Sold into the Desert

They were the daughters of Kurdistan's mountains until the soldiers came and the world looked away. Torn from their villages and marched into a desert prison, a group of young women survive the unthinkable, only to be sold across borders and made to perform, night after night, for the paying men of a distant country. Watching from the crowd is David, a Jewish journalist who recognizes their grief as one his own people know, and resolves to carry their story home.

Iraqi Kurdish novelist Abdulqader Saeed draws on the fate of the women of the Anfal genocide to craft a haunting act of witness, in which a survivor of one people's annihilation becomes the keeper of another's. The question is no longer how to avenge the dead; but how to bring the living home.

Originally written in Kurdish and translated into Arabic and Persian, Sold into the Desert now reaches English readers for the first time, a lament for the vanished, and a testament to those who refuse to look away.