What Comes with the Dust

As The Kite Runner and The Swallows of Kabuldid for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, this slim, profound novel illuminates the plight of those living under the Islamic State as well as the spirit of the Yazidi people.

Today is Nazo’s wedding. Today she will set herself on fire.

Nazo Heydo has drenched herself in kerosene and is ready to light the match in order to avoid marrying the Syrian elder who bought her from Islamic State officials. Her forced marriage is just the latest horror in a journey that began when ISIS fighters surrounded her peaceful village, demanding spoils and the Yazidis’ conversion to Islam. Rebuffed, they took away her father, brothers, and the love of her life in their pickup trucks with the other village men. The women and children they enslaved and separated, transporting the younger women to be trafficked for the pleasure of their soldiers or sold for money. Only Nazo’s wits and daring have saved her from further abuse or death, yet each escape leads to some new horror.

Meanwhile, in a parallel narrative, Soz, another young Yazidi, flees her family’s farm when she sees the black-flagged pickups approach. She manages to reach Mount Sinjar, where she joins the Yazidi fighters who have allied with the Kurdish Peshmerga. Her journey will lead back to her homeland to do battle against ISIS.

What Comes with the Dust is a powerful novel about genocide and the will to survive as well as a testament to struggles of the Yazidi people.

Gharbi M. Mustafa is a native of Iraqi Kurdistan and a professor of English at the University of Dohuk. He has personally interviewed Yazidi women who have escaped ISIS, and his novel is based on details of their ordeals as well as his familiarity with Yazidi culture and lore. He is also the author of the self-published, English-language memoir When Mountains Weep, about growing up in Kurdistan under the regime of Saddam Hussein. He lives in Dohuk.

"In this timely and important novel, Gharbi Mustafa unveils the hidden suffering of the Yazidi people at the hands of the brutal and merciless terrorist regime of ISIS. What Comes from the Dust is a testament to the indomitable power of love and the unconquerable persistence of the human spirit in the face of the most unimaginable evil.”—Corban Addison, international bestselling author of A Walk Across the Sun

"Mustafa, a native of Iraqi Kurdistan who has interviewed Yazidi victims of ISIS, brings the story of the Yazidi people to life for a Western audience in a way that headline-news coverage cannot."—Booklist

"Rich in culture and characters, and jarring in its account of jihadist brutality, it is a story that keeps the reader turning the pages to the end."—Bob Rogers, hospital chaplain, history professor, and writer

"An excellent story . . . It is a human responsibility to practice empathy and charity towards others. What Comes with the Dust shows us why that is. . . . Mustafa's lessons are ones for all to aspire to that are directly applicable to our current political and social climate.—Embersbookreview.com

"In this story you will find the atrocities of ISIS."—meandthebooks.com