NON-FICTION
The Girl Who
Escaped Isis
Farida Khalaf with
Andrea C. Hoffman
Translated by Jamie Bulloch
Published: 2017
Publisher: Vintage
Page: 206, paperback

 

In August 2014, Isis fighters gave the Yazidi inhabitants of Kocho village in the mountains of Iraq three days to convert to Islam or ‘suffer the fate of infidels’. They erroneously viewed the Yazidi religion as a form of devil worship. Farida Khalaf, a young Yazidi woman who was then 18, belonged to one of the many families in Kocho who thought converting to another religion was tantamount to dying.

 

The result: The Isis stormed into their village, and the jihadists murdered all the boys and men including Farida’s father and elder brother. The girls—around 80 of them—including Farida, were forced into a bus, at gunpoint, and sold into slavery at Raqqa, a city in Syria. The women—including Farida’s mother—were taken elsewhere.

 

What’s worse, for the Isis fight­ers, misogyny is part of their reli­gion. And that made it possible for men to reject the idea of gender equality and enjoy a sense of power over ‘their’ women. They reveled in violent sexual acts that often left women bruised and bleeding. That’s what happened to Farida too. She was repeatedly sold into sexual slav­ery, raped, and beaten senseless when she tried to resist.

 

But the good news is that The Girl Who Escaped Isis isn’t just a harrowing tale of all that happened to Farida during the time she was held captive. Yes, she talks about the beatings (she lost sight in one eye, and there was a time when she could not walk for two months), and all the sexual torture that she had to go through.

 

She even narrates the attempted suicide episodes—from cutting her wrist with glass shards to trying to stick her finger into a light-bulb socket—carried out just to put an end to all the rape.

 

But the book is ultimately the story of a girl who survived the horrors of Isis against all odds. Farida currently lives in Germany and has been reunited with her mother and younger brothers, who were also taken from their village and held captive for months. However, escaping the clutches of Isis wasn’t the end of the fight for Farida.

 

Even when she was reunited with her surviving family members, the extended community looked down upon her as someone who had brought dishonor to her family by being raped. Even the name Farida Khalaf is a pseudonym, adopted to protect herself and her family from further shame.

 

What makes you unable to put the book down though is the way human spirit shines through the ordeals. Farida defies her captors from the get-go and she fights them every chance she gets and with every ounce of strength she has. Maybe Farida’s father, who was a soldier on border duty between northern Iraq and Syria, and who taught her how to shoot a Kalashnikov when she was just 15, had fired up her ‘fight’ rather than ‘flight mode.

 

This early life lesson was perhaps why she was able to bear the torture without letting it defeat her, even when things seemed far beyond her control. Farida worms her way into your heart with her fighting, screaming, kicking ways. You realize that in a similar situation you would have long given up and that makes you cheer for her unwavering spirit even more.