What Comes with the Dust by Gharbi M. Mustafa

Author:Gharbi M. Mustafa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2018-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

OVER THE next few days, the YPG, People’s Protection Units from Rojava carved a secure corridor of dirt trails through the area controlled by ISIS. Many people on the mountainside took this opportunity to cross into the Kurdish territory in Syria. Omed and Soz joined the thousands of displaced people on the trek to safety. Around them, some of the children descended the mountain barefoot, while others walked in worn-out shoes. Yet everyone smiled despite the pain of swollen feet and lips cracked from dehydration and heat.

At the bottom of the mountain, the refugees reached the newly made dirt trail across the field. Soz helped Omed climb onto one of the trucks waiting for them along the road.

Packed with people, the truck drove down the bumpy road, a plume of dust trailing behind. It swirled everywhere, landing on people’s faces and in their hair. Children squeezed their eyes shut while their bodies bounced on the hard floor of the truck.

Kurdish fighters stood on alert at either side of the road, hiding behind newly dug earthen mounds to fend off ISIS fighters who roamed the nearby villages. As the truck sank in the shifting sands of the desert, gunfire from a Dushka machine gun burst from a mudbrick hut on the outskirts of an Arabian village about a half-mile south of the road. The YPG patrol fighters shot back from their own Dushka mounted on the bed of their truck. As they streamed through the crossfire, a woman at the rear of Omed and Soz’s truck screamed.

“Help, she’s in labor!” shouted another woman.

Weary but dutiful, Soz pushed her way through the crowd until she reached the woman. Four women lifted a blanket over the one in labor to provide some privacy as the truck continued to bounce. Beads of dusty sweat ran down Soz’s forehead while she checked the woman’s racing pulse. Some children poked their heads under the blanket to get a peek, but the encircling women pushed them back. Filled with worry over the baby’s fate, Soz kneeled between the woman’s legs and urged her to push.

The woman must have been in labor for a while already, because after only a few minutes, the primal scream of a newborn girl silenced the Dushkas on both sides. Soz cut the umbilical cord with the bayonet tied to her waistband. Still on her knees, Soz raised the baby, the newborn life, in her bloody hands and gave the newest soul to her mother. The woman laid the baby on her lap and wrapped her child in her white headscarf.

As Soz tended her, the baby girl’s mother wept. She wailed that she’d lost her husband a few days back defending the Shrine of Sharafadin against an ISIS effort to demolish the Mazar—mausoleum. She wanted, needed, her husband with her in this moment as the girl was her first child, and now would be their only child.

A YPG patrol vehicle overtook their truck, and the children waved a V-sign to the fighters, who played a cheery Kurdish anthem at full blast.

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