Until the Cloud Moves

Springs of Hope
Dec 4, 2025
6 min read

"Whenever the cloud was taken up from above the tabernacle, (they) would go onwards in all their journeys. But if the cloud was not taken up, they did not journey till the day that it was taken up." Exodus 40:34

From time to time, we ask ourselves a kind of accounting of the soul question: Why are we still here? It’s been eleven years. What more can we do? What more can we be? Over the years, we have learned the value, the weightiness of "just being", of the times where there are no words, no more actions that we can make, but presence is the steadying rock, presence is comfort, presence is stability. Presence is often sacrificial.

I was planning to write about a recent visit to Lalish Temple this week, the very heart of the Yezidi people but another one of those "somethings" happened that affected several of our tribe, so we will give honor to the families and share a hard story remembering that for such as these, our cloud has not moved and for as long as it remains, so do we sharing in both the joys and sorrows of our beloved community. Both go hand in hand and can not be separated.

Over the years, as our kids would "spill" stories from their time in captivity of IxxS, we would hear how one of their friends was killed on the battlefield or in an air strike and how they would try to remember the exact geographical details in case, just in case one day the body could be retrieved and taken for burial.

This week, just after we returned from a restorative visit to Lalish we hurried to the tents of some of our students as the bodies of Munir and Faris, cousins to 6 of our students, were found. Faris was only two years old when he was killed in captivity, Munir a tender eleven. Their story in brief reads like this.

Faris (aged 2) and Munir (aged 11)

Ali, Hamidi, Ahmad (one of our drivers) and Hassan, four brothers were taken into captivity, separated from each other and sent to desert villages in the Mosul district. The brothers worked as shepherds for the local Arabs. You may ask why they did not run away. Fear. IxxS would visit every few days and as a form of monitoring take pictures of them. Both they and their "hosts" were scared of the visits which would be punitive if anything was wrong with the sheep or the crops that they were also taking care of. If they were missing, their immediate captors would have been killed along with any of their family members who did not escape.

Note dear friends, that the entire families of the brothers were all in captivity, most of them our students either past or present. Some of you will remember Fairoz, the daughter of Hassan from Kabarto camp, who was taken captive to Baaj in the Sinjar desert.

There were air strikes on her captor’s house where her two cousins Munir and Faris were killed, probably instantaneously. She was trapped alone in the house, buried under its rubble. Until today, Fairoz is not sure what happened, how she got out of that hell hole as she was suffering from much internal bleeding and was mostly unconscious. She found herself in a hospital in the Baaj area where IXXX doctors performed four unsuccessful surgeries, leaving her body sliced and scarred.

Her first question when I met her, and she showed me her wounded body, was “Will someone be able to love me with all of my scars?” Today, thank God, Fairoz is married, has a child and has returned to Sinjar.

As for Munir and Faris. During the air strike, the captors and villagers fled, leaving the boy's corpses in the village. Just this week, largely thanks to Fairoz eye witness testimony, and the family connecting with people in the village of Feryal Karah over a ten year period, the bodies were dug up from their burial place in the Arab village and taken to Baghdad for forensic pathology, which, when completed, will allow the families to bury the boys in Sinjar.

One thing that we see in the camp is the waiting. Waiting is a hard, uncomfortable place to be in. The lack of knowledge, the lack of information, never sure if that which is slowly coming is accurate. Waiting is a killer for the tent dwellers.

We live alongside those who wait. Nadia Murad once said, "Until the Last Girl Comes Home". For us, it is "Until the Cloud Moves". This week, the cloud was parked above the tents of the four brothers and their children, our students. Fairoz and Muna, Naba, Saba, Hamda and Asma as two graves were opened and dry bones exposed to the light.

Asma and Hamda

Muna, Naba and Saba

Munir's father sits at the graveside

"

We have waited for eleven years. We have worked as a family to find my son’s grave and bring him home but from the moment that the government officially said that they will exhume the bones I feel very weak and am crying day and night. I am very nervous at the moment.

It was not easy for me to see my son hidden under the soil, nothing of him, just bones but I am glad for this day. It is not the closure that I would have dreamed of but we knew that he was killed. We want to bury him in our homeland with the dignity and respect that he deserves, so that we can be at peace.

I want to take deep breaths again and no longer choke when I try to breathe. I want to be able to eat food and taste it. I do not want to wait any more. I want to live and take care of my children who are alive. Not to be living for the one who is dead.

Wahida, Munir’s Mother.

"

Knowing that my son was killed and buried in a foreign land with foreign customs that are not according to our ways was so very painful for me. The region is still under the control of IXXX, so we could never go to the grave. It has been unsafe to go; we would request permission once we knew the approximate location, but permission was, of course, denied.

I watched my husband and his brothers open Faris’s grave in the middle of the desert. It was so hard to see that a part of my soul is no more than a bone. There was no ability to hug him, to kiss him, to smell him. No last embrace. Just a bone.

I am grateful, though. My son will come to his place of rest. There are many families and mothers still looking, still waiting, still hungry for the tiniest piece of information, the smallest clue. The waiting is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The waiting is a killer.

Our waiting has ended. For that, I am grateful

Manal, Faris’s Mother.

"

So you ask us, "Until when will you remain in the Land between the Two Rivers?" As do we ask ourselves. The most obvious answer is "until the cloud moves", but I also think of the dry bones described by Ezekiel (buried in Iraq).

"Then he said to me, 'Son of man, these bones are the house of Israel. They say, "our bones are dried up and our hope is gone, we are cut off. Therefore, prophesy and say to them, "This is what the Sovereign Lord says, 'My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them… You will know that I am the Lord when I open your graves and bring you up from them and I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land."

Until then. The bones and the cloud. They go together.