Kocho's Living Ghosts - Part Five
This is Part Five of a serialized long-form essay. If you missed them, read Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four. Make sure to subscribe to receive the remaining parts.
Saed Murad was in hospital in Dohuk when I first met him, a few days after the massacre. He was scared and badly injured, having just trekked through the Iraqi countryside to safety with six bullet wounds in his knee, shoulder, hip, and back. I perched on his bed, and he winced through the pain as he told me his story.
Twenty minutes after ISIS drove the first trucks full of Kocho's men away from the school, three more trucks took the next group. Half an hour later, the vehicles returned, and a third group departed. Saed was in the fourth group and piled into the trucks with around forty others. Nobody spoke as they drove west. When Saed saw their destination was the irrigation pools Kocho's men had built next to the village, he knew in his heart they were going to die. They begged for their lives, but rather than a reprieve, the twelve armed men laughed as they shot them. An injured man let out a cry before another round of bullets pummelled them. The men shooting were from neighbouring villages—Saed recognized them as friends, even as they laughed while filling him with bullets.
The brains of his two of his cousins sprayed across the ground as they died next to him, but he didn't scream. He didn't make a noise. He didn't so much as breathe.
US warplanes swooped overhead and scared the ISIS fighters off. Still, Saed lay on the ground like a snake, waiting until the coast was clear before fleeing to an empty house nearby to hide. From there, he watched the fighters return to bury the bodies––those too injured to move were buried alive alongside them.
As night fell, the women and children were loaded into the villagers own vehicles and driven away. Saed watched as the long convoy left Kocho. After dark, he and Ali, another man from the village who'd survived the massacre, began the long walk to safety.
Three years later, Saed was living in Rawanga refugee camp under the shadow of a small mountain range between Duhok and Zahko, along with almost all the surviving residents of Kocho. Not long after I'd seen him in the hospital, American aid workers took Saed to one of the country's leading hospitals for the best medical care; then they asked him where he'd like to go to. "I said I wanted to go to Sinjar. They were shocked."
While Kichi used his second chance at life to get Kocho's girls back from ISIS, Saed took up arms. As soon as he recovered, he joined the Yezidi forces fighting ISIS in Iraq's Sinjar region. There, he found his experiences had left him with uncommon bravery. On one occasion ISIS attacked his position; while most of Saed's colleagues fled, he stayed. "The Peshmerga...made me an Officer. Not for my studies, but for my bravery."
Despite sustaining injuries on the battlefield, he joined the campaign to retake Kocho. "When we took back Kocho, I went to all the mass graves...where Daesh shot us." He said, scrolling through photos, proudly holding up an image of himself in army fatigues alongside other fighters atop the school building where he'd been separated from the rest of his family and bundled onto a truck. "I took the power back. It felt good to go back to the place they separated us and shot us."
For Saed, Kocho will always be home. He returned with his sister the famous Yezedi campaigner and now Nobel Peace Laureate, Nadia Murad, when they first fought ISIS out. "I was so happy to see her. Together we visited our home." He said, pulling up a photo of Nadia on her knees, racked with grief among piles of clothes strewn across the floor of their house. I ask him what it is that gave him and his sister such remarkable character. The answer was simple; "We want to do something for Yazidis."
While his physical health is now good, inside, Saed says, the mass graves are with him always. "If we started a new life, it would stay until we die." I begin to suspect his attachment to Kocho is partly because moving on is impossible. "I want to avenge my six brothers' deaths." He says.
Six bullets hit his body. His six brothers remain in the graves around his town. Saed won't rest until someone pays.
This is Part Five of a serialized long-form essay published in newsletter form. Subsequent installments will arrive in your inbox over the next seven days, during the fifth anniversary of the genocide in Kocho.
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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.