Seeking Happiness

The journey of Naser as a young boy escaping Da’esh from his village, to the Shingal Mountain, through a safe passage to Syria and then to live in an Internally Displaced Persons camp in Dohuk. After three years of a harsh and hopeless existence in the camp, he decided to go to Turkey on his own, then by boat across to Greece, and eventually to Germany where he sought asylum and endeavoured to make “a life of happiness” with his family.

I feel no happiness…

Is there even anything left to be happy for?.

​Where can it be found? 

Is it hidden beneath the raindrops?

Or is it here, within my cursed tent?

​No, a thousand times no.

​There was once something called "happiness," 

But it belongs to neither this time nor this place. 

The era of joy has ended…

And my story with it has reached its end.

​For I am a migrant standing at the gates…

knowing nothing...

knowing no one...

​Other than listening in silence to this story 

that has no beginning, and no end.

This is what Naser wrote in 2015 when he was staying at a refugee camp in Greece on a treacherous journey via land and sea from Iraq to Germany. 17 at the time, he followed in his younger brother’s footsteps, for there seemed no future in the IDP camp he was staying in in north Iraq after the 2014 genocide. How did he get there? His story is one of trials and tribulations that was rehearsed by a thousand others who too fled persecution and violence. We talked to Naser to follow his life journey, beginning with a time that he could recall of happiness:

Poem written by Naser after being displaced from his home and on his way to Europe. Photograph by his father.

“I remember being with the family in my own home with my family with my friends. I used to enjoy going to school. My dad was happy when I studied. I used to enjoy playing football. I was Centre Forward. We had no playing fields. We were on a level patch of land and put 2 big rocks down for the goal. Many times we would fall on the rocks and hurt ourselves.”

Now a Barcelona fan, he also stands up for the Iraqi team especially now that it has qualified for the 2027 World Cup in the Americas. Naser continued with his memories:

“My home was built with mud. We had one room that was concrete which was a guest room for my father. He was a Councillor. That’s where he would meet the guests and where they would stay. It was next to a garden with lots of flowers. Many people used to come a lot of times to see him. I used to help him and go to Mosul with him. I would take my father to government work. I was the eldest so it was my duty. I was driving and serving the family.”

Naser is the eldest of 7 brothers and 2 sisters, the youngest being only 2 at the time of the genocide: “Our dad taught us not to argue with each other. We learnt to support each other. We helped each other with homework and so on.” This supportive nature kept him buoyant. But when his family was ripped away from him in 2014 during the chaos and carnage of escaping Da’esh, he lost the ground underneath his feet. Tales of happiness quickly turned to grief, added to which his best friend from school also died working in a petroleum company: “One day the chemicals used in batteries fell onto him as he was working, and he died. He was only 16.”

Naser’s escape from Tel Ezeer to the Shingal Mountain north of his village in August 2014 was one stricken with incomprehension and dread:

“We heard firing sounds first of all, then sounds of bombing coming our way when we were at home in our village. People were running away. We did not know what was happening. I’d never seen such things before. When Da’esh were approaching, my father was very worried and he shouted, ‘Hurry, hurry! Da’esh is here.’ People were saying, ‘You either have to convert or they will kill you.’ It was August 3rd. I knew something about Da’esh. They were already in Mosul. I felt strange. It was shocking what they were doing. I heard from my classmates that some were being killed, some girls were being kidnapped. It was a scary time.”

Naser on Shingal Mountain in August 2014, trying to escape Da'esh. Photograph by his father.

Although Naser had heard about genocides against Ezidi people, this was his first time experiencing such violence: “Our elders told us about massacres, but it was always theory. We had never seen it. But we knew about them. And that they attacked us only because we were Ezidi.” Naser was among the lucky ones whose family had a car. But at the foot of the mountain, they needed to get out to ascend. “We went to the temple, Shermant in a village called Jedali. We moved on. We were told later that had we been there five minutes later, we would have been killed as people were killed in that very place.”

Naser had nothing with him—only the clothes on his back, a brown T-shirt and pants. His biggest regret was not being able to free his canary birds that were kept in a make-do cage covered with a net. Leaving them behind distressed him the most, more than anything else including his bike:

“I forgot to free them by removing the net in front of them. I was thinking that nobody would feed them. It was very sad. I was crying about many things but also the fact that I left behind the birds still in their cage.”

His family were accompanied by thousands of others who ascended the mountain in the middle of a blistering Iraqi summer. “It was a confusing time because we had one Muslim family in our village. They were our friends. We could not understand why they would turn against us so suddenly.” He and his family spent about eight days on the mountain:

“We saw many people crying and shouting on the mountain. They were saying that our family had been killed. My dad told me that on the mountain there were people who had died. But he didn’t let us see them.”

At night, it turned terribly cold:

“We had no blanket. We used to keep warm by hugging each other. We couldn’t sleep sometimes. My mother had a long dress and she would cover my little siblings with it. We were on the mountain for 7-8 days. Sometimes for 2 days there was no food. We found water from different places. After 3 days we crossed to the north side. After that, a plane dropped some food. We got some water container that had the British flag. It was the RAF. Then later we got food from US planes. It was plastic army food—canned food soups, juices.  Slowly we finished it. 1 meal had to last at least 2 days. Sometimes we came across spring water on the north side and we filled the container from the plane with it.”

Naser’s father knew the local coordinator, a Muslim man who worked for the US Embassy in Mosul. His father was the only one in the family who had a smartphone and he would regularly phone the coordinator to give him GPS positions of their positions for airdrops. This way they also attained a solar-power lamp that was dropped by parachute. This lamp also doubled up as a phone charger. After about a week, the fleeing people heard that a safe corridor was opened up into north Syria:

“We walked towards it. 2 days and nights. The first night we slept in open land. The second night we slept around the walls in a gas station. It was very rough. And there were deadly scorpions there. But these were the least of our worries. And we slept—only because we were very tired.”

Their long walk was one that could meet with danger at any moment:

“Some of my family went before me. Some members stayed behind. We thought that it was better to split—if one group met with danger, at least another group could be safe and survive the ordeal. We didn’t know what their fate was. We were very worried. I was with 2 of my uncles and some neighbours. I think my mum and dad were in front of me. They were with the little children so they walked faster thinking they may get a car and get some help. My uncle said—the soldiers were helping us. They are Kurdish but they are not Peshmerga.”

This was a reference to how Ezidi people were let down by Peshmerga forces who provided them with no defence and abandoned them to Da’esh on August 3rd, 2014. Naser elaborated:

“Peshmerga were in our village. Nobody could say anything against them. They surrounded the village and made a big wall of soil so we could not go out. We saw how they stopped people for 3 hours at the check point. They were supposed to protect us but they ran away before Da’esh came.”

When Naser got near to the Iraq-Syria border near Derk, he took his first bath in a river surrounded by large rocks. “This was after 10 days. We were dirty and hot. And we had no other clothes to change into, so we had to dry the ones that we were wearing.” There they also got some food and water, and took some rest:

“The soldiers were saying, ‘Join us and fight Da’esh.’ But we wanted to meet our family. We were still not all together. I didn’t know where they were. I got onto these big trucks that are used in construction works. We went to a camp in Syria after a border checkpoint with a floating bridge called Semalka. It is at the exact corner of Syria, Turkey and Iraq. We entered through there on foot and local people gave us food and water. We knew some people had arrived in Kranke and we went to this camp and stayed there hoping to meet up with our family. When I arrived after about a week, I saw my parents but didn’t see my siblings. I was so happy to see them, but then I started to cry, thinking my brothers and sisters were not there. But they were around but not with them at the time. My parents consoled me and told me—there is no need to cry here. None of us ever believed we would meet again.”

There Naser and his family set up a large tent in the UNHCR camp that was set up about a fortnight after Da’esh’s onslaught. It was also visited by one of the co-authors, Farhad Shamo Roto, in 2014, as he too ran from his village north of the mountain to safety. At the camp, Farhad helped with the distribution of the tents with responsibility for 660 tents. Each person who worked in erecting a tent got $3 each. But the workers exaggerated the number of tents they put up and Farhad ran out of funds. The camp contractor who worked with the UNHCR said, ‘Don’t worry. These things can happen. We’ll give you the fund to cover the extra number of tens they asked for and some for your efforts.’

As it turned out, Naser was offered work to erect the rents by one of these workers and was paid 2 dollars. Those that offered their labour to Farhad outsourced the work to others while picketing the dollar difference. Even though Farhad did not meet Nasar there at the camp, they were in contact through middlemen in the same camp, doing similar work and contending with similar challenges.

At the camp, they received further details about massacres from others. His father later bought a television to receive further news while entertaining the younger members of the family:

“It was a difficult time. Tents could easily catch fire and some would flap and fly away with strong winds. There was a communal toilet between 10 tents, each of which housed about 12 people each. There were no medical or educational services.”

Faced with miserable presents and prospects, after three months, Naser’s brother who was 14 at the time, conferred with the family and decided to leave Iraq towards Europe. He reached Germany two months later. Almost a year later, Naser also had a similar impulse:

“I got the same idea to go to Europe. In 2015, I became 18 years old. I saw there was no hope in Iraq. I thought it would be good to reach my brother and give him company. I crossed the Turkey border and there was a Turkish airport. I went by plane to Istanbul. I stayed one week in Turkey then crossed in a plastic boat to cross the water. Then along with some other boys I got to the Bulgaria border. In Bulgaria the police caught me and I was in prison for 18 days. There were many fights so we stayed away and shut the door to try and keep the troublemakers out. I used to say to myself, ‘Either I will die or I will get to my brother.’ They took my phone away and I could not talk to anyone. My parents were worried sick.”

Eventually, after 18 days that seemed more like months, Naser was released with refugee documentation:

“When I got out of prison, I along with some other refugees went to the Serbia border. Some people took us by car to Serbia. At the border they walked through the border security while we took a parallel route through the forest and met them on the other side. And a humanitarian organisation in Serbia helped us there. This was 2015 around October time. Then we went to Croatia. We found some other people to take us to Austria. They showed us the way and had collaborators on the other side. We finally came by car to Munich. I spoke a little bit of English so I got by the best I could”

At this point, Naser had his second breakdown since leaving the camp. With no phone for over two weeks, feeling alone and forlorn, he was taken to a  large basketball stadium:  “It was full of refugees. I asked some people how long have you stayed here. Some were saying 2-3 months. I almost collapsed when I heard this. It was so disheartening to hear.” Fortunately, Naser got out about a month later. The police gave him a train ticket for Düsseldorf as he had told them his family was living near there. When he got to Dusseldorf, he had no money to buy another train ticket to get to Pforzheim. Fortunately he came across another Ezidi family who gave him the funds to buy the ticket. Eventually he reached his brother: “I knew my mother could get suicidal so I had to call her straight away. But fortunately they had already called her and she was happy.”

Naser in Germany. Photograph by Raminder Kaur.

What kept you going all the way to Germany, we asked:

“I knew there was no life for me back home in Iraq. I was also praying all the time to carry on…I’m glad I’m with my family and appreciate everything they’ve done for me. They keep me hopeful. I had to find work to make money to rent a house in order to bring my family across. That took another 2 years. I was responsible as the eldest. All the time they were in the camp and I was worried about them. All the time I was outside the camp they were worried about me.”

Once settled in Germany with a job, the rest of his family came across in 2017. Now living in a five-bedroom rented house with his 9 siblings and parents, Naser is studying to do a Masters in Economics. Despite his sense of purpose and achievement, Naser was plagued with nightmares throughout: “Even now I still got nightmares about Da’esh esp in the first 1-2 years after the genocide. Now it’s only every other week.” After Da’esh were defeated in 2017, Naser and his family went back to their home in the Shingali village of Tel Ezeer:

“The concrete room remained but there was nothing inside. It was stripped of everything. The net for the birds was not there. They took everything—my toys, my bike, everything. The mud house had been destroyed by the weather over the years as nobody had maintained it. There, we got some photos back from my childhood. They were protected from the elements in a plastic album.”

Naser was happy to receive a token of his childhood memories in the village. While his father spends a few months in the year in his village home, Naser could not entertain the idea of living there for its lack of safety and security. Yet he was proud of his Ezidi heritage and identity. We talked about how Ezidi discrimination and genocides could be stopped in the future:

“Until we have our own security, and can govern ourselves with our own administration in our homeland (Shingal), we cannot be safe. We cannot trust anyone else to do this. This is one way we can try to secure our future as Ezidis. Being Ezidi is everything. It’s hope, it’s faith. It’s Bawari—that is more than trust. I cannot imagine not being Ezidi.”

Naser, an Ezidi young man now settled in Germany. Photograph by Raminder Kaur.

Raminder Kaur and Farhad Shomo Roto, June 2026