The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq [Paperback]

Haunting and captivatinga powerful portrait of courage.Mikhails harrowing account of the horrors inflicted on women captured by Isis...A powerful reminder.The Beekeeper is a brutally important, electrifying, and lyrical true story.A searing portrait of courage.Iraqi journalist and poet Mikhail lays bare the agonizing experiences of the Yazidi people at the hands of ISIS in this visceral account of the outskirts of modern day Iraq. In 2014, ISIS began invading villages of northern Iraq, killing most of the men and enslaving the women and children. Much of Mikhails account is made up of first-person testimonies of several survivors who speak of being repeatedly raped, sold to the highest bidder, and tortured. They recall losing their families and witnessing their children, raised by ISIS supporters, becoming a distorted version of who they once were. Mikhail also homes in on the rescue efforts of a man named Abdullah, a local beekeeper who used his knowledge of the region and the money he made selling honey in Iraq and Syria to cultivate a hive of transporters and smugglers to save women; he subsequently connected Mikhail to several survivors. Powerful and heartbreaking, this work lets the survivors tell their stories and highlights the courage of those risking their lives to rescue others.The stories inDunya Mikhail, award-winning poet, has gathered first-person stories from those who survived [an] unthinkable ordeal, as well as those who worked tirelessly to rescue them. We should all read it.This remarkable book tells of one mans attempts to fight back and to rescue his people from a life of horror. In the hands of Dunya Mikhail, an Iraqi Assyrian poet, the stories of these women and their escape, with Abdullahs help, become a horrifying tightrope walk. Abdullahs story is a remarkable one, and it is told with great intensity by Mikhail.Remarkable. A childs perspective mingles freely with the poets mature voice,both baffled by the paradoxl³’