The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq

The true story of a beekeeper who risks his life to rescue enslaved women from Daesh

Since 2014, Daesh (ISIS) has been brutalizing the Yazidi people of northern Iraq: sowing destruction, killing those who won’t convert to Islam, and enslaving young girls and women.

The Beekeeper, by the acclaimed poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail, tells the harrowing stories of several women who managed to escape the clutches of Daesh. Mikhail extensively interviews these women―who’ve lost their families and loved ones, who’ve been sexually abused, psychologically tortured, and forced to manufacture chemical weapons―and as their tales unfold, an unlikely hero emerges: a beekeeper, who uses his knowledge of the local terrain, along with a wide network of transporters, helpers, and former cigarette smugglers, to bring these women, one by one, through the war-torn landscapes of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, back into safety.

In the face of inhuman suffering, this powerful work of nonfiction offers a counterpoint to Daesh’s genocidal extremism: hope, as ordinary people risk their own lives to save those of others. 

Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi American poet and writer. She is the author of the poetry collections The War Works Hard (shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize), Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (winner of the Arab American Book Award), The Iraqi Nights (winner of the Poetry Magazine Translation Award), and In Her Feminine Sign (chosen as one of the ten best poetry books of 2019 by The New York Public Library). Her nonfiction book The Beekeeper was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her debut novel, The Bird Tattoo, was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Mikhail won the UNESCO Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture and the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing.

Max Weiss is an Associate Professor of History and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of In the Shadow of Sectarianism, and the translator of Samar Yazbek’s A Woman in the Crossfire and Nihad Sirees’s The Silence and the Roar.