'Sabaya': A Mirage of Hope in the Desert
In Northeastern Syria, near the Iraq border, lies a veritable city of canvas tents housing 73,000 refugees. This is a notorious camp called Al-Hol, and it’s the center of Hogir Hirori’s documentary Sabaya.
Sabaya is an Arabic word that essentially means sex slave, and it is applied to Yazidi women, a Kurdish ethnic minority. ISIS, or Daesh, have killed countless Yazidi men and enslaved countless women, and thousands of these women still reside in Al-Hol, forced to convert to Islam, separated from their families, sold to different men, abused. Just an hour and a half drive from the Al-Hol camp is the home of Mahmud and his family — Siham, a sensible and patient wife; Zahra, a grandmother with a big heart; Shadi and Suleyman, playful young boys; and Mahmud himself, whose mission is to rescue the Yazidi girls and return them to their families.
Mahmud works for the Yazidi Home Center, a nonprofit in Northeastern Syria led by Shejk Ziyad. They have a wall of photos of smiling Yazidi women and girls, a rescue list. 206 have been saved. Over 2,000 are still missing. The Yazidi Home Center sends infiltrators into the camp to snuff out the location of these sabaya and then report back to Mahmud on his cell phone. Then, they sneak into the camp, find the girls, and get out as quickly as possible. This is no simple task— there is real danger. On the first rescue mission we are shown in the film, their car is shot at as it’s escaping from the camp with a Yazidi girl in the backseat. “We want them to come back to their origin, religion, and culture,” Mahmud says in the film, and so despite the danger, they keep returning.
The first girl we see them rescue is Leila, who cries quietly on the ride out of the camp. Upon arrival at Mahmud's home, she is welcomed. “You are safe now. No one is going to hurt you. You don’t have to cry anymore,” they tell her. But in the morning, Leila confesses to the camera, “I hate this world. Everything is black. Five years in captivity and now I’m here alone. I had a mother, a father, brothers and sisters… Soon you will hear I committed suicide.” It sounds inevitable.
The youngest girl they rescue is seven years old. Her name is Mitra. She was kidnapped when she was a baby, and she doesn’t even speak her own language, having been raised speaking Arabic. When she’s rescued, Zahra dresses her in a t-shirt and sweatpants, combs her hair, and gently pets her head. Mitra is a little girl who’s had terrible experiences, but she acts just as any child would. She refuses to go to bed though it’s late. She stares enraptured at a cartoon one of the women plays on her phone, a jolly tune echoing from the tinny speakers. She tries to impress and copy the older girls.
Mahmud’s house acts as a way station for these girls, where they’re welcomed with open arms. They come out of the Al-Hol camp traumatized and broken, and it seems they’ll never be able to feel hope again. One girl bitterly recounts a woman beating her with a broom until it broke. But the thing about humans is: we never lose hope, even when we desperately want to, for our own sanity.
In the living room, a news anchor on television delivers bad news about Daesh, the Al-Hol camp, and Syria’s refugee crisis; while outside in the twilight the kids dash past in a flurry of delighted screaming, Mitra pushing Shadi on a dusty plastic tricycle, heedless of the tense atmosphere inside. Leila, who weeks before had assured us she’d be dead soon, watches the birds fly south for the winter against the smoky sky and smiles despite everything. A storm comes in the night and is determined to drown the world, but the warm lights of the house glow through the windows, and the next morning, Shadi and Siham push the water out of the house with brooms. “There are always problems and they never end,” Mahmud says. “That’s the way it is. It will be okay.”
Director Hogir Hirori, a Kurd himself, wanted to get the western audience closer to a world that was so unfamiliar to us. “I decided this has to be shown to the rest of the world… The biggest point of this film is to show the real consequences of war,” he tells his Sundance audience. Syria has been at war for ten years. It has caused over 500,000 deaths and displaced over half of the Syrian population. Mahmud’s home, in the middle of this conflict, is simultaneously a symbol of hope and a heart-wrenching reminder of all that has been lost. Too many girls are still missing, but these people will continue to look for them, because what else can they do?
A movie like this has the natural consequence of inspiring people to act— how can we help? We see these incredibly brave people marching into camp to find these girls and we want to find something to do. There are several organizations out there dedicated to the humanitarian crisis in Syria, but as for helping this cause directly, there’s nothing yet. When asked about a fund for Mahmud’s family, Hirori said that they “hope to be able to do that soon”. As for now, what we can do is listen and pay attention and not forget.
As Mahmud commented in the film, “The situation is getting worse, but it will soon get better.” We can only hope, as people tend to do, that it does.
- Written by Gemma Feltovich
