![]() Yazidis have been persecuted for centuries by groups - from Ottomans to Saddam’s Ba’athists - who looked at Yazidism, which is a monotheistic religion having elements in common with the many religions of the Middle East, with disdain. Many of those stories, sadly, are tragedies.” Barely four pages into the novel, she sets the tone of the narrative by penning the most poignant lines I have read in a while: “I think of my religion as being an ancient tree with thousands of rings, each telling a story in the long history of Yazidis. Murad’s writing cuts through one’s cultural conditioning, no matter how tough you think you are. ![]() Nadia Murad - the Yazidi author and Nobel Peace Prize winner - was one among the hundreds of women who were driven off in droves to Mosul and Syria, repeatedly raped, beaten up and sold off or exchanged between militants. The Islamic State, shortly after taking over Mosul in the summer of 2014, captured Kocho - rounding up and slaughtering hundreds of Yazidi men and elderly women for refusing to convert to Islam, brainwashing young boys and recruiting them into their militia, carting off young women like cattle and deploying sexual slavery as an orchestrated combat tool against them. The extermination of Yazidis - a religious minority group settled in the village of Kocho in western Iraq, 2014 - comprises the greater chunk of this agonising universe. If a book were like a home reflecting a tragedy that befell its inhabitants, The Last Girl would be like a universe teetering on the edge of collapse. ![]()
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