Behind everything that has happened in recent years, the Islamic State has practically disappeared, pushed out of consciousness by the pandemic, coalition agreements, climate change and Afghanistan. In reality, of course, he is still raging out there, only in a smaller area, but most of all his spirit is still there. This continues in the Taliban’s reign of terror in Afghanistan, as in any civil war.
And there is a little light in this story from the beginning – because only those who escape can tell.
So Badeeah Hassan Ahmed’s experiences are now historical, but they are representative of all women in the war. She is a Yazidis who grew up in northern Iraq, and this religious and ethnic affiliation makes her and her family alien to the community, even though there were many Yazidis in the area. When the Islamic State swept her village away in August 2014 and she was abducted as a slave, she was still a teenager. Her case was one of those reported by the American and European media a year later, after her escape, and if one remembers what these Yazidis had to say at the time, it dawns on one that it is very difficult to keep track of events to prepare a book for young people. “A Cave in the Clouds” is certainly anything but a feel-good book, but the narrator practices the art of suggestion and omission, and then it works. And anyway there is a little light in this story from the beginning – because only those who escape can tell. Badeeah is now alive, that’s at the end of the book, reasonably safe in Germany.
Badeeah wrote down her story together with the American Susan Elizabeth McClelland as a kind of diary, initially with a date, then, in captivity, she can only guess that it might be November or December. She put a few of the characters together to make the story clearer, otherwise, she asserts, what she reports is what happened. She sprinkles memories in her chronological report, and she tries two things: On the one hand, she describes the culture and religion of the Yazidis with a bit of history and maps; and she reports firsthand how little violent fanaticism has to do with religiosity. Badeeah is brought to Syria. She pretends to be older and tells the ISIS soldiers that the three-year-old nephew she has with her is her child, she smears her face in order to be as unattractive as possible, but in the end there is a buyer – the sheikh of Aleppo. An American who has recently arrived, has a blonde woman with a baby somewhere, with whom he talks in the evening on Skype, and whose jealousy Baadeah can sense, although there is nothing to envy her.
It shows again and again how angry she is that there was so little resistance to IS from the Muslims around her. Another girl is there all the time, Navine, and they support each other as best they can – a stroke of luck, because Badeeah takes the risk of fleeing has a lot to do with this solidarity and the care for the child she is entrusted with . She not only saves herself. And so there is little to read in her report about what violence actually happened to her and a lot about a sense of community – and what its absence means. (from 14 years)
Badeeah Hassan Ahmed, Suzan Elisabeth McClelland: A Cave in the Clouds: Escaping IS. Translated from the English by Ann Lecker. cbt 2020. 320 pages, 10 euros.