Nadia Murad’s tale of captivity with Islamic State

The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight against the Islamic State. By Nadia Murad and Jenna Krajeski. Tim Duggan Books; 306 pages; $27. Virago; £18.99.

THIS is a disturbing book. Many readers will find parts of it hard to stomach. But anyone who wants to understand the so-called Islamic State (IS) should read it. The jihadists who until recently controlled much of Iraq and Syria hit on a recruiting technique that was as crude as it was ingenious. They urged their fighters to capture and keep sex slaves—and convinced them to feel virtuous about it.

Nadia Murad was one of those slaves. Jihadists came to her village in Iraq and slaughtered all the adult men and the women they deemed too old to rape. The victims included Ms Murad’s brothers and probably her mother—she is still not sure. Ms Murad, then 21 years old, was taken to a slave market in Mosul. (“When the first man entered the room, all the girls started screaming.”)

She was sold to a judge, a thin, soft-spoken man whose job was to have people executed for trifling offences. He raped her every day, and beat her when he was displeased with the way she cleaned the house, or when he had had a hard day at work, or when she kept her eyes closed while he was raping her.

Even as he inflicted grotesque cruelties on her, he explained that what he was doing was just and righteous. IS had published rules explicitly stating that captured infidels were property and could be raped with a clear conscience. Ms Murad was a Yazidi, a member of a small religious minority that the jihadists particularly despised. They thought it their duty to exterminate this ancient faith through murder and forced conversion.

“You’re my fourth sabiyya [slave],” [the judge told Ms Murad]. “The other three are Muslim now. I did that for them. Yazidis are infidels—that’s why we are doing this. It’s to help you.” After he finished talking, he ordered me to undress.

Readers will find the jihadists’ reasoning as baffling as it is odious. On the one hand, the judge said he was allowed to enslave Ms Murad because she was not a Muslim. On the other hand, he forced her to “convert” to Islam—ie, he ordered her to recite the shahada, the Muslim profession of faith, or die—and then he continued to treat her as a slave anyway. He told her that it was pointless to escape, because her male relatives would kill her for no longer being a virgin, and for having converted.

Ms Murad tried to escape anyway. The first time, she was immediately caught. The judge punished her by letting his guards gang-rape her. Then he sold her to another jihadist.

She escaped again, and this time she had better luck. After dark, she ran into a poor neighbourhood of Mosul and banged on a door more or less at random. The Sunni Arab family inside made a split-second decision to help her, despite knowing that it might cost them their lives. They bought a fake identity card for her and smuggled her out of Mosul in a taxi, with Ms Murad posing as the wife of one of their sons. At one roadblock, she saw her picture hanging there—a “wanted” poster for a runaway slave. However, she was wearing a niqab, and the jihadists at the checkpoint were reluctant to insult a fellow Sunni Arab by making his wife expose her face, so she was not recognised.

She escaped to Kirkuk, and thereafter to Germany. She now tours the world bearing witness to IS’s barbarity, and urging the International Criminal Court to prosecute its leaders for the attempted genocide of her people.

There is hope in Ms Murad’s story. The caliphate has failed. In recent months its fighters have been driven from most of the territory and all the major population centres they once controlled. Their vision and methods were so ghastly that many of those they expected to support them decided not to. In one telling example, Ms Murad says her sister-in-law escaped from slavery because her captor’s wife was weary of his abuse of Yazidi girls and called an American air strike down on him.

Yet it is hard to be cheerful. Ms Murad is alive, but many of her family are not. Her young nephew, who was captured and brainwashed by IS, used to call and threaten her. The Yazidis have set aside their own traditions and welcomed back thousands of young women who are no longer virgins. But the jihadists have set a horrifying precedent: that zealots can raise an army by telling young men that their most savage impulses are holy.