Kocho's Living Ghosts - Part Three
This is Part Three of a serialized long-form essay. If you missed them, read Part One and Part Two.
The Kocho massacre and James Foley's murder were followed by the murder of American freelance journalist Steven Sotloff. Then the nightmare played out on repeat, with the killing of British aid workers David Haines, and Alan Henning, and finally, and most excruciatingly for me, Pete. When they were taken captive, I was managing several voluntary projects that aimed to protect journalists working in conflict zones. As a result, I spent a lot of time working with others to try to save each of the boys. When they were killed, all I could see was that we'd failed to bring them home. I took it hard. I'd close my eyes, and all I'd see was blood. I'd sit in the bottom of the shower and scream, or sob until my head-ached. I struggled with grief and survivor's guilt, unable to see that I never had the power or the responsibility to save anyone in the first place.
In the years since the killings, I've been clawing my way back to life, relearning who I was before the kidnappings. Finding myself after trauma involved carefully excavating the fragments of my former self—a woman who laughed readily and saw beauty and good in everything. It has been painstaking and painful.
As I've struggled to recover, I often thought about Kocho's men. The timing and intensity of our meeting and our common adversary, saw Kichi and Kocho's other survivors take a lead role in my memories of that fateful summer, one that's beginning to feel like a dream, or a nightmare —but one lived by somebody else.
Despite having every privilege and opportunity to come back to myself and my place in the world, I'm still haunted by what ISIS did to people I love. I've struggled to navigate life in a world where I know that the kind of evil and pain I've experienced exists. Some days, the full weight of my grief exists as a tangible presence in the world—I stare into the middle distance and suck energy from the room. On others, it's clear my heart can't break anymore, it just burns and crumbles. The sadness is larger than the sum of its parts. The ghosts follow me everywhere. I spend a lot of time wondering if it's ever really possible to recover once you've stared into the human face of evil.
Kocho's survivors have been through so much more, but they've had none of the same opportunities to recover. Their whole village—both its people and the place—are tied to the event that changed their lives. As Iraqi towns and cities began to be ‘liberated’ from ISIS, the stories were positive and celebratory; ones of new beginnings. I knew it wasn't so simple.
Two summers ago, Kocho was finally freed from ISIS control. I knew I had to go back and find Kichi and the other survivors I'd met in 2014 to understand what "coming home" looked like when, in the words of Somali poet Warsin Shire, "home is the barrel of a gun."
This is Part Three of a serialized long-form article published in newsletter form. Subsequent installments will arrive in your inbox over the next nine days during the fifth anniversary of the genocide in Kocho.
Like this content? Feel free to forward it on. If you received this and you’re not a subscriber, Subscribe Now.
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.