The Morning They Came for Us Read Online Free PDF

justice. That was the singular motive of the women – and the men – who agreed to talk to me: that the men who had done this to them would not be able to walk the streets when the war was finished, with impunity. Some told me they spoke to me because hiding their story was like a ‘stone weighing down my heart’, as one young girl said tearfully.
    Many years before, I had had a similar task in Bosnia and Kosovo. Following those wars, the women were often held in ‘rape camps’ for weeks or even months, and would not use the word ‘rape’ in their own language. They would say – between sobs – that they had been ‘touched’. They would cry, saying that if their husbands knew, they would divorcethem to find a clean woman. They covered up their secret like a bloody wound, and told no one.
    The taboo of rape for any woman is enormous. But for a Muslim woman, who is meant to be a virgin upon marriage, it is the end of life, or the life she was meant to live. If she was single before, she will probably never marry. She will not have children, a family. In other cultures, this might be fine; but in the Middle East, where large families are a given, it means isolation from the rest of society.
    Later, Yazidi women, from an ancient community in northern Iraq, would report being kidnapped by ISIS soldiers, sold into slavery, held in houses, raped, forced to marry their captors. The sexual violence used against women during the war that rages through Syria (and later, Iraq, when ISIS pushed through the town of Mosul and began to erase the borders between Syria and Iraq) is a way of fighting the men themselves: if we cannot fuck you, we will fuck your women.
    Most of the rapes I was able to document were committed in detention. Some happened at checkpoints. Other women were raped in their homes, when the Shabiha entered their villages.
    The women who were held in detention report that rape was always the threat used when they were not ‘cooperating’. One young woman said that she was imprisoned with her mother and forced to watch the soldiers beating her mother.
    â€˜I did not care what they did to me,’ she said, ‘but to see my mother suffering . . .’ The soldiers threatened to rape her mother, before telling the mother that they were going to rape the daughter.
    â€˜This was the most terrible psychological pressure. I do not think you can imagine the pain . . .’
    Another young woman in Aleppo told me she was arrested for putting up revolutionary posters. She was partially stripped, blindfolded and tied to a chair.
    â€˜Then they said they would pass me from man to man.’
    When I met Nada in a safe house in southern Turkey, she had been out of prison for some months. But she still had the reflexes of a prisoner, of someone huddling in a corner, protecting her face and her body from blows. Sudden movements made her jump; she would frequently get lost in her thoughts, and stay silent for several minutes, or well up with tears.
    She was minuscule in size, thinner than when she had entered prison, which made it hard for me to believe that anyone could beat her with a stick or a whip. She looked as though she would break in two if you touched her. Her body was the size of a twelve-year-old: no breasts, no hips, shoulders hardly wide enough to carry her frame. She wore a lavender hijab and a tight red sweater. The childish clash of colours seemed to emphasize how young she looked.
    When we first met, she cowered when I touched her hand in greeting. She seemed broken, vulnerable. She would not use the word rape. She told her story in staccato. But after a while of sitting quietly, her face changed into a myriad of emotions – sadness, pain, then the heavy flood of memory, and finally revulsion. She told of the day they brought in a male prisoner and forced her to watch him being sodomized. As she talks, her voice