Ferah’s World: A Teen Girl among ISIS | God's World News

Ferah’s World: A Teen Girl among ISIS

02/26/2018
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    Iraqi teen Ferah says writing helped her endure the time the Islamic State ruled over her home city of Mosul. (AP)
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    Ferah’s home city of Mosul, Iraq, was ruled by Islamic extremists. A single wrong word could get you killed. (AP)
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    Airstrikes on Mosul crush Islamic State fighters but destroy the city as well. (AP)
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    Iraqi children flee through the rubble as Iraqi forces advance against Islamic State fighters in Mosul. (AP)
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    An aerial view shows Mosul, Iraq, lying in ruins. (AP)
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Everyone in Mosul, Iraq, dreaded the Islamic State-imposed checkpoints. But the women hated them most. The fanatic gunmen were unpredictable when they encountered the slightest hint of what they considered “sin.” One of them leaned into the backseat of the taxi the three women were riding in. He peered at 14-year-old Ferah.

Ferah’s face was veiled, but she had forgotten to cover her eyes. She was also not wearing the required gloves. If she lifted her hands to fix her veil, the soldier would see her bare hands. Punishment would be sure to follow. Fear-filled, Ferah shrank in her seat.

In rage, the gunman screamed threats of punishment for lawbreakers. The others pulled the taxi driver from the car. How did he know these “immoral” women?

Then suddenly, it was over. Somehow, the driver calmed the IS fighters. They let the taxi go, but safe at a friend’s house, Ferah broke down, trembling. This was the nightmare world the Iraqi teen now lived in.

A DARK NEW WORLD

It wasn’t always this way. Before the summer of 2014, Ferah had never even heard of the Islamic State. Her world seemed wide open. She attended the best private school in the city. She was taking classes in English, her favorite subject. She dreamed of becoming an interior designer. But in June, everything changed. IS militants took over Mosul. In one night, the city fell into a dark chaos.

Around midnight, the streets lit up with headlights. Neighbors piled into cars, screeching away as artillery and gunfire echoed. Across the city, a panicked exodus erupted. Ferah’s two eldest sisters, who were married, fled to the nearby Kurdish zone. Her best friend messaged that her family was running to Turkey. Ferah’s family stayed.

The next morning, her world was ruled by the militants, sneeringly referred to by their Arabic acronym, Daesh (pronounced like breaking the English word “dash” into two syllables: da’ash).

Days turned into weeks. The militants enacted horrors in the streets—shooting and stoning people who opposed them or violated their impossibly strict rules. Ferah retreated into her bedroom. It became a private sanctuary for her. Mostly alone, she put her thoughts into writing.

In the evening, Ferah lit a candle. Its faint glow stirred in her a likewise faint hope. She took out her iPad and wrote a few lines on her Facebook page. Each day she shared a feeling: a fear or a hope. How could her family survive like this? she wondered into cyberspace.

THE PLAGUE

When school started again, it was under IS control too. Ferah’s private school was closed, so she went to a public one. She was certain some girls in her class were Daesh. Their faces hidden under veils, they hardly talked but when they did, it was to judge harshly. Ferah was afraid of them. She stopped going to school.

The son in the family next door joined Daesh. Soon the father wore militants’ clothes too. It was like a plague, spreading and transforming people—people Ferah once trusted. One by one, Ferah’s remaining friends packed up for Turkey or the Kurdish areas.

Relatives and family friends who stayed dropped by her house with news: strict laws, arrests, public floggings.

Ferah’s father, a university professor, explained that Daesh was exploiting religion: “Speaking righteousness while committing evil,” he said. He and his wife considered themselves a religious Sunni Muslim family. Ferah, her sisters and their mother wore headscarves, like almost all Muslim women in Mosul. But this rigid and punishing power was not like the Islam they had known.

Religious police monitored everyone. Women and girls were ordered to wear the niqab: a black robe with long gloves and veil. The niqab hid any hint of a woman’s human form or identity from men’s eyes. Ferah hated the niqab. She hated being reduced to an unidentifiable object. She hated Daesh. And she hated her life.

One October morning, after helping with the breakfast dishes, Ferah went to her room, locked the door, and cried. Her friends and sisters were gone. One sister had given birth to Ferah’s niece since she had fled. Ferah hadn’t even seen the baby. She felt alone, afraid, and grieved.

She wrote her thoughts in English on pieces of paper. Nothing is how I hoped. Why? She cut up the papers and hid them in her closet. But late that night, she wrote in Arabic, “I’m afraid to care about the scattered remains of my soul, only to then lose it. Sometimes I’m afraid of happiness!”

She posted it on her Facebook page and felt, curiously, better—“like a light at the end of a mysterious path.”

FERAH’S PROJECT

Ferah had never thought of herself as a writer. But she started a separate Facebook page and posted every few days. Soon she had hundreds of followers, then several thousand.

She created a hope-filled world in her bedroom. She cut colored paper butterflies and hung them around her mirror. She draped twinkle lights from the ceiling. And she lit her candle. In her writing, she faced her greatest fear: Her life might never begin. Daesh might be here forever.

“When you close your eyes, you’ll feel how horrible it is to have your hands chained and be unable to picture your future. You’ll curl up on the ground crying.” And cry she did.

Her mom found excuses to drift into Ferah’s bedroom and check on her. It wasn’t easy raising a teenager in a city run by fanatics. One wrong word, even by an emotional teen, could bring the worst. . . Fear and boredom were crippling, trapped inside a house, afraid to go out.

Night brought the closest thing to freedom: the internet. During the day, usage was restricted. But after midnight, megabytes were unlimited. Ferah, like others, lived a virtual life after hours.

Ferah downloaded books—many of them “self-help” books for encouragement. One said, “Be proactive.” To Ferah, that meant, “I can choose my own attitude.” She realized: “I can’t go on like this. If I am depressed and terrified, that way of thinking will stay with me forever.” She decided to use her time waiting in a positive way—a way that fit her personality. She would be a dreamer among Daesh.

This would be her project. She wrote out her new optimism. Her Facebook journal grew to more than 6,000 followers.

RANIA

One evening, Ferah noticed an Iraqi girl following her page. Her name was Rania. She was from Mosul too, but her family had fled to Kurdish territory. Ferah and Rania started chatting often, and a friendship bloomed.

The two girls had similar tastes. Both explored interior design videos on YouTube late at night. They decorated rooms together in online games and traded virtual furnishings. The connection encouraged Ferah. Though she couldn’t escape Mosul, there was life outside the IS-occupied city, and Rania connected her to it.

Ferah created a world in her room. She continued decorating it with paper cutouts she called her “little works.” The space gave her comfort. There she could wander far online with her friends, her writings, and her readers.

Then that too was gone. On her 16th birthday, Daesh shut the internet down.

UTTER ISOLATION

IS was sealing off Mosul’s population. It feared spies guiding American airstrikes to IS strongholds in Mosul. Without her online friends, Ferah was alone. She began to sew to fill her hours, taking lessons from a family friend. She worked at the machine sometimes until 3 a.m. and gave away clothing as gifts.

And she wrote—for herself now, not her followers. She challenged herself in her writing, forcing herself to face her doubts, speaking boldly to herself.

“No one can stop you when survival is in your heart, when light is inside you even as darkness is around you,” she wrote. “Even when difficulties grow, I will not break. Go on, war; get worse.”

There was just one person outside she yearned for. For Rania’s birthday, she wrote her a message, thanking her for her friendship.

On the top floor of her house, Ferah could get a faint phone signal. She stood in just the right place, held her phone up and, hitting send, prayed her message, byte by byte, would make its way to the friend she had never met.

ASHES

In January 2017, Iraqi forces battled their way into eastern Mosul. The IS militants took over homes to fight the advancing forces. The city shook with gunfire, car bombs, and airstrikes.

One evening, there was banging at the front gate. Then Daesh gunmen shot through the gate. They ordered everyone out, taking the house. The roof would give their snipers good views. Ferah was outraged seeing boys no older than 17, with guns, shouting at her father, a respectable man in his 50s.

Ferah’s family took refuge with a neighbor. Just before dawn, the storm of battle struck. Rocket fire burst. Guns hammered. The “wzzzzzzz!” that preceded an airstrike grew closer. Then a giant blast. Part of the ceiling collapsed. Ferah and the neighbor’s children screamed, but Ferah’s father was silent, stunned.

As suddenly as the storm came, it moved on. Daesh retreated, and troops from the Iraqi Army fanned out in the streets around Ferah’s home. After nearly three years, their neighborhood was out of the fanatics’ control and in government hands.

Ferah and her family emerged from their refuge and stood before their home. Flames gushed from its windows. The flames were in her room. The Daesh fighters had set off explosives in the kitchen before fleeing.

When the fire died down, Ferah’s walls were black, the paint peeling in shreds. The ceiling had fallen onto her bed. Her “little works” were ash — the butterflies, the lights, paper hearts and birds, the clothes, even the box in her wardrobe filled with cut-up papers bearing her deepest thoughts in English.

She wrote. “My trust in tomorrow slipped away . . . My heart has burned up.”

NOT THE END

After the fire, her family stayed with Ferah’s eldest sister in Irbil. From there, her father oversaw the rebuilding of their home. Ferah took a high school refresher course and passed. When classes resumed, she would be only a grade behind.

They visited Ferah’s other sister, and met her daughter, now nearly three. There, Ferah dropped by a school. She found a group of schoolgirls in the halls and looked for one in particular.

Rania didn’t realize it was her until Ferah stood right in front of her. “For real? You came?” Rania cried. The two girls hugged for several minutes. Rania showed Ferah her phone: Ferah’s birthday message had found its way to her.

Back home in Mosul now, Ferah’s room is repainted. It’s not the sanctuary it once was. She misses her butterflies, but she won’t put any up just yet. Nothing is normal, but Ferah has freedom. She is still a dreamer, but not among Daesh.

Sometimes, she looks back at a favorite text. She wrote it amid hopelessness, praising what good she could find to hold onto.

“Good morning to everyone who feels the beauty within—no matter who it angers,” she reads to herself. “Glory to the fading light of endings and the burst of new beginnings. Everything else won’t last long.”