The Beekeeper Page 2

  What language did he speak?

  He spoke Russian with his friends and Arabic with me.

  When did you get away, and how?

  A month and a half ago. There was a woman who had three children in Daesh’s house with us. We came from the same region, and she became my best friend there. She and her children were also making rockets. We’d place them side by side in the car, filling it up with fifty or sixty rockets. One day Abu Jihad told us that he was going off to fight but that he’d be back. My friend called her relative, and she would have been able to get away the very next day but she waited an extra day for me, until Abu Jihad had left. Every minute in captivity cost a lot and yet she waited a whole day so that I could go with her. I’ll never forget her generosity, never. My friend was able to use the telephone at a coffee shop in the neighborhood. Luckily the owners weren’t with Daesh. We fled to Kobani in a skiff, where some people greeted us and told us that they were from the People’s Defense Brigades.

  All right, thank you very much. I’m happy you are all free.

  My family — my mother and my father and my brother and my husband’s family — are all missing.

  We all hope they’re safe, too.

  After listening to the recording I called Abdullah and asked him, “What’s the name of Nadia’s friend who escaped with her? Is it Raghda?”

  Raghda and Rula and Hoshyar

  “Yes. How’d you know?”

  “Are both of them in Dohuk right now?”

  “Yeah. They talk on the telephone every day. As you know, they have some painful shared memories.”

  “How are the children?”

  “They’re still shaken up by what happened. For example . . . well, I better not say.”

  “Please. I’m a grown woman. You can tell me.”

  “All right. Yesterday I went to see Nadia and her kids. She’s my cousin. I found it strange that her daughter would say to her, Mama, around this time you were taking off your clothes. And her younger son kept repeating, Allahu Akbar, just like that, every minute or so. Poor Nadia told them: We have to forget. We’re all very tired and we simply have to forget.”

  “Is there anything we can do to help? I feel horrible not doing anything.”

  “The best thing you can do is write about our suffering.”

  “Thank you so much for rescuing those kidnapped girls.”

  “I used to do business in Iraq and Syria, but ever since the Daesh disaster started, my work has become saving female captives. My phone rings off the hook. Sometimes Daesh men themselves will sell the women to me. Yesterday I rescued an entire family. I didn’t get to sleep until they finally arrived safely at four in the morning. Can you hear that ringing? Someone’s calling right now.”

  “Yes, please, go — we can talk some other time.”

  “Thanks. Call whenever you like.”

  The next day I was putting an orange in my shopping bag when Abdullah called me. I left the orange and the other items in a shopping cart and left the store.

  “Hello? I’m sorry I had to cut our conversation short yesterday.”

  “I totally understand — and deeply admire the work you’re doing.”

  “It was another escaped woman on the run calling. We found her this morning at dawn, thank God.”

  “That’s fantastic. I’m so glad to hear she got away. Was she alone?”

  “Yes. The problem is . . .”

  “What?”

  “The man who raped her also got her pregnant. We’re conservative families, as you know, and it’s a big problem for a girl to leave a virgin and come back pregnant. Nobody wants to have the children of terrorists.”

  “It wasn’t her choice.”

  “I know. Our spiritual leader Baba Sheikh issued a statement declaring that our girls running away from Daesh were helpless, powerless, yet brave in resisting terrorism, which is why their honor cannot be impugned even if their hymens have been damaged.”

  Is that pregnant survivor going to get rid of her child? I wondered to myself. If she has him, will he ever seem as beautiful in her eyes as other children are in the eyes of their mothers? Or would she always see him as a painful memory growing alongside her? Had his father ever been an innocent child or had he always been broken, oozing with poison? How had he learned to pray while he cut off people’s heads and raped young girls?

  “Are there rehabilitation services available to surviving girls?”

  “Our area is poor, as you know, but there are physical therapy sessions for the girls because they suffer from pain all the time. Sometimes they’re overcome with fits that are like epilepsy.”

  Their souls haven’t yet moved on, they never will, I thought to myself as I listened to Abdullah. That’s why their bodies hurt so much. Staying alive doesn’t mean permanent survival. Anyway, what is survival when the calamity survives along with you? To survive all alone is the worst kind of survival.

  “In Iraq I heard that the Yazidis had strange customs,” I told Abdullah, changing the subject, “and to tell you the truth, all of us Iraqis have strange customs, as you know.”

  “Some people believe that we worship fire, but actually we worship light, which is why we face the sun when we pray. If you visit the Palmyra ruins inside the Aleppo Citadel, you’ll find this inscription on one of the stones: Whoever built the Aleppo Citadel must have worshipped the sun.”

  “The sun deity was one of our Babylonian ancestors. There was democracy back then — people could choose which male or female god they wanted to worship. One of their customs took place on New Year’s Day, when they would smack the king’s cheek in front of his people so hard that he would start crying. They believed his tears were a good omen for the new year. As for my own customs . . . I write poetry. All my other habits are good ones.”

  “I thought poetry was a good habit. It’s not?” he asked.

  “Well, perhaps not when you’re obsessed with it night and day.”

  “I used to be obsessed with beekeeping, but ever since we’ve had our Daesh problem I’ve been distracted from the bees. Freeing people from those savages has become my daily concern.”

  “So from bees to beasts.”

  “I used to have a huge garden in Sinjar where I would tend to the beehives for hours on end, especially on Fridays — discovering the secrets of the bees, their meticulous organization, their harmony with nature. The movements of the queen bee up above, her superior flying abilities compared to the males amazed me, made me profoundly appreciate all the women in my life — especially the queen mother — because her loss would completely disorient the colony. In the end, the females surround the males and expel them from the hive because they’re not good for anything other than pollination. That’s some justice, isn’t it? In our society women work and sacrifice for others without getting what they deserve, without enjoying the same privileges as men. Women are oppressed even outside the world of Daesh, which has nothing whatsoever to do with rational human life, of course. I had experience as a businessman, which required a reputation, many business relationships, and knowledge of the roads. With the money I made selling honey in Iraq and Syria I was able to help save female captives — and I rely upon the same skills in my new work. I cultivated a hive of transporters and smugglers from both sexes to save our queens, the ones Daeshis call sabaya, sex slaves. We worked like in a beehive, with extreme care and well-planned initiatives.”

  “Actually it seems to me that males do more than just pollinate. You save queens, for example . . . I mean, female captives,” I said.

  Abdullah the beekeeper

  “That’s true, but our hive includes women, too, and they have a big part to play in the rescue operation. At the moment I need to be careful not to talk about the specifics of our work, for their own protection.”

  “So you gave up beekeeping because you’re
too busy smuggling families away from Daesh?”

  “Beekeeping’s just a hobby. What I’m doing now can’t be described. I can’t explain the feeling I get when I welcome back runaway girls, when they are reunited with their families. We all cry together, overcome with a mixture of joy and outrage. For the sake of that moment, that moment of reunion, I spend most of the day answering calls for help from voices that tell me where their prisons are located. So much of the time the families of the kidnapped can’t be found, and those who can don’t have much because they fled with nothing but the clothes they were wearing, leaving behind their homes and their farms and their animals. The smugglers who help us are working for a wage, and that’s their right.”

  “And who pays them?” I asked.

  “The people in our region help one another. They’re in each others’ debt. But sometimes I pay the drivers out of my own pocket, and then I get reimbursed by the Office of Kidnapped Affairs, no matter how much the rescue mission costs. In the Office of Kidnapped Affairs, they listen to the survivors and write down reports, but they don’t fund the operation until the girls are brought back, and sometimes they even pay by installments later. But money’s not going to stop us from doing whatever we can, even if we have to make special arrangements. Our work isn’t without danger, of course. Daesh gruesomely executed one of our drivers when he was caught. We were extremely sad to lose him. He was a young man, and I depended on him very much. In fact, up until now, we’ve lost twelve smugglers.”

  “How?”

  “Sometimes Daesh will propose letting the sabaya return to their families in exchange for a large sum of money. Those who are serious will release their sabaya in exchange for the money; yet there are others who claim they’re willing to go through with the exchange but then ambush the go-between when he shows up, killing him despite their previously agreed-upon arrangement. About twenty-five percent of direct purchases from Daesh ended up with our smugglers getting ambushed. There are also Daeshi infiltrators among the transporters, but this isn’t clear until it’s too late.

  “Those smugglers must get a large cut. Why else would they dangerously risk their lives?”

  “Some of the smugglers I work with used to run cigarettes. In the regions under Daesh’s control, smuggling cigarettes was no less dangerous than smuggling female captives.”

  “Is smoking forbidden by Daesh?”

  “It’s a major crime. They’ll even chop off the hand of anyone who uses tobacco, in whatever form.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Those cigarette runners would get paid a certain fee for the danger of their job, which is why they got an even larger cut when they shifted to smuggling captives. Not just because the cost is higher in relation to the danger involved but also because the emotional yield is so great — there’s a human value even greater than the material cost.”

  “How would the rescue operations actually take place?”

  “It would start with a phone call, a kidnapped woman trying to reach her family. Then the family would call me. I advised most people around here with my number not to waste any time exchanging extended pleasantries — you know how long our greetings can be. But of course, I fully sympathize with how it must feel for a person to make a call like that. I instruct the family to give the captive my telephone number so that I can make arrangements with her directly. Then we come up with a plan based on where she is. I use Google Maps to scope out the area — the old map of Syria I used back when I was selling honey is no good anymore because many of those regions have changed. Now I know all the neighborhoods in Raqqa, building by building. When the captive calls me, I pick a specific rendezvous point and a code word, informing her that it’s safe to get in the car with the driver who’ll pick her up. Once they get far enough away, she’ll be moved into a safe house, the same houses where smugglers warehoused cigarettes in the past. She’ll stay there for a few days, until the commotion caused by her disappearance dies down a bit. During that time the man who calls himself her master might try to track her down and punish her. Daesh’s police won’t go near women, though, because they are part of Muslim households. After two or three days the driver will come back to the safe house and they’ll continue their journey by car, then on foot for another five or six hours. Sometimes the operation will include crossing the river to Turkey in a skiff and, finally, spending about twelve hours in another car in order to reach the northern border of Iraq, where her family will finally greet her. Sometimes I’ll follow the mission step by step; sometimes I cross over into Syria to meet with the smugglers, guiding and encouraging them. There’s no need for me to welcome back those captives but often I tag along with the family to the border region between Iraq and Syria because I love being a part of these moments. It’s indescribable, everyone bursting with ecstasy and tears and hugs; I’ve witnessed this over seventy times, and every time I can’t keep myself from crying.

  “Can you remember the first time you saved one of the girls?”

  “In October 2014, I got a call from my brother’s daughter Marwa, who told me she’d been kidnapped in the Raqqa area. Bazda, I told her, which means get out of there, in Kurdish. Six days later she called me again to tell me she’d run away and that she was safe in the home of a Syrian family. She had stolen a key from a Daeshi woman; this woman used to guard Marwa, occasionally biting her, provoking her by picking fights, preventing her from doing anything, even dying. Marwa has scars from the time she tried to kill herself by slitting her wrists — but this woman saved her first and beat her afterward. Marwa opened the door at four in the morning, then closed it behind her and walked out into the street, flagged down a cab and got in. The taxi driver was stunned. As you know it’s rare to find a young lady hailing a taxi in the street at such an early hour. Where are you going? he asked her. She broke down in tears, telling him that she had just escaped from Daesh. Kill me please, I beg you, just don’t take me back to them.

  “I can take you to a neighborhood where the clans are sure to offer you shelter, he said. When they open the door, tell them: ‘I’m at your mercy.’ Arab clans won’t turn away anyone who knocks on their door and says that. Dawn was extremely quiet as Marwa approached a large house and knocked on the front door.

  “A woman opened the door. As soon as she listened to Marwa’s story she invited her inside. But when the woman’s husband heard that she had run away from Daesh he refused to take her in. He didn’t want to shoulder the responsibility; he said that he would have to hand her over to the police. The wife pleaded with her husband to just let the girl be on her way; eventually she apologized as she said goodbye to Marwa at the door. Marwa headed somewhere else, this time knocking on the door of a smaller house. A man opened the door with his wife and children behind him. When she told them she was running away from Daesh they invited her inside. They sat down in a circle around her and asked her to tell them what had happened. She wept even as they tried to calm her down, telling her they weren’t going to abandon her. Their house and their furniture signaled extreme poverty — they didn’t even have a telephone. They promised that as soon as the shops opened in the morning they’d take her to the Internet café so she could use the phone. When Marwa called me, I didn’t have a functioning network yet, but I decided to make a few calls and find her a smuggler. Marwa ended up staying with that family for fifteen days. They shared their food with her and told her repeatedly that she was safe with them. By the time I found a smuggler we’d run into a snag: the owner of the Internet café found out that she’d escaped from Daesh and threatened the generous family that he would send her back if they didn’t pay him $7,500. The family agreed to the ransom even though they had nothing, asking the man to give them time to scrape the money together. The members of the family went from house to house, managing to raise $7,000. When they went to give the money to the Internet café owner, they asked him to forgive the remaining five hundred; he agreed and let Ma
rwa leave with the driver. Marwa came back alone, without her mother or father or sisters or brothers. My brother and my sister and fifty-six members of my family, including cousins, are still missing.”

  “Where were you when all of this happened, Abdullah? I mean, when Daesh attacked the area?” I asked.

  “We were all in Sinjar. We lived in the same area. We saw each other almost every day. But at three in the morning on August 3, 2014, we heard the booming sound of artillery. We had never heard such blasts, even in times of war. Twenty-eight of us gathered together — my mother, my siblings, and their families — all of us hesitant to flee. It isn’t so easy for a person to give up their home. After four hours of waiting, we set off in a convoy. There were hundreds of us, including Muslims who’d lived in the same region alongside us for hundreds of years. It was like Judgment Day, people walking to God knows where, some of them barefoot, clutching their children or carrying elderly people on their backs. We couldn’t take too much with us but I grabbed four bottles of honey. We spent seven days like that: every morning our breakfast consisted of that honey, but the children didn’t like to eat it. They would cry because the whole situation wasn’t comfortable for them. Then we had to walk for seven hours to reach the mountaintop. Our water had run out. People can die from thirst in that time of the year. The strange thing was that a pleasant breeze came to us from time to time, a soft wind that saved us from dryness in that difficult time. Still, a lot of people died on the journey, including the ill, whose families had to leave them behind. Even though my mother had been recovering from a heart surgery a few days earlier, she walked those many hours. For her sake we’d stop every so often to let her rest, without ever making her feel like she was slowing us down. A blind man and his family, including his only child, joined our group. The blind man told us that his son was a miracle who’d blessed the family after they spent forty years trying to conceive. We shared a meal with them, scraping together whatever food they had with the honey we had left.