimes committed against” her.
Nadia Murad was named the “UN Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of the Survivors of Human Trafficking”. She concludes the book with the statement “I want to be the Last Girl with a story like mine.”
Nadia later founded "Nadia's Initiative" an organization dedicated to helping women and children affected by genocides, mass atrocities, and human trafficking to rebuild their lives.
Nadia Murad was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2018. Her highly motivational Nobel Lecture could be viewed here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqB0cMvGnIk
The book is available on Amazon (India) for INR 379.
9/10
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