I suddenly awoke to the nightmare of a government decision to remove us, along with other Kurdish families, from our homes in the vicinity of the strategic oil fields in Kirkuk. It was 1975. President Saddam Hussein had begun to implement a demographic engineering programme to Arabise that region. Our journey of displacement led us to Mosul, dubbed the “Spirit of Iraq” and “The Mother of the Two Springs”, with the hope that we could live safe and secure amidst a predominantly Arab population. We soon settled into a calm and harmonious life. My father began work in a state-owned factory, which ensured him a house and a salary. The years passed in a comfortable rapport with our neighbours, with nothing to scar my memory apart from a single incident that occurred in 1984. I accorded it no importance at the time, but it flashed back to mind in June 2014 after Mosul fell to IS. In that 30-year interval, in which I recall how excited I and my siblings were when we added new rooms to our small house so that my brother could get married, no one else passed by and shouted at us, “this isn't your home. So, don't waste your time. We're the future of this land.” IS and its members were not strangers, despite the handful of foreigners among them. They had been our neighbours and our neighbours' children who had been nurtured on extremist thought. They had wanted to drive us out from Mosul since the 1980s and their dream had come true. As for us, we had to bury the roots we had planted there, never to return. For decades we had had broken bread together with our Muslim neighbours, and shared in their joys and their misfortunes. But that climate changed following the collapse of the state and the rise of the wave of violent extremism which, starting in 2003, would surge from the mosques after Friday prayers. I used to ask my wife to wear a niqab so that we could go to the market together. I lived in constant terror for my children should they want to go to school. We kept them cooped up at home for days or even months on end. Educating them had become a luxury for us. Other people's children were kidnapped. Some of them were never heard from again. We had become the “other”. The “other” was a “heretic” whose economic interests and ways of life were under attack. The wrath against the “heretics” would peak some days before the holy month of Ramadan every year. The streets would swarm with an army of raging bearded men. To avoid ending up their scapegoats, we sought temporary refuge in Ankawa in northern Iraq. Then we returned to our homes once the madness had passed. We were confident that IS, which had seized control of Ramadi and Fallujah, would never come near Mosul which was protected by a regular army of strong and stalwart men. But the unexpected happened and the defeat was resounding. IS unleashed the full force of its ferocity against society and the state in Mosul, while from our midst surfaced gangs of thugs bent on plunder, theft and discrimination. I was doing shifts as one of the “angels of mercy” tending to the wounded at the hospital. Then the devil, himself, arrived and began sift and sort workers and staff on the basis of their religious affiliations, with immediate execution and massacre reserved for Shias while other minorities were condemned to the payment of the head tax for non-Muslims or exile. Not even Sunni Muslims were spared from slavery under that satanic model of Islam. I spent three days in fear of being hauled out to the courtyard and slaughtered until a brother in the spirit of humanity helped me to freedom. I raced home to my wife and children so we could collect some of our precious belongings and commence a new journey of displacement. We were terrified as we made our way through the city, the stench of blood wafting from the rubble of ruined buildings and thousands of others, like us, trudging towards the border barrier at Karamlesh, leaving behind tons of gold and their cars abandoned in the open. As I looked around me, I felt immense pain at the loss. I tried to bargain, hoping to find a shred of sympathy for my wife who suffers muscular dystrophy in her leg, so that we could keep the last of our belongings. But the IS guard said, “leave with the clothes on your back. Everything else that belonged to you and to others is now the property of the Islamic State. If you don't like it, you can leave us your wife and your daughter.” I embraced my family, grateful that I still had all of them. Then we set off on our refugee journey. We have travelled for thousands and thousands of miles, holding on to the dream of safe asylum in a country that respects human rights. 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The writer is a researcher in political and strategic affairs.
