Separated by bitter choice, reunited by sweet chance

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — It isn't normal in the Middle East for someone to go homeless. People may be poor, and spend waking hours wandering the street in search of work, food, or spare change. But rarely would a person in need be turned them away from a home – neither stranger nor family. Not in normal circumstances, anyway.

Ayshe Rasho's circumstances were far from normal. The 56 year-old Yezidi woman had been banished from her home a second time, and living homeless on the streets of Erbil. When her second husband died in September 2019, her stepsons felt no affection or need for her, and sent her out the door.

This was not her first time she had said goodbye to her family. In 1988, Ayshe had a different name and a different life. In the Al Qosh district village of Boza, in the Nineveh Plains, she was born with the Yezidi name Khafse, and was married with four sons. But that was not the life she had chosen.

In the Yezidi code, no one can covert to the religion, leave it, nor marry someone outside of it. If a person breaks the rules, they are expelled from the community and may never return.

The man Khafse was married to by arrangement was abusive and adulterous: she was one of 11 wives. Polygamy is legal in the Yezidi religion, and Khafse could not bear it. She could hardly expect what would await her in a life of excommunication. But she knew that the life she had in Boza was not the right one for her. So she left behind her family and set off to start a new life, of her own choosing. She married Mohammed Tahir, and taking the Islamic name Ayshe, settled in Erbil. They were happy together for 30 years. But when he died of diabetes, she was alone again.

One rainy night in November, around 11 pm, Ayshe was picking through trash at the Tayrawa bazaar in the north of the city. The stalls had been closed for hours, but the sick and elderly woman was there eking living out of a mountain of tarps and scraps collected from her days of roaming the streets. People from the bazaar saw her roaming around alone and sought to get her help from a local charity. A Rudaw news crew was there to broadcast her story on television, and shared it on social media.

It was a routine news report, and Ayshe didn't care much for things like Facebook. She had no idea she would soon get the most important news of her life.

A hundred and fifty kilometers to the north, the next day's sun hung over Duhok as the clock passed three. Abdullah remembers the time, because he had just finished his afternoon prayers and was surfing social media when he saw it: Try as they may, videos on social media rarely shock or truly surprise a person. Even those that "go viral" have only a sliver of novelty that goes beyond the mundane. But this one struck like a bolt of lighting.

As he listened to the Rudaw journalist's story of an elderly lady, destitute and alone, he felt a prodigious sense of pity for the woman. Just the idea of a mother without a family lit a fire under his feet. But it was her face that gripped his attention. Perplexed by the strange feeling that he recognized this woman and her story, he couldn't stop toying with the thought that this mother without a family she could possibly the mother who had been absent from his life for so long.

“I immediately forwarded the video to my brother Fazan,” Abdullah recalled. He could hardly wait to hear if his older brother would confirm his inkling suspicion, so he dialed his phone immediately: "It's a sign from above – this is our mother."

Fazan was not so sure. It had been more than 30 years, and he was only ten years old young when he had last seen their mother. Abdullah had been only three. But he wanted answers. So he jumped in a taxi and head for Erbil to look for her.

For the next several months, Abdullah, a father of three, would search for the woman in the Tayrawa bazaar. Several trips between Erbil and Duhok passed without yielding any success. And like many choices people in this divided country choose to walk on, not everyone approved of the path he was walking.

Like his mother, Abdullah, too, had converted to Islam 11 years ago. He was cast out of Boza, and left the village for city life in Duhok. He and his brother are now Muslim, but their two other siblings stayed in the Yezidi community. Abdullah now works as a secretary for Nineveh Religious Affairs Endowment. He told Rudaw that since the day he converted to Islam, he has been searching for his mother.

To be a motherless child is to be eternally searching for something missing. “All my life I kept my eyes open as I turned every corner. I've been to Erbil, Duhok, Sulaimani, Mosul... but I never found her," he said.

Until one day searching, Abdullah finally found his mother.

“Thank God, I am not alone anymore, and neither is my mom," he told Rudaw at a short meeting to thank the cameraman who did the report that brought his mother's face to the screen on his mobile phone, crediting the crew for bringing them back together.

“I am so happy and glad that I have someone who cares about me now," Ayshe told Rudaw. "I have much respect for the people of Erbil city, and I bid farewell to them.”

There were no cameras to photograph the reunion. It was a bittersweet occasion, because the rest of their family still did not want to meet with her. Once she had left the Yezidi community, they refused to accept her back. Abdullah doesn't blame his mother for leaving them behind to pursue her own path. Now that they've found each other in a new community, they have much to talk about. That family business is now up to them to reconcile.

Reporting by Mahdi Faraj 
Edited by Shawn Carrié

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