Kocho's Living Ghosts - Part Nine
This is the penultimate part of a serialized long-form essay. If you missed them, read Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, and Part Eight. Make sure to subscribe to receive the final part and subsequent writing in this newsletter.
You can hear the voices of the dead in Kocho's school. The atrium reaches from the ground floor through to the landing upstairs, creating an airy space where the silent screams of the dead echo off the walls. This school is the last place the village of Kocho existed. They are still present in the room, the air thick with everything that Kocho was, and everything it has become. Unimaginable horror happened here: there's no blood, no bullet casings, but the magnitude of the evil that occurred in the room lingers, squeezing the air from your chest and the words from your mouth.
On the Mukta's first visit he found, among the papers strewn over the floor, the report card of his deceased nephew—he had been top of his class. As the militia traipsed upstairs, I, too, was overcome and broke into tears that I smeared across my face with the collar of my denim shirt, overwhelmed by the sense of loss. I wandered through the building among the books, desks, clothes, and children's knick-knacks scattered across the floor.
Two of the Yezidi fighters took me to the berm at the edge of town—a small mound of earth built up around it, that has been there since 2007 when Yezidi's came under attack from the al-Qaeda-led insurgency in Iraq. Back then, a Yezidi girl and a Sunni Muslim boy fell in love, but they were killed by her community when she tried to convert to Islam to marry him. Their killing prompted violent reprisals that led to the death of over 600 Yezidis.
On the outside of the berm, we stopped and scrambled over the dirt to the other side. Here were the graves, three within just a few meters of each other. Human bones were scattered around: a jaw, a leg bone. Patches of scorched earth where someone attempted to light a fire, perhaps to hide the evidence. The graves themselves were dirt mounds, each holding several dozens of Kocho's men who lay, undisturbed. I've not been able to stand at my own friends' graves, but I imagine them as unremarkable as these.
I spotted some bullet casings near one of the graves––they were close to the mound, the men having been shot at close range. I stood over the casings and pictured the scene I've imagined so many times. Outside the berm in Kocho, in the bruising summer heat, I allowed myself to inhabit just one of the nightmares ISIS wrought that summer. The men in black stood here, just behind the bullets, weapons raised and fired into Saed, Ali, Kichi, and the other men, just a couple of meters away. The nineteen surviving men laid here, wounded and bullet-ridden, playing dead among the corpses of their friends and families who were buried where they fell. This mound of earth was the pain of Kocho in its most literal form—here I understood the brutality and banality of evil.
This is Part Nine of a serialized long-form essay published in newsletter form. The final installment will arrive in your inbox tomorrow, on the fifth anniversary of the genocide in Kocho. 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.