Most houses are made of adobe, single-story, with small vegetable gardens in front where they grow tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. The sun is merciless, and as soon as I arrive, I rush to the first house I see for shelter. After resting in the shade, I head to the camp’s press office. Along the way, there are children with hoses spraying each other to beat the heat. The streets don’t smell good; they have a sewage-like odor.
The same smell greets me and my colleagues in the garden before the office. Some young people come out: Idris, Deniz, Hivda, Beritan. They invite me in for coffee, and Deniz asks:
“What brings you here?”
I explain that I’ve come to report: I’m looking for characters, everyday stories, no tears or politics. Everyone laughs. I laugh too.
“And you’re looking for those here?”
“Yes.”
They burst out laughing again, and we all join in.
It’s not that stories are lacking—every person in this refugee camp has a story that deserves not just a report, but a documentary. However, none of their stories are free from tears and politics, even those of the children born here.
*
The Mahmur camp is made up of Kurdish farmers who fled Turkey’s repression during its so-called “fight against terrorism” in the 90s. Thousands of people crossed on foot from the provinces of Şırnak, Van, and Hakkari, crossing a border riddled with mines while under Turkish bombing. The Turkish bombs pursued them in Iraqi Kurdistan too—killing 26 people in the Zele camp alone. Hunger, cold, heat, and bombs forced them to change locations multiple times.
On minefields, crowded in plastic tents and enduring weeks of hunger, they waited for a friendly hand. Paradoxically, Saddam Hussein was the one who welcomed them: the tragedy of these 10,000 refugees softened even the heart of the Middle Eastern tyrant.
They were taken to a desert called Mahmur, a cradle of snakes and scorpions. All they had was well water—tainted with oil and minerals—while enduring 50℃ heat in plastic tents. By the end of the year, the number of children buried from scorpion stings exceeded 60. These refugees had no choice but to take life into the desert. While teenagers went hunting scorpions, grandparents watched the children, and the rest built houses. They planted trees—the first trees that desert had ever known. They didn’t plant them for fruit, but for shade.
They also created schools, initially as a way to keep children away from scorpions and teach them to read and write. They created their own security system, assemblies, and press. Now, with ISIS approaching this refugee camp, I manage to film two life stories with the help of two photojournalists from the press office: Idris and Deniz.
*
If you’re not a refugee condemned to remain in this corner of the earth, then it’s a place you want to rush away from as soon as you’ve finished doing what brought you there. I would do the same, but today on August 3, 2014, leaving Mahmur is something you can only try, just like surviving there.
Deniz comes over and tells me:
“The roads are closed. The path is not safe.”
ISIS, which a month and a half ago took Mosul without any difficulty, seizing a gigantic load of ammunition and millions of dollars from the Iraqi government, is advancing at will towards Mahmur.
Time already passes slowly in this desert, but now it barely seems to move the clock’s hand as ISIS approaches. I don’t even want to think about which corner I’ll hide in when these jihadists arrive. I look around and realize that while I’m speculating about the possibility of my survival, the Mahmur press office staff, accompanied by the thunderous noise of a primitive air conditioner, continue to work tirelessly.
As Deniz, amid all her work, tries to find a solution to get me out, I read the news prepared by the press office for the camp’s weekly newspaper called Rojew. I start reading Deniz’s article for the latest edition. It’s about female genital mutilation among Iraqi Kurdistan girls. I’m shocked.
“Is it really that widespread?” I ask.
“What did you think!?”
Seeing me write in my notebook, she adds:
“You’re taking notes because, if something happens to me, you’ll tell my story, right?”
“Yes, but you—who are you?”
*
She is Deniz, born in 1984 in a village called Xecixatun, in the Van province of Turkish Kurdistan. Her father was a smuggler; he moved tobacco, tea, and gasoline with his mule from Iran to Turkey. When he also became a PKK militiaman, the bells started tolling for the entire family. Their house was raided several times, but Deniz only remembers the last time; the others were told to her.
“Turkish soldiers ransacked the entire house, and my three-month-old sister's cradle. They even uprooted the trees in our courtyard. They said they were looking for weapons. My father wasn’t home. They took my older brother.”
That’s the only memory she has of her village, where she lived until she was eight.
“I don’t know what else happened that night. From my life there, I only remember that image. I also remember I loved my village very much.”
Her mother didn’t wait for her husband to return. In the middle of the night, she set out for Iran with five of her children.
On foot and helped by militiamen, they reached the Iranian border. Just as they were about to cross, the Turkish army opened fire on them and the three-month-old baby wouldn’t stop crying.
Still, they made it across, and only then did they realize the baby was no longer crying. A militiaman told Deniz’s mother: “How well-behaved! Pass her to me so I can cuddle her a bit.”
“But my sister wasn’t there,” Deniz tells me. “We all looked at my mother in shock.”
“I left her under a tree. I had to choose.” She had chosen between the lives of everyone and the life of her baby, left on the other side of the border in Turkey. Before Deniz’s mother finished speaking, the militiaman turned around and went to search. Half an hour later, he returned with the baby in his arms.
*
“That sister of mine always used to tease my mother, saying: ‘You never loved me, you abandoned me under a tree.’ She grew up, finished university, and is now a filmmaker.”
Deniz guesses exactly what’s going through my mind.
“It’s a perfect story for my program!”
“No, no, it wouldn’t work. True, the story has triumphs and miracles . . . but it has too many deaths. Besides, my sister’s not here right now. She’s in Van. She’s the only one who managed to fulfill everyone’s dream. She returned, went to see the village where she was born. She crossed the border illegally, and in the same way, she’ll come back.”
Of the family members who crossed from Turkey to Iran in 1992, the only one who has been able to see her native village again is that three-month-old baby.
The mother and her five children, the eldest ten years old, moved from place to place seeking refuge. Tired, she had to make a decision once again. This time she decided to go to the Zele camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, where other Kurds who had fled the Turkish army were located. When Turkish warplanes bombed that camp, one of those who lost his life was Deniz’s seven-year-old brother. After that, the family sought refuge in the Qandil Mountains.
“As you see, you can always choose!” says Deniz.
Once again, she leans on irony—the only way to tell such a story.
From the mountains they were forced to choose again and again. In 1998, the mother and father, with the now four-year-old, went to the newly established Mahmur refugee camp. The three older girls remained in the mountains.
The eldest two became guerrillas. First, the beautiful Sarya from “Boy Aynası” (a short film) lost her life in a battle, followed by her younger sister. Deniz also wanted to become a guerrilla after losing her second sister, but was rejected according to the rule that no more than two deaths can occur in the same family. So Deniz left the mountains and went to Mahmur where her parents were.
Deniz, who learned to read and write in the mountains, spent her childhood and adolescence devouring novels, reading everything she could find. Then one day, she saw that she had prepared herself to be a journalist. And she loved her profession—the camera, the writing—as much as swimming and living.
*
As soon as she finishes telling her story like that, she goes to the kitchen.
“Okay, you’re leaving. Tomorrow at dawn, four o’clock, a car will come to pick you up here,” Deniz informs me while preparing dinner.
“You’re lucky, we don’t cook like this every day. We’re sending you off with dolmas.”
After eating the stuffed eggplants prepared by Hivda and Deniz, we go down to the women’s café. How good the terebinth coffee tastes in the middle of this conversation dominated by ISIS!
At home, the three of us settle down to watch TV. They’re showing Carmen. We all love Paz Vega in the role of Carmen, but the movie, which won so many Goyas, doesn’t convince any of us. For two hours, we wait for a surprise that never comes. “I didn’t understand anything,” says Hivda.
Deniz exclaims, “Damn Carmen! If Daesh found out what we’re watching, they’d shoot us right away. She’s suicidal! But those guys are so handsome . . . why aren’t there any like that around here?”
I’m the only one who participates, half-heartedly, in Deniz’s conversation about Vicente Aranda’s handsome men until we go to sleep in the rooms across the courtyard.
*
At four in the morning, I’m already up, prepared to leave, waiting for the car that will come to pick me up. Deniz is also awake. I approach her to say goodbye, thinking she had gotten up for that.
“You’re not going anywhere,” she says. “ISIS is coming. The car can no longer leave.”
Her sentence wakes me up completely, and then she adds: “The road is closed. Go back to sleep.”
Oh, Deniz. How am I supposed to go back to sleep peacefully!? Her ability to give me cold showers knows no limits.
“We need to sleep, because when they arrive, we must be fresh.”
She deserves a good beating for such jokes at this hour. She’s over 5’7” and weighs around 50 kilos, so if I were to push her with one hand, I could make her fall. To be sure, I head toward her with both hands—yet she doesn’t move an inch, and I lose my balance.
*
About four hours later, when I wake up, I find everything just as it was the previous morning. Towards midday, Deniz, with her camera, returns from work. “Smile. You’re leaving here today at two o’clock.”
I want to know what time it is.
“There’s still time," she tells me, “but not for an elaborate meal.”
“You should have been a footballer, not a journalist. Minute one: goal one,” I respond.
Seeing my defeated face, her compassionate side speaks:
“Not a footballer, but I would have liked to have been a good swimmer. Come, I’ll prepare you one last terebinth coffee.”
*
Accompanied by the delicious smell of coffee, I listen to Deniz’s love of swimming. The only thing she chose in her life is her name and surname: Deniz Firat. Deniz means “sea,” and Firat is the Euphrates River.
“When I was in the mountains, I dreamed about swimming, but I didn’t know how. One day we were next to a lagoon, and I was admiring my comrades swim. Suddenly, I closed my eyes and threw myself into the lagoon. When I opened them, I saw myself on the other side. At first, surprised, I touched myself to make sure I was alive—how could this be, if I didn’t know how to swim?”
This time, she’s not going to fool me. “How can someone who can’t swim get to the other end of a lagoon alive? You’ve watched too many movies!”
“Don’t laugh at me. I truly swam. Later I found out that what I also believed was a miracle, wasn’t.”
This story reminded her of the river that flows next to her birth village. “Well, I don’t remember the river well, I remember the water. I asked my mother, and she confirmed that as a child, I used to swim there.”
Deniz had learned to swim in that small stream. But on the day she left her village at eight, she forgot that she knew how.
As soon as we finish the coffee, Deniz picks up her camera to take some farewell photos. While I pose for her, I take the opportunity to give her some advice, just in case.
“ISIS is no joke. It wouldn’t hurt to be a bit afraid.”
The photo session ends. Deniz takes her camera and goes to work. Deniz and Idris are documenting the entire Mahmur refugee camp amid this August heat: how they built the camp, the stories of their schools, their elders, everything. They don’t cease this work even with ISIS knocking at their door; quite the opposite, it seems they want to stay busy so as not to think about the danger. This time, they want to thoroughly document the 17 years of life they’ve lived in this camp, before it disappears once again.
*
The next morning, when I hear the car horn, I grab my backpack and run. I don’t have the courage to say goodbye one by one to these young people I’m leaving alone with ISIS. I hear Deniz’s voice behind me. I turn around. In one hand, she has a coffee cup, in the other, her camera. She smiles at me.
“You go, I will fight!”
She sees the helplessness in my eyes and adds:
“Okay, okay, I’ll take care of myself, don’t worry. Don’t forget I still have things I want to see. I still have to see my village and the stream where I learned to swim. I haven’t seen the sea. I have to swim in one, don’t you think?”
I run toward the minibus. Those inside hurry to make room for me. As I’m about to step in, I hear her voice again. She’s standing behind me with arms wide open. We hug without a word. The minibus stops at the camp’s exit. As I retrieve my passport from the checkpoint, the sun blinds me. I don’t look back at the Mahmur refugee camp. What would I look at? ISIS is coming, and I am leaving.
As soon as we start moving again, heading to Arbil, I see that the Peshmerga’s checkpoints have multiplied. At each checkpoint, they stop us. They look at everyone’s documentation and ask the driver the same question: “Are there any Arabs?” Any young Arab seems suspicious to those fighting ISIS.
*
It wasn’t long before news came that they were evacuating Mahmur. Once again, these refugees who built this camp with their own hands had to leave. It was the seventh time. I think of the people I met there: Leila, Husein, Idris, Deniz, Beritan, Hivda . . . The more I think about it, the longer the list gets. How can a community of ten to twelve thousand refugees be evacuated in a single night? They say only the militia and journalists remain.
By afternoon, I’m reunited with Idris in Ranya, the city where the refugees took shelter, and noting down everything he tells me so that I can transmit it in the evening news.
I dial Deniz’s number, but she doesn’t answer. A few minutes pass, I call again. Nothing. At that moment, Idris looks up from his phone. He’s just read a message: “Deniz is no longer alive.”
Half an hour later, sitting with Idris under a streetlight, I report on the evening news on who Deniz was.
An ISIS fighter shot her in the stomach while she was filming the children who had been saved from the scorpions and who were now defending a desert called Mahmur. Deniz means sea; a jihadist dried it up.
