The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity and My Fight Against the Islamic State

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Still, most families in Kocho kept weapons at home—clunky Kalashnikov rifles, a big knife or two usually used to slaughter animals on holidays. We are not responsible for the republishing of the content found on this blog on other Web sites or media without our permission. However, she continues to dig away at the island’s secrets, under covering a web of myths and legends and whispers of the supernatural.

At her elite high school, Rachel doesn’t fit in — until she stumbles across the Mary Shelley Club and joins in on their game. But it also made us targets of persecution by larger groups, from the Ottomans to Saddam’s Baathists, who attacked us or tried to coerce us into pledging our loyalty to them. It wasn’t the money that made their wives collapse in tears in front of our mukhtar, or village leader, Ahmed Jasso; forty thousand dollars was an otherworldly sum, but it was just money. I’ve probably sold it to you already, I know, but I guess I’d better expand a little on what makes it so amazing – readers seem to expect it!The first part is interesting and smooth sailing giving great insight into the Yazidi culture and Nadia's childhood and so you get quite a shock moving in to part 2 where she gets kidnapped. Soon afterward Dishan, a man employed by my family, the Tahas, was abducted from a field near Mount Sinjar where he watched our sheep. I loved the character dynamics in this, really intriguing interactions and relationships that were difficult to pin down keeping things unexpected and tense. This inspiring memoir takes us from her peaceful childhood in a remote village in Iraq through loss and brutality to safety in Germany.

With twists and turns that will keep readers guessing this book is page-turner with an ending you could never guess at from bestselling author Goldy Moldavsky. Written in her own words this tells of her treatment while in the hands of ISIS as well as her early village life. Nadia Murad was born and raised in Kocho, a small village of farmers and shepherds in northern Iraq. Nadia Murad is a courageous young Yazidi woman who has endured unimaginable tragedy and degradation through sexual enslavement to ISIS. About 60% of the way into the book, things got a little more tense and exciting (due to Sadie's carelessness but still .Not to be taken too seriously, and not something you’d ever want to experience in reality, but self-aware enough to feel the author was having just as much fun writing it as I did reading it. I think the underlying message is clear: sexual violence and genocide perpetrated in times of war, when victims are at their most vulnerable shows humanity's most despicable side. She shares the events and experiences that will be burned into her memory forever, so many things that even time can never erase.

Hezni, one of my brothers, came home from his job as a policeman in Sinjar City and joined the other village men who loudly argued about what to do. In the opposite direction, away from those lamb sandwiches and the comfort of the mountain, was the rest of Iraq. They chose land that would be good for farming, but it was a risky location, on the southern edge of Iraq’s Sinjar region, where most of the country’s Yazidis live, and very close to non-Yazidi Iraq. Despite the survivors’ best efforts and Murad winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for her work as a human rights activist, the world largely remains woefully unresponsive – even ignorant about the Yazidis’ plight.Besides Rachel the other characters are written in such a way that they feel like real people which teen novels often struggle to achieve. We had friends in those villages—girls I met at weddings, teachers who spent the term sleeping in Kocho’s school, men who were invited to hold our baby boys during their ritual circumcision—and from then on bonded to that Yazidi family as a kiriv, something like a god-parent.