Chapter One At the age of ten, I was living my best life with my family. There were thirty-two of us, including many aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. We all lived together in the city of Shingal -- known to Arabic-speaking people as Sinjar. This was our home in northern Iraq. The town of Shingal lies near the mountain from which its name is derived. This mountain is sacred to Yazidis; as the original and indigenous people of this land, we have lived along her slopes since the beginning of things. The mountain is a beautiful and ancient place of wild extremes and mythological import. It is the spiritual and traditional home for Yazidi people.

Since long ago, Yazidi people have scooped up her sacred soil in their hands, mingled it with water from her holy spring, and formed a tiny ball. This mixing of soil and water from Shingal Mountain symbolizes the entire Earth. Yazidi people cradle this ball tenderly between each other''s hands as we shake to make our sacred vows or promises. Shingal Mountain is the greatest teacher of the hardest lessons for mortal human beings. This cradle of civilization is the land of Gilgamesh, the first-of-all, ferocious, ancient tyrant who once sought absolute power and immortality through his exploitative, warlike adventures, only to be laid low in his great pride. These same mountains have broken and foiled the ambitions of many historical tyrants -- most recently Saddam Hussein, who once chased the Yazidi people out of Bakira, a tiny village at the base of Shingal Mountain, to pursue his mad plan to burrow an underground tunnel through its core. In the fever of his megalomania, Saddam began to blast a giant trench at the foot of the mountain. The Yazidi people native to that area fled up into its steep slopes and caves; all the while, the tyrant burrowed and tore at the mountain.

Saddam left the mountain at Bakira with a pathetic scar as witness to his endeavours; however, the mountain still stands, unmoved and unconquerable, and whenever such madmen leave, Yazidis return. We rebuild our lives in relation to the mountain as our spiritual home. The mountain is a spiritual place. If you should ever go there, you will feel a sense of grandeur and timelessness permeating the slopes. My grandfather is buried along one of the mountain passes on a hillside. His grave site overlooks the barren, parched valley. The wind howls incessantly there, and you feel the indifference of the mountain to all human suffering, tyranny, and genocide. Likewise, if you visit what remains of Bakira, you see nearby the enormous scar from Saddam''s assault, but even the intended destructiveness of the blasting pit is pitiful against the vastness and timelessness of the mountain.

You know the mountain as a presence; the mountain isn''t an object or an it, but rather a sacred place. The lower slopes at Bakira are littered with foundations of ancient stone settlements. Some of them are supposed to have been the meeting places for angels. There are lonely graves on the hillsides at Bakira. Some of my own ancestors are buried there. The branches of trees near the graves and next to the small Yazidi mountain temple at Bakira are tied with prayer ribbons. I think it''s important to the resiliency of the Yazidi people to understand that the mountain is indeed indomitable -- no tyrant can master her -- and that the Yazidi people have always lived and survived there not by domination of the mountain as an object but by way of our own relational knowing in an indigenous symbiosis with the land itself. As our ancestral land, Shingal''s sublime peak rises up from the lands of Mesopotamia like a great, timeless sentinel standing tall and indomitable in its spirit over the north of Iraq.

She watches over all the affairs of human beings with the greatest indifference to any of our pains or joys. Beneath her massive form and along her edges, Yazidi people have gone about our lives down through the millennia. We have raised our families at her ancient feet; we have practised our cultural ways and beliefs along her slopes and in her sacred glens, even locating our most holy sites along her skirts -- places like Sharfadin Temple, which can be seen from her summit, and which Yazidi people fought bravely to defend from Daesh at the greatest personal cost; likewise, our holiest of all holy sites, Lalish, is a massive temple complex that is partly constructed within an ancient cave that enters directly and naturally into the mountain -- not by means of blasting or violence. Yazidi activity at Lalish dates back at least four thousand years; it is the sacred centre where our people have always worshipped God and venerated Tawusi Malak, the Peacock Angel, who is responsible for the creation of all things. Shingal Mountain is a place of extremes, to be sure: On the one hand, she can be as idyllic and welcoming as a Greek Elysium; on the other, she can be a cruel and inhospitable moonscape of parched earth and scorching, unrelenting sun. During the spring, the mountain and her surrounding lands turn a luscious green, becoming a Garden of Eden on Earth. Her landscape of rolling hills and flatland prairies is cut through by ravines in which rivers and streams flow lazily; grazing sheep and goats are shepherded along windswept mountainsides, all abloom with flowers and thick vegetation. But then, in the summer months of July and August, this same life-giving place of abundance and mercy turns a pale yellow and brown in the severe heat.

Shamash, the sun god, blazes relentlessly upon Shingal Mountain, baking her hard to an austere, craggy, dry, and unforgiving desert landscape. Our homeland is therefore a place of the greatest beauty and the severest adversity. Only Yazidi people truly know how to live here, and through our sacred relation to this mountain, we have survived through many hardships over the years. For just as we have learned across the millennia to live in harmony with the cyclical nature of the mountain, so too has it been the scene of seventy-three genocides against our people. When troubles come to the Yazidi people, we have always taken to her slopes, hiding among her ancient, secret caves and wild places. Time and time again, our enemies, being out of step with nature as colonizers and dominators, find themselves ruined by the folly of their incursions into the mountainous territory that is our homeland. This is the setting for the story that I will now tell you about my life.