Kocho's Living Ghosts - Final Part
This is the final part of a serialized long-form essay and coincides with the fifth anniversary of the Kocho massacre, which occurred on August 15, 2014. If you missed them, read Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, and Part Nine. Make sure to subscribe to receive subsequent writing in this newsletter.
The other graves, and two 'kill sites,' are scattered around the edges of the town. Inside the village, there is endless destruction. The writing on some buildings serves as a stark reminder that ISIS lived here; there's an Islamic pharmacy and an Islamic hospital. One building says: "God willing ISIS will stay." Elsewhere, the airstrikes that helped ground forces drive the militants out of town flattened whole buildings. Only one or two houses show signs of life, with lights on, curtains hanging in the windows, flags waving in the yard. Their inhabitants mostly the handful of Yezidi Haashd who remain here to protect the territory. Some of the buildings are booby-trapped; former residents have been killed when they came to check on their homes and triggered explosive devices by opening their doors. Kocho's empty streets scream "nothing will be the same" at a pitch heard only by those who know the pain ISIS caused out here in the desert.
The exhumation of the mass graves has now finally begun. More than 150 bodies have been found and sent for forensic analysis and, five years later, Kocho's families now wait for a call telling them which bone is their brother.
"People should never forget what happened in Kocho," Jasso says. "What I hope from the world is to make Kocho into a museum to remember, for all the world to see for themselves what happened." While Kichi, Saed, Ali, and Kocho's other survivors make their own way through the darkness, this should be a place to remember. Like Hiroshima or Auzwich, Kocho must be a place that people can come and see what happens when the minds of men are warped to the point that they pick up weapons and exterminate their neighbours.
There are a few videos of life in Kocho that have survived. In one, of a wedding held at the school, the women of Kocho dance in a line, dressed in bright colors. They're singing as they bounce back and forward, arm in arm, across the basketball court behind the school. Most of the village attended, and they are joyful. While the town still physically exists, Kocho doesn't. The schoolyard now is eerily silent. Some of the women who dance in the video have returned from ISIS captivity, but many are still missing. With ISIS now defeated it's increasingly likely that the missing are dead.
ISIS' genocidal aim, to wipe Kocho off the map, was achieved. Perhaps the sound of children playing, and women dancing and singing, would cut through the sense of loss the town's desertion only magnifies; but which children, and which women? The remaining villagers, those who would even consider returning, wouldn't fill the space left behind, even as they carry the missing and the dead with them. Naif now leads his people remotely; they're now scattered across Europe and Iraq. Despite the triumphant headlines of victory over ISIS, in Kocho it doesn't feel like winning. Kocho's living ghosts can never go home.
This is the final part of a serialized long-form essay published in newsletter form. I spoke to the Global Dispatches podcast about Kocho and the Yazidi genocide. Give it a listen.
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Revolutionary Ghosts is a newsletter of personal writing by Emma Beals. It’s about how Syria changed the world and how reporting on it changed me, the idea of moral injury and the practice of moral repair, and the mess we're in and what we do about it. There will also be recipes.