Only Cry For the Living

ONLY CRY FOR THE LIVING

Only Cry for the Living is published as a joint publication between Jocko Publishing and Di Angelo Publications INC.

JOCKO PUBLISHING

Di Angelo Publications 4265 San Felipe #1100 Houston, Texas, 77027

Only Cry for the Living Copyright 2020 Hollie S. McKay. In digital and print distribution in the United States of America and worldwide.

www.jockopublishing.com www.diangelopublications.com www.holliemckay.com

Library of Congress cataloging-in-publications data Only Cry for the Living. Downloadable via Kindle, iBooks, NOOK.

Library of Congress Registration

ISBN-13: 978-1-942549-63-5

Interior Layout Design By: Kimberly James Dust Jacket Design by: Jon Bozak

First Edition 10 9 8 7 5 6 4 3 2 1

No part of this book may be copied or distributed without the author and publisher’s written approval. For educational and entertainment purposes, this book may be ordered in bulk through Di Angelo Publications. For educational, business and bulk orders, please contact sales@diangelopublications.com. 1. History --- Military --- Iraq War

History --- Military --- Afghan War

History --- Middle East --- Iraq

Travel --- Special Interest --- Military

Travel --- Middle East --- General

Political Science --- Human Rights

Political Science --- Terrorism

ONLY CRY FOR THE LIVING

Memos From Inside the ISIS Battlefield

HOLLIE S. MCKAY

FOREWORD BY JOCKO WILLINK

For my Kurdish-Syrian goddaughter and namesake, Hollie, the beautiful child of Mazloum and Parishan.

You are so deeply loved.

If one were to tell an unborn child that outside the womb there is a glorious world with green fields and lush gardens, high mountains and vast seas, with a sky lit by the sun and the moon, the unborn would not believe such absurdity. Still in the dark womb how could he imagine the indescribable majesty of this world? In the same way, when the mystics speak of worlds beyond scent and color, the common man deafened by greed and blinded by self-interest cannot grasp their reality.

From Rumi’s Little Book of Life The Garden of the Soul, the Heart, and the Spirit

FOREWORD

War reveals the complex and often contradictory face of human nature. On one end of the spectrum, people make incredible sacrifices to care for others. They protect, they defend, and they nurture those who cannot take care of themselves. Some heroic people will do anything to safeguard their families and their friends; sometimes people even make valiant sacrifices for those they don’t actually know at all. War can unveil these beautiful and moving sacrifices.

But war also exposes the most vile and despicable of behaviors. Torture. Rape. Murder. Genocide. The ability for human beings to commit abhorrent atrocities with wanton disregard for morality is sadly displayed over and over again. Evil does exist.

It is critical that, as human beings, we never forget our nature—and our potential—for both good and evil. We must remember that we are capable of glorious and benevolent actions—acts that will bring light, love and laughter into the world. We must also remember that, as human beings, we are capable of demonic and reprehensible behavior that propel the world toward darkness.

We must remember.

Only Cry for the Living serves a share of our memory—and thereby, our conscience. This book, written by the incredibly courageous Hollie McKay, takes us deep into the psyche of war. She achieves this not only by simply reporting on what happens during war, but also by interviewing and conversing with those who directly participated in or were personally impacted by war. Hollie has spent extensive time on the ground in the Middle East, including Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, and Iraq––where she witnessed first-hand the fight of Kurdish,

Syrian, Iraqi, and American forces against the sadistic rise of ISIS, also known as ISIL or Da’esh.

Through her detailed and intense writing, Hollie brings us onto the battlefield with her. We can feel the impact of explosions. We can hear sniper rounds being fired. We can see the rubbled buildings and war-torn streets. We can smell blood, fire and death.

She lets us listen in on her conversations. We talk with ISIS sympathizers who murdered on behalf of their twisted caliphate. Hollie introduces us to the vile miscreants that traveled from first-world countries to fight for this wretched nightmare of a state controlled by Islamic extremists. Hollie allows us to see the difference between those who willing volunteer as ISIS fighters and people––such as a fourteen-year-old child soldier––indoctrinated and brainwashed into doing ISIS’s sinister bidding on the battlefield. Through her interviews, we see the face of evil.

But Hollie also introduces us to heroes. We meet the soldiers that take the fight to the enemy, including the “Black Devils,” a name given by the opposition, who ruthlessly hunted down and killed ISIS fighters. Perhaps serving an even worse fate to ISIS are the female Kurdish soldiers who hunt and kill insurgents. Their efforts deliver the insult of an afterlife without paradise for the fanatical enemy fighters, who believe death at the hands of a woman precludes them from that so-called paradise. Moreover, Hollie brings us into heartfelt discussions with Yadizi women who were captured, tortured, starved, and raped, but who survived and show indomitable strength as they carry on with their lives.

These are just some of the examples of the views Hollie delivers in this book—views not only of war, but of human nature. While I do not wish war on anyone, I do wish a better understanding of war for all of us. That is what Hollie McKay does with this book: she gives us all a better understanding of war and human nature. It is not a comfortable read. It is not a pleasant read. It is an important read.

But don’t just read it. Remember it.

Jocko Willink

INTRODUCTION

July, 2014

“When you hear the bomb sirens, we will stop,” said the old Israeli cab driver ever-so-spiritedly as we sped through the West Bank. “Crouch down against the side of the road. Don’t worry; there will be lots of us. It’s like a big party!”

I had just ventured back over the Allenby/King Hussein Bridge land crossing after spending some time sipping tea and watching wild camels with the Bedouins in Jordan.

Operation Protective Edge — also known as the Israel and Gaza war — was just launching in early July 2014.

An ominous carillon pierced the air and lingered for minutes before standard procedures followed. Then, finally, the pursuit of a normal life resumed. I glanced at my driver and watched his cheery face collapse.

He explained casually, in a tone flushed with anguish, that these little procedures made him think of his father who had been killed in the Six-Day War of 1967, and of his brother who passed in the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

I had forgotten to ask his name, but knew I would not forget the deep agony in his eyes or his snow grey hair, which he said turned from a rich black within days of hearing the news — his son, too, had died inside his wife’s womb amid the stress of the First Intifada of 1987.

In that series of slow-motion moments, I knew that, while I was soon to return to my comfortable Los Angeles life, I had opened a door and started

to walk down a road from which I knew there was no retreat. My insides growled with curiosity and an intense longing to understand these conflicts; to understand how countries could continue to douse themselves in blood, decade after decade; to understand why it could not be stopped.

All this, and yet both friends and foes were cut from the same cloth of human existence. It seemed they were fighting each other for the same things: freedom, future, and their families. Only deep down, nobody really wanted to fight and be apart from those they loved night after night. Everyone I had spoken to during that trip insisted they wanted peace, but opined that they were caught in the middle and had to defend their own people, wrapped in a situation they could not control. Each had their own unique story to tell.

The everyday people had no control over the decisions made by their leadership — whether it was offense, defense, or a tactic of terror. And yet the decisions over which they had no control impacted every aspect of their lives. All they could do was watch from the grimy glass window until the glass shattered, waiting for the war to gush into their lives.

Nearby, brutality was tearing Iraq apart yet again.

Just a few weeks earlier, in late October, Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul had fallen out of Baghdad’s government-controlled hands and come under the rule of a group known as Islamic State, ISIS, ISIL, or the Arabic derogatory term, Da’esh. We knew little about them other than that they were deemed “too brutal” even for their main insurgency predecessor, Al Qaeda.

I had felt an unexplainable obligation to that country, to its people, to the place we as a nation had left behind before it was ready to stand on its own. Or perhaps I was trying to make sense of something that made no sense.

As we journeyed to Jerusalem that day, I thought about myself as a little girl. I remembered one afternoon, dancing around the living room to Madonna and unexpectedly catching sight of footage of the Gulf War on television. I remember with clarity being shocked and appalled as hollowed buildings burned and children just like me ran unaccompanied for their lives. There was a flashing image of one little girl who looked my age, covered in blood and wailing, the foot of an armed soldier beside her.

I couldn’t understand how, in 1991, given the modern and magical world my six-year-old self-thought we lived in, that it was possible for there to be war anywhere. I had been raised to believe that war was a bygone concept. After learning my grandfather fought in WWII, in some era lifetimes before I was born, I had simply thought that the world had learned its lesson and there was no way people needed to orchestrate mass killings anymore. I was convinced that surely everyone now valued life and talked through their problems.

I think in that precise moment of glancing at the television, my naiveté disappeared — but my idealism did not, and I hope it never will. Perhaps it was my childhood curiosity that drove me to the point of obsession; of needing to make sense of what went through my mind as my city fell to the earth and the entire country was doused in flames; of wondering what it must have felt like to have been trapped inside.

I sat in that backseat and scrawled in my little black notebook. Today, those little black books are many. Over time, they piled up in my California beachside kitchen and later filled the drawers of several tiny Manhattan apartments, all filled with references to small Iraqi villages like Wardak and Nasr and foods like tashreeb and dolma and names like Mohammed and Miriam and Saif — people who I met along the way, who I didn’t know if I would ever meet again, and about whom I often wondered if they were still alive.

I had wanted to understand this plight, a plight I did not know when I started would become a full-blown genocide, and I had to be there in my own skin. I had to stand beside ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations, whose lives and livelihoods had been ravished by something that was no fault of their own. I wanted to understand conflict from a microlevel — from the human level — through deeply personal stories, rather than through the big, brooding macro-level statistics and weapons.

Throughout the years of ISIS occupation, I made countless trips in and out of Iraq to investigate the onslaught as a writer. As time went on and the fight to free the embattled nation intensified, I spent more and more time in the region, determined to play whatever small role I could to deliver a rough draft of history through the lens of the ordinary people surviving it. As the years went forth and the battle intensified, I wrote more and more memos as exemplified in this collection.

While they may never be the ones to read this book, it is these ordinary people for whom this book is written — by capturing anecdotes of their lives and nuggets of their history, I had figured they would never disappear into the void that is the collateral damage of war. Somehow, they would stay alive forever. They would know that their presence, their stories, and their contribution to the world truly mattered.

FIRST YEAR OF ISIS: 2014 America, the Savior

AMONG THE FIRST TO FLEE

November, 2014

Tents swooshed across muddy fields as the arid summer heat softened into fall. The days grew shorter and the nights colder. Little feet in rainboots stampeded along the gated confines of the displacement camp just outside of the northern Kurdish city of Erbil, sheltering thousands of Muslims and Yazidis from the Mosul area.

A row of young boys sat along an old metal pipe, excitedly singing Arabic songs. The girls whizzed each other around in wheelbarrows and played with their dolls on patches of earth that had hardened from mud to crusty dirt.

“It is still like a playpen to them, like a big party,” one frail father said absently, as if he was staring right through me. “Soon they will know.”

Crevices of stress had been delicately carved into his tanned face. His party was one of torment as he paced in circles, as if slowly going mad. I did not know what had happened to him and his family, but it did not feel right to ask.

The children noticed the new cluster of outsiders and raced toward us, tiny arms open for an embrace. I was there with my good friend from California, Mylee Cardenas. Mylee was a U.S Army veteran, tough around the edges with tattooed sleeves and a forthright demeanor, contrasted with soft eyes and layers of wisdom. And Mohammad Huzaifa Muluki was a twenty-three-year-

FIRST YEAR OF ISIS, 2014: AMERICA THE

SAVIOR

old student from Baghdad who had written to me about a campus campaign he had started with a handful of other students.

When I leave this world, I’ll leave no regrets; leave something to remember so they won’t forget, Beyonce had sung at the United Nations General Assembly in New York two years earlier. I was here.

Those lyrics had spawned the “I was here” campaign and hundreds were sweeping the Baghdad streets and rehabilitating archaeological sites, raising money for disabled students.

But since then, a new tragedy had been lumped into the pile.

At the camp, the sight of fresh faces brought with it a renewed belief that someone was coming to save them from ISIS, to tell them that everything was okay, to ensure that their situation was not forgotten; with a hope that it would all be fixed soon.

The first boy to introduce himself was a nine-year-old named Abdullah. He struck me with his light eyes, gap-toothed smile, and the spattering of freckles across his nose. There was gentleness in his demeanor — I wondered how such gentleness could come from a child that had been ripped from his home by war. Abdullah told us that he was a Muslim from Sinjar — or Shengal, as they say in Kurdish. He had been forced to flee two months earlier when ISIS invaded his village. He insisted on showing us around the camp, annotating like a proud tour guide. He explained the different people who lived there and where they were all from. He explained how they had all been confronted with the same vicious enemy, and how they coped in different ways.

“Some ISIS we knew,” Abdullah said. “Some of our neighbors became ISIS, too.”

I did not know then that such a phrase would be repeated time and time again as the years went on. I did not realize then the importance of that phrase, the clefts, and all the conspiracies that would come from it. That one phrase would come to represent the fissures of a country that I wasn’t sure could ever be put back together.

“Our neighbors became ISIS, too.”

ONLY CRY FOR THE LIVING

ISIS took over large swaths of Iraq beginning in June 2014. Iraqi Army soldiers had abandoned their weapons and ran, igniting international condemnation and frustration. While President Obama had initially dismissed ISIS as the “JV team,” it was evident that — as much as we all wanted to disregard the group as a bunch of thug wannabes — their potency could not be denied.

Now, in the heart of autumn, Abdullah boldly led the pack of young children, weaving through the tents. He commanded a certain respect from the other young ones: when he smiled, they smiled; when he laughed, they laughed. Abdullah had a kind of infectious energy that gave me a glimmer of hope for them and their future.

The afternoon passed and Abdullah and his camp friends still seemed to be such happy beings, oblivious to the darkness that reigned not so far away. The innocence was, in many ways, tragic. A day would come when they would grow up and realize the unfairness and all the things that terror had robbed from them, far beyond material things like clothes and possessions. They could no longer roam freely in the streets; they could no longer wrap themselves in the arms of a mother who was not stained by her trauma; they could no longer wander down their village road to seek an education.

Education is not viewed as a life and death matter when such conflicts arise — but often it gets lost altogether. What is war? War is children being sent off to work or made to stay home and fend for the family, even when the likes of the United Nations set up temporary schools. When a child loses everything, all they have left is their still-open minds. Education was as pertinent to their immediate survival as it was to their future.

Yet who was I to tell these people suffering from war what should be done? There were no happy endings or alternatives. The future was fantasy, and living day-by-day was all that mattered.

The children posed for pictures and their parents encouraged them to do so, pushing them into the frame. If their picture appeared in a newspaper or on the internet, maybe it would bring them the lifeline to be saved and handplucked to go to a better world. If the world knew their story and all they endured, surely help would arrive on their doorstep.