I've said Daesh, the local name for ISIS, with a thick Yezidi accent since the summer of 2014 when I first met Kocho's living ghosts. The emphasis is on the vowels, heaviest on the 'e.' Dah-ee-sh. Maahr-fee Dah-ee-sh. It means 'there is no ISIS.' Tomorrow marks five years since ISIS entered the small Yezedi town of Kocho in northern Iraq and tried to wipe it off the map. Kocho's ghosts––the nineteen surviving men from the town's original population of 1,888––say that day, they "survived the mass graves." When the town was taken back from ISIS three years later, I stood among the bullet casings by the mounds of dirt that cover the bodies of the dead, and I finally understood their choice of words. The nineteen surviving men lay in the piles too, wounded and bullet-ridden, playing dead among the corpses of their friends and families. Their women were taken and raped. Their children brainwashed and forced to fight. The men's fate was a pile of earth. They didn't just survive an attack. They weren't just injured. They lay in the graves where their stories were supposed to end, and tore life back from the grisliest of deaths.
Kocho's Living Ghosts - Part One
Kocho's Living Ghosts - Part One
Kocho's Living Ghosts - Part One
I've said Daesh, the local name for ISIS, with a thick Yezidi accent since the summer of 2014 when I first met Kocho's living ghosts. The emphasis is on the vowels, heaviest on the 'e.' Dah-ee-sh. Maahr-fee Dah-ee-sh. It means 'there is no ISIS.' Tomorrow marks five years since ISIS entered the small Yezedi town of Kocho in northern Iraq and tried to wipe it off the map. Kocho's ghosts––the nineteen surviving men from the town's original population of 1,888––say that day, they "survived the mass graves." When the town was taken back from ISIS three years later, I stood among the bullet casings by the mounds of dirt that cover the bodies of the dead, and I finally understood their choice of words. The nineteen surviving men lay in the piles too, wounded and bullet-ridden, playing dead among the corpses of their friends and families. Their women were taken and raped. Their children brainwashed and forced to fight. The men's fate was a pile of earth. They didn't just survive an attack. They weren't just injured. They lay in the graves where their stories were supposed to end, and tore life back from the grisliest of deaths.