Kocho's Living Ghosts - Part Seven
This is Part Seven of a serialized long-form essay. If you missed them, read Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, and Part Six. Make sure to subscribe to receive the remaining parts and subsequent writing in this newsletter.
Three years later, I sat across from a cross-legged Ali on the plastic-parquet floor of his porta-cabin in the Rawanga IDP camp. Unlike Saed, who was now bubbly and engaging, Ali stared into the middle distance when he spoke, unable to fully interact. I recognized his mannerisms from the way I've walked through the world at times over the last few years; unlike Saed and Kichi, Ali's still in the grips of shock.
"Other towns are surrounded by flowers and trees. Our village is surrounded by our bones;" Ali responded when I asked how he's feeling. Ali handed me his medical report, and photos of his injuries taken in the days after the massacre. One of the bullet's entered his back, and it still causes him pain, but the physical wounds are only part of it. "We are very sad. It will be an open injury all our lives. Nothing will change it." He paused and swallowed hard, choking back tears, his gaze fixed on his clasped hands. I looked behind him to a box of antidepressants on a small table by the bed. "The mass graves we experienced in Kocho, we can't put into words."
Ali lost his father, wife, sisters, brothers, and two daughters in 2014. One of his surviving daughters was freed from ISIS hands after nearly three years of captivity––she hadn't spoken since. The girls that returned within months of capture recovered well, for the most part, but those returning after years in captivity suffered levels of shock and trauma that rendered them speechless, and in some cases catatonic. Some of the girls in Rawanga were still wearing the clothes they were rescued in, weeks after their return; clothes they wore while ISIS owned their bodies and broke their spirits. I was left wondering why a world so horrified by ISIS' deeds couldn't find a way to dress their victims in something that didn't leave them enveloped in the hell they'd survived. Kocho's children were spoken to in Arabic while they were in ISIS' hands––they look at their relatives with suspicion when they speak Kurdish. Their indoctrination by the group left some of them with a propensity for violence, and they spoke flippantly about shooting their families with no emotion and dead eyes.
Ali struggled with the news that Kocho had been freed of ISIS control. "If we go to Kocho, we won't see our friends or have the same feeling as before. We will feel sad. We will never go back there."
I asked Ali about forgiveness, and he threw the question back at me. "I watched them kill people I loved, could you forgive such a thing?" "I'm not sure," I replied, explaining what ISIS did to people I love; that the reason I asked is that I'd been trying to forgive too—my question philosophical, not prescriptive. Ali nodded and broke it down for me. Forgiveness, he said, is for small things—a traffic accident, forgetting a meeting—it's not something for situations like this. "The Iraqi people now have written on their cars 'We forgive what is passed [forgive and forget].' How can I forgive someone killing me and my father and girls? We cannot forget. It is just bullshit." He spat the last words.
For Ali, like all the men, the wound is too deep to forgive—and they can't forget. It reminded me of the words of comfort a friend offered during one of the times I found myself sucked into the darkness in the years since my friends were killed. On this occasion, I wasn't just sad I was a ball of white-hot-rage, I'd been working hard to move on, and I resented the way I was feeling. "You keep acting like you're going to get your life back. You don't get your life back; you learn to live with the darkness." The friend said. He'd been held hostage at the hands of terrorists and knew a thing or two about recovery. I was furious with him at the time, but I came to realize that he was right. Sometimes something is so big that it possesses you, becoming the prism every word and every breath refracts through. Moving on becomes about learning how to live with that. For me, accepting the darkness, and finding a way to navigate the world despite being awake to the true depth of evil that exists in it, was the first step, but what happened in Kocho dwarfs my own experiences.
"Sometimes I want to talk about it, then I picture the graves, and my mind stops and I can't," Ali says, choking up again. He can't yet begin to accept. It was time to go.
This is Part Seven of a serialized long-form essay published in newsletter form. Subsequent installments will arrive in your inbox over the next three 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.