From Iraq the prophecy of the young Kurdish Haisha: “No, ISIS will not return”
The young Haisha is Kurdish, she is 40 years old and has three children. She couldn't study because her husband didn't want her to. But she works and is free not to wear a veil. He would like to come and live in Europe, because in Europe "it is better"
ERBIL (Iraq) – Haisha agrees to speak, it wasn’t easy to convince her. Then when she arrives at the agreed appointment for the interview, together with the interpreter, in the center of Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, she appears confident and at times smiling. She wears her work clothes, she is employed as a cook in a canteen. She is almost 40 years old and has 3 children and got married at 15: when she says it she laughs, gets embarrassed and puts her hands on her face, but then lets it be understood that in Kurdistan, especially in those days, that was how things went. Would you do it again? “No, I wouldn’t do it anymore. I wanted to study – she says – but my husband didn’t let me“. She had to be ‘woman of the house’, wife and this path didn’t go well with books. She says it naively, almost without gravity, with many regrets, yet she doesn’t seem to have given up at all.
“I still have a good life“, she is keen to say, because she, who is about to go to work and did so even when her husband was unemployed, has a pride that emerges exuberantly from her eyes dark and which also makes her suffer, you can see it. And she is also keen to say, she, of Muslim faith, who is free not to wear the veil, that “there is no connection as the West believes between Islam, all of Islam, and the deprivation of women’s rights”.
She hasn’t been able to study, but when asked about the prevarication of women and the abuse that often happens in the family in Kurdistan, Haisha responds confidently: “There are several reasons: the ‘age of marriage, economic situation, male violence“. She is amazed when she hears the statistics of Italian feminicides: 120 women killed in 2023 (Criminal Analysis Service of the Central Criminal Police Directorate) and 20 only up to March 2024, as the news documents, and says: “No, I couldn’t imagine this.” .
Haisha is in a hurry, she has to go to work. But she has the time, she takes it all, to tell her dream: “To go to Europe, my husband’s brothers live in Germany – she says – above all I would like it for my children “. And before talking about money, study or work she says another reason, the simplest of all: “It’s safer to live there“, with the simple concern of a mother of teenage boys. Because in Kurdistan there are no man’s lands where terrorism resists like a poison and Haisha knows this well.
But when the time comes to talk about ISIS he loses his smile. It’s clear that she doesn’t want to talk about it, almost as if the problem doesn’t concern her. However, she responds peremptorily when asked about the future and the dangers of a return of the Caliphate: “No, ISIS will not return“. He repeats it several times. In 2014, during the years of the Islamic State in power, she was a young mother, she had small children and yet apart from the story of some family members who fled in terror from Mosul she had nothing else to tell. He has no stories, memories, nor precise fears, testimonies of women kidnapped or sold. The questions all come back.
“I have no updates, I don’t have time to watch the news, I work a lot,” he only has time to say. As many in Kurdistan say when talking about Isis with this phrase of circumstance. The fear is intact.
It’s getting late, he says with the manner of someone who has to get out of that corner. It’s late morning, lunch is approaching, Haisha has to go to work. But she willingly says ‘yes’ for a photo: she takes off her uniform hat, just a profile shot, and then her hands marked by work and her hair falling on her neck, on one side, wavy and finally free, less tidy. Haisha doesn’t know she’s still a girl.