Consider This from NPR - Life After ISIS: A Portrait Of Human Resilience In The Middle East

Episode Date: December 8, 2020

2020 has been a year of resilience in the face of tragedy. But for much longer, resilience in the face of tragedy has been a defining story of the Middle East. In her final conversation for NPR, international correspondent Jane Arraf reflects on what it's been like to watch that story unfold. Arraf is departing NPR to take on the role as Baghdad bureau chief for The New York Times. Follow her on Twitter here.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

A couple of months ago, in a village called Salag in northern Iraq, workers in masks and white protective suits were digging. NPR international correspondent Jane Araf, who's covered the Middle East for years, was there recording and described what she was seeing. One of the men is shoveling the dirt into this big rectangular sifter and then fine pieces of dirt come out and he flips the gravel over. The other one is now going through it by hand, trying to make sure that they don't miss any of the bones. Bones. The men digging were Iraqi laborers working with investigators from the United Nations and an International Missing Persons Commission.

Saeed Marad, the brother of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Marad, was waiting to learn if their mother's body was buried there, in a mass grave known as the mother's grave. It's believed to contain the remains of dozens of women, some pregnant, who were killed by ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. My mother was the most peaceful, charitable person in the world. If she saw a poor person and we had only one piece of bread,

she would cut it into half and give it to him. We needed to have her with us longer. Murad's mother, and the others thought to be buried here, were Yazidis, an ancient religious minority targeted for genocide by ISIS. In 2014, the U.S. launched a military effort to protect the Yazidis. Today I authorized two operations in Iraq. Targeted airstrikes to protect our American personnel and a humanitarian effort to help save thousands of Iraqi civilians who are trapped on a mountain without food and water and facing almost certain death. That mountain was Sinjar Mountain, and thousands of Yazidis had fled there.

But the U.S. intervention, America's first entry in the long fight against ISIS, came days after the group began slaughtering villagers. Some 3,000 Yazidis were killed and dumped in mass graves around the region. 3,000 more are still missing, presumed dead. Hundreds of thousands more were driven out of the country. Now, six years later, investigators are trying to identify the bodies. This six-year-old boy's father and brother may be buried there, but that's not why he's crying. In fact, he doesn't even remember them. He's crying because investigators need to prick his finger with a needle for a blood test

that could help them identify his father and brother if their bodies are found in one of the 17 mass graves uncovered in the region so far. Nearby, a Yazidi woman named Leila was waiting to learn if her family was buried in the grave. She lost her mother, her two aunts, her sister-in-law, and her mother-in-law. We have nothing left in the world except these bones. We want to bury them properly and pray for them. We want to sit down beside their graves. Resilience in the face of tragedy.

It's something we've heard a lot about this year, and it's been a defining story of the Middle East for a long time. Coming up, NPR's Jaina Raff on what she's learned watching that story unfold. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish, and it's Tuesday, December 8th. This message comes from NPR sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers licensed professional counselors who specialize in issues such as isolation, depression, stress, anxiety, and more. Connect with your professional counselor in a safe and private online environment

when you need professional help. Get help at your own time and your own pace. Schedule secure video or phone sessions plus chat and text with your therapist visit betterhelp.com slash consider to learn more and get 10 off your first month writer baritone day thurston says this democracy experiment requires more than just voting this is incumbent on all of us. It takes two. It takes two to make a thing go right. It takes two to knock it out of sight. And both parties in a national level discourse, both sides have to still remain committed. How to be a good citizen. That's on the TED Radio Hour

from NPR. It's Consider This from NPR. Not all the Yazidis targeted by ISIS made it out of Iraq alive, but many did. And this year, some of them finally returned home. That's the sound of neighbors welcoming the Edo family back to their village of Tel Haseb in Iraq. The women unpacked cardboard boxes with dishes, pots and pans. The men unloaded a small flatbed truck carrying furniture and foam mattresses wrapped in plastic. Nalfa Hudea returned with her husband, Ali Edo. It's a beautiful feeling to be home, she's saying. She handed out chocolates in colorful wrapping.

The Edo family had been among the 200,000 Yazidis living in displacement camps in Iraq's Kurdistan region. Those camps were less than four hours away, but many Yazidis are too traumatized or too poor to return to their villages. Also in this village, Kutei Murad is another lucky one who could afford to return from Kurdistan after ISIS was largely driven out of the region by Iraqi and Kurdish Syrian forces. I was backed by the U.S.-led coalition. Murad found her house so damaged, her family had been living out of two rooms that they had repaired. They had no electricity or running water.

She said they were still finding snakes and scorpions in the yard. In Kurdistan, they took care of us and respected us. But we would rather live on bread and water here than eat meat and rice as displaced people. This is our homeland. That homeland is still incredibly fractured. The story of how it got that way has been told here at NPR for years by our international correspondent Jane Araf. In fact, all the audio you've been hearing was recorded in Iraq by Jane, who was there as the Ito family returned to their village. They gave her one of those celebratory chocolates. Jane is about to start

a new job as the Baghdad bureau chief for the New York Times. But before she goes, she sat down to reflect on her years covering the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and what she learned about the resilience of the people there. Jane spoke to NPR's Ari Shapiro. Here's their conversation. You know, you have told so many specific stories over the years that have often revolved around one big story, which is the rise and fall of ISIS, especially in Iraq. And you have brought us the voices of resilient survivors, dogged fighters, people who are reshaping the region after ISIS is gone. As you look back today, what stands out most to you?

So there was that incredible saga of watching ISIS take over large parts of Iraq and Syria, and the forces that were supposed to protect civilians basically retreated or ran away. Then when the battle for Mosul came, it was the fiercest fighting that anyone had seen in years. I had never seen such devastation. It was absolutely flattened in some parts of the historic old city. And so we went out, myself and our local producer Sengar Khalil, and we went out with civilians who were trying to find the bodies of their family members, most of them crushed to death when buildings were hit by airstrikes. This was 2017. One of them was a vegetable seller named Bashar Abdel-Jabbar.

I come and I go and I come and I go, he says. I have no house, no money. He says he's not crying for his son. He's crying over the disaster that has befallen everyone. The workers get out shovels and they start to dig. Out of that rubble and misery in Mosul, you have chronicled life coming back to the city and rays of hope.

Tell us about what you've seen. So you had this incredible fighting, this incredible tragedy of parts of a city being destroyed and thousands of civilians killed, and then nothing happened. The bodies of ISIS fighters were left to decompose for more than a year. The Iraqi government didn't come in to help, really, in a meaningful way. Instead, we saw young Iraqi volunteers, and they were picking up bodies and diffusing explosive suicide belts, restoring water to some of the neighborhoods. And then a year after ISIS was defeated, they held a reading festival. And that sounds routine, but it was extraordinary, because ISIS had banned most books

and music and shut down most colleges. And it turned out when quite a lot of people had stayed home under ISIS, they secretly read. We met a young pre-med student, Aboud Abdelaziz, who spent the years teaching himself English at home. And his dream was to build a cancer hospital. Your pain will be the best power to you when you use it to achieve your dream. I have many friends. We are right now just studying. I told them that we end our college. We have to do something new to our city. And then there's Sefwan Al-Madani, an engineer who volunteers his time to help rebuild the old city. He loves this event.

Here you see your friends, see the books, see that songs and music, see everything related to life. It's opposite of ISIS, opposite of death, opposite of anything is bad. So there were all these incredible people and almost every one of them had suffered tragedy, but they were out there with that incredible resilience. Beyond Mosul, another story that you followed closely was the genocide of Yazidis, this ancient religious minority that ISIS singled out as targets, enslaving thousands of people and killing thousands more. What's happening with the Yazidi people now? They are still absolutely devastated. You'll remember that the U.S. got into war against ISIS to try to protect Yazidis

who fled to Sinjar Mountain, but still 6,000 of them were taken captive. And of those, there are 3,000 still missing, and people can't even really properly bury their dead. Last year, we went to a village called Kucho, where almost the entire male population there was killed. They were commemorating the fifth anniversary of that genocide. They gathered at the mass graves, and the sound of it was absolutely haunting. She's calling out the names and singing to her loved ones who have been buried here in this mass grave. This might be the saddest song in the whole world.

And that trauma isn't over, Ari. I mean, you see these people and they're still desperately poor. The community from Sinjar, they have no money to rebuild homes or their lives. A lot of them are still in camps. They're dependent on food rations from A lot of them are still in camps. They're dependent on food rations from aid agencies, and they're still traumatized. You've been covering the region since the 1990s, and you've been an NPR correspondent for the last four of those years. Is there anything in the last four years that changed your understanding of the region?

There are a couple of things that have really stood out against the backdrop of so many things happening in Iraq. I guess I've been surprised at the capacity for bad government. I've been absolutely astounded by the courage of young people who have come out in these protests from Basra to Baghdad, literally risking their lives to demand not just water and electricity, but a homeland that they can be proud of, one that treats them like actual citizens. A young woman in a white medic's coat, a volunteer, is running from the tear gas. She doesn't want to give her name. She says the Iraqi government doesn't care about the more than 600 protesters killed, the 20,000 injured.

They don't care about our generation. They don't care about our youth. Don't think we'll stop. Enough. And that's really the thing, I suppose, that keeps drawing me back to Iraq and the thread that I see in a lot of these stories, it's that incredible resilience against all the odds, against the backdrop of so much tragedy that's so hard for so many of us to even imagine, against the backdrop of neglect by not just their own governments, but a world that seems to have forgotten them, that these people still have the courage to hope and to go out and do something to try to make their lives better. Jane Araf in her final conversation for NPR. Find her on Twitter at the link in our episode notes to follow her work at her new job as Baghdad Bureau Chief for The New York Times.

You're listening to Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish.