My Family Stabbed Me and Shot Me for Leaving Islam. I Survived Both. This Is My Story

I have a scar on my left side, just below the rib. It is about 4 in long, thin, white, slightly raised.

If you looked at you might think it was from surgery. It was not from surgery.

It was from a knife, my cousin’s knife. The blade went in just deep enough to send a message.

Come back to Islam or the next one goes deeper. I did not come back to Islam, so the next one went deeper.

Not a knife the second time, a bullet. It missed my spine by 2 cm.

The doctors in Erbil said it was a miracle I could walk. I told them it was not a miracle.

It was   a message. A message from God that said, “I am not finished with you.”

My name is Dara. I am 32 years old. I am Kurdish, from Sulaymaniyah in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

I am a former Muslim. I am a follower of Jesus Christ and I have the scars to prove it.

This is not a gentle story. I want to be honest about that from the beginning.

This story   has blood in it. It has betrayal. It has the kind of violence that comes not from strangers, but from family, from the people who are supposed to protect you, from the people who held you as a baby and taught you to walk and called you by name.

That is the worst kind of violence. Not because the wounds are deeper, because the hands that make them were once the hands that loved you.

But this story also has something else. Something stronger than blood and betrayal and violence.

Something that took every weapon my family, my tribe, and my country threw at me and turned it into testimony.

That something is Jesus and he is the reason I am still alive. Kurdistan, the land of the Kurds, the largest ethnic group in the world without a country.

40 million people spread across Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran. All of them dreaming of a homeland that the world keeps promising and never deliver.

I grew up in Sulaymaniyah or Slemani as we call it in Kurdish. It is the second largest city in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, nestled in a valley surrounded by mountain.

Beautiful, rugged mountains that turn green in spring and golden in autumn and white in winter.

Mountains that have sheltered the Kurdish people for centuries, that have hidden fighters and refugees and dreamers.

The Kurds say, “We have no friends but the mountains.” >>   >> It is a proverb born from a thousand betrayals, and it is as true today as it ever was.

Sulaymaniyah is considered the cultural and intellectual capital of Kurdistan. It is more liberal than Erbil, more cosmopolitan, with a tradition of poetry, music, and political dissent.

But, do not confuse liberal with free. Sulaymaniyah is still Iraq. It is still Kurdish.

It is still deeply, fundamentally Muslim. And beneath the cafes and the bookshops and the university campuses, the old structures are still there.

Tribe, clan, honor, blood. My family was Jaf, one of the largest Kurdish tribes, historically powerful, with deep roots in the Sulaymaniyah area.

The Jaf are known for their pride, their fierce loyalty, and their absolutely non-negotiable commitment to family honor.

In Jaf culture, the family is not just a social unit. It is a covenant, a blood pact.

You do not betray the family. You do not shame the family. You do not leave the And the family’s religion is Islam, period.

My father, Aram, was a former Peshmerga fighter, one of the Kurdish guerrilla warriors who fought Saddam Hussein’s regime in the mountain.

He had fought in the 1991 uprising. He had survived chemical weapons attack. He had buried friends in mountain graves and carried the ghosts of their deaths in his eyes for the rest of his life.

He was a hard man, hard in the way that war makes men hard, not cruel by nature, but scarred so deeply that tenderness had become inaccessible.

My mother, Shirin, was a homemaker from a religious family. She was soft where my father was hard.

She cooked. She sang Kurdish folk songs while she cleaned. She held us when we were sick and told us stories about Saladin and the great Kurdish heroes.

She was the warmth in our house, the counterbalance to my father’s granite silence. I have three brothers, Azad, Rebwar, and Soran, and two sisters,   Chinar and Rozhan.

I am the second oldest. In Kurdish families, the oldest son carries the weight of expectation, but I, the second son, carried the weight of curiosity.

I was the one who asked questions, the one who wondered, the one who sat apart and watched the world with eyes that were always searching for something they could not name.

My father did not like my curiosity. He was a man of action, not thought.

He said, “Dara, a man does not ask why. A man acts. A man fights.

A man protects his family and his honor. Questions are for women and philosopher.” He did not mean it as an insult to women or philosopher.

He meant it as a description of a world in which survival depended on decisiveness, not reflection.

But, I could not stop reflecting. I could not stop asking. And the questions I was asking were getting dangerous.

Islam in Kurdistan is different from Islam in the Arab world. The Kurds are Sunni Muslims, mostly of the Shafi’i school, but our Islam has always been colored by Sufi traditions,   by pre-Islamic beliefs, by the pragmatism of a mountain people who adapted everything to their own needs.

Kurdish Islam is, in many ways, more relaxed than Arab Islam. You will find Kurds who drink alcohol, who do not pray regularly, who treat religion as a cultural identity, rather than a daily practice.

But, beneath this surface relaxation, the fundamentals hold. God is one. Muhammad is his prophet.

The Quran is his word. And leaving Islam is an unforgivable betrayal of God, of family, of the Kurdish people themselves.

I grew up attending mosque, memorizing Quran, fasting during Ramadan. I went through the motions, but even as a boy, I sensed that the motions were empty.

The prayers felt like recitations, not conversations. The fasting felt like discipline, not devotion. The religion felt like a fence, not a path.

It kept things out. It did not lead anywhere. Then came the years that changed everything.

I am talking about the ISIS year. In 2014, the Islamic State swept across northern Iraq like a black wave.

They captured Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, in a matter of days. They pushed toward Kurdistan.

They slaughtered Yazidis by the thousands in Sinjar. They enslaved women. They beheaded men. They crucified people, literally crucified them, and posted the images online as propaganda.

I was 20 when ISIS came. Old enough to understand what was happening. Old enough to be terrified.

Old enough to see, with horrifying clarity, what Islam looked like when it was taken to its logical extreme.

My father and my older brother Azad joined the Peshmerga forces defending Kurdistan against the ISIS advance.

They fought on the front lines near Kirkuk. Azad was wounded. Shrapnel in his leg that left him with a permanent limp.

My father came home after 6 months on the front, thinner, older, with new ghosts in his eyes to join the old ones.

The ISIS fighters called themselves Muslims. They quoted the Quran. They cited Hadith. They claimed to be implementing true Islam, the Islam of Muhammad’s original community, purified of centuries of deviation.

They pointed to specific verses, specific rulings, specific precedents in Islamic law to justify every atrocity.

The beheadings,   the slavery, the crucifixions, the burning alive of a Jordanian pilot in a cage.

The mainstream Muslim response was to say, “They are not real Muslims. They have perverted Islam.

Islam is a religion of peace.” And I wanted to believe that. I desperately wanted to believe that.

But when I read the verses they cited, when I studied the historical precedents   they referenced, when I traced their ideology back through the centuries of Islamic jurisprudence, I found that they were not inventing.

They were selecting, selectively, brutally, terrifying, but the source material was there. >>   >> It was in the Quran.

It was in the Hadith. It was in the classical Islamic legal tradition. This realization was devastating.

It did not make me hate Islam. It made me afraid of it. Afraid of a religion that contained within its texts the seeds of what ISIS had become.

Afraid that Islam is a religion of peace was not the whole truth. Afraid that the fence I had grown up inside was not just a fence.

It was a cage with teeth. The question that formed in me during those ISIS years was not is Islam true?

It was something more visceral, more personal. Is this the God I want to follow?

A God whose book can be used to justify crucifixion? A God whose legal tradition has provisions for slavery?

A God whose prophet waged war and took captives? I pushed the question down. I was a Kurdish man.

Kurdish men do not question. Kurdish men fight. I picked up my father’s silence and wore it like armor and went about my life.

But the question was eating me alive from the inside. The encounter came in 2018.

I was 24. The ISIS caliphate was collapsing, but the wreckage it left behind, the displacement, the trauma, the ideological poison was everywhere.

I was working in Sulaymaniyah as a translator for an international humanitarian organization. My English was good.

I had studied it at the University of Sulaymaniyah and there was high demand for Kurdish-English translators in the NGO sector.

The work was intense, translating for medical team, for psychologists treating trauma victims, for journalists documenting the aftermath of ISIS.

One of the organizations I worked with was a Christian medical charity. They ran a clinic on the outskirts of Sulaymaniyah serving displaced families, mostly Arabs and Yazidis who had fled ISIS-controlled areas.

The doctors and nurses were from various countries, the UK, South Korea, the US, Jordan.

Some were Christian, some were not. But the organization itself was explicitly Christian. They did not hide it.

They did not proselytize. They healed, but their motivation was openly rooted in Christian faith.

I was assigned to translate for a British doctor named Dr. Sarah. She was in her late 30s, calm, competent, and tireless.

She treated patients 12 hours a day, often more. She saw injuries that would make most people vomit, war wounds,   burns, the physical evidence of torture.

She treated ISIS victims and ISIS fighters with the same care, the same thoroughness, the same compassion.

When I asked her how she could treat an ISIS fighter with the same dedication she showed his victim, she said, “Because Jesus did not ask me to judge who deserves healing.

He asked me to heal.” That sentence hit me like a sledgehammer. I had grown up in a world defined by who deserved what.

Tribe determined who deserved protection. Religion determined who deserved salvation. Clan determined who deserved loyalty.

The entire social structure was built on the question of deserving. And here was this British doctor working 16-hour days in a clinic in northern Iraq saying that the question of deserving was irrelevant, that Jesus had made it that love, the kind of love Jesus taught, was not a reward for the worthy.

It was a gift for everyone. Over the following weeks, I watched Dr. Sara with increasing fascination.

I watched her pray quietly before each surgery, just a few whispered words with her eyes closed and her hands still.

I watched her interact with patients, always gentle, always present, always treating each person as if they were the only person in the I watched her grieve.

She lost patients, and each loss left a mark on a shadow in her eyes that faded slowly and never fully disappeared.

And I watched her joy, because despite the suffering, despite the exhaustion, despite the blood and the trauma and the endless stream of broken bodies, Dr.

Sara was joyful, not happy in the superficial sense, joyful in the deep sense, >>   >> the sense of a person who knows why they are here, who is doing what they were made to do, who has a source of strength that does not depend on circumstances.

I had never seen that kind of joy in a Muslim.   I had seen devotion.

I had seen discipline. I had seen resignation. The inshallah of a people who had learned to accept suffering as God’s will, but I had not seen joy, not the kind that Dr.

Sara had, not the kind that made her sing while she washed her hands between patients, not the kind that made her laugh with children in the waiting room, not the kind that made her cry at the beauty of a sunset over the mountains of Kurdistan, as if the sunset were a personal gift from God.

Where did it come from? What was its source? And could I have it? I asked her directly one evening after the clinic had closed.

We were sitting in the common area drinking tea. The Kurds and the British share a love of tea, which made our friendship easy.

And I said, “Dr. Sara, I need to ask you something personal.” She said, “Of course.”

I said, “You are a Christian. I know this. But what I do not understand is how your faith gives you what it gives you, the peace, the joy,   the ability to do this work day after day without being destroyed by it.

I have a religion, too, Islam, and it does not give me those things. It gives me rules.

It gives me fear. It gives me a God who is powerful but not present.

Where does your God come from that is different?” She looked at me for a long time.

Then she said, “Dara, my God is not different from yours in terms of power or sovereignty.

He is different in terms of proximity. My God is close, not distant, not watching from a throne.

Close. So close that he became a human being and lived among us and died for us.

My peace comes from knowing that the God of the universe knows my name and chose to suffer for me.

That changes everything.” She paused. Then she said, “Would you like to know more about him?”

I said, “Yes.” >>   >> And that yes opened a door that would lead me through fire.

Dr. Sara gave me a Bible, a Kurdish Sorani Bible, one of the few copies she had brought specifically for this purpose.

Kurdish Sorani is my mother tongue, and holding a Bible in Sorani felt intimate and strange, like hearing a familiar voice say something unexpected.

She said, “Read the Gospel of Luke. It was written by a doctor like me, and it tells the story of a God who came to heal the sick, not to judge the righteous.”

I took the Bible home. I hid it in the false bottom of a drawer in my bedroom, a drawer with a panel that I had built myself, because in Kurdistan everyone knows how to build hiding Generations of Peshmerga hiding weapons from Saddam’s army had made concealment a cultural skill.

I read the Gospel of Luke. It destroyed me in the best possible way. Luke begins with the birth narrative, the angels, the shepherds, the manger.

But it was not the supernatural elements that struck me. It was the setting. God was born in a stable, not a palace, not a mosque, not a temple, a stable, among animals, in the dirt.

The most powerful being in the universe entered the world in the most powerless way imaginable.

A Kurdish boy grows up hearing stories about powerful men, Saladin, the great Kurdish warrior who defeated the Crusaders, the Peshmerga fighters who stood against Saddam with nothing but rifles and courage.

Strength is everything in Kurdish culture. Weakness is shame. And here was God, the God who supposedly rules the universe, being born helpless, dependent, vulnerable.

This was not the God I was taught about. The Islamic God, Allah, is Al Aziz, the almighty, Al Jabbar, the compeller, Al Kahhar, the subduer.

Names of power, names that inspire fear, names that make you small. The God of Luke was different.

He was small. He made him- self small. He chose smallness, not because he lacked power, but because he loved too much to use it the way powerful beings usually do.

I continued reading, the ministry of Jesus, the healings, the parables, the teaching. Each chapter was a revelation.

Jesus healed on the Sabbath and infuriated the religious leader. In their world and in mine, rules came first, people came second.

Jesus reversed it. People first, rules second. A man with a withered hand was more important than the Sabbath law.

A woman bent double for 18 years was more important than the synagogue regulations. A bleeding,   broken, suffering human being was more important than any system ever designed to manage them.

I thought about the Yazidi women I had translated for at the clinic. Women who had been enslaved by ISIS, raped, tortured, and then discarded.

Women whose suffering had been justified by religious rule, specific Islamic jurisprudential rulings about the treatment of captives.

And I thought about Jesus, who looked at the religious rules of his day and said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

People first. Always people first.” Then I reached Luke chapter 15, the three parables of lost things, the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son.

And the lost son, the prodigal son, broke me open. A young man demands his inheritance early, which in Middle Eastern culture is essentially saying to his father, “I wish you were dead.”

He leaves home. He squanders everything. He ends up feeding pigs, the lowest, most degrading work imaginable in a Jewish context.

And then he decides to go home, not with confidence, with shame. He prepares a speech, “Father, I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”

But the father, the father is the one who changed everything because the father does not wait for the son to arrive and deliver his speech.

The father sees him while he was still a long way off. The father has been watching, >>   >> waiting, scanning the horizon every day, hoping to see the silhouette of his boy.

And when he sees him, dirty, broken, ashamed, the father runs. In Middle Eastern culture, a wealthy older man does not run.

Running is undignified. It is shameful. A man of honor walks slowly, deliberately, with the gravity appropriate to his status.

But this father does not care about dignity. He does not care about honor. He cares about his son, and he runs.

He runs and he throws his arms around the boy and he kisses him before the son can finish his speech, before the son can earn his way back, before any conditions   are met or any debts are paid.

The father runs and embraces and kisses and weeps and calls for the best robe and the fattened calf and the music and the dancing.

I read that parable and I thought about my own father, a Peshmerga fighter, a man of honor, a man who would never run, a man who stood in front of tribal councils and spoke with the authority of a patriarch.

And I wondered, what kind of God runs? What kind of God throws away his dignity to embrace a broken child?

Not the God I had been taught about, not Allah, Al Aziz, Al Jabbar, not the God on the distant throne recording deeds, weighing scales.

That God does not run. That God waits for you to crawl to him on your knees with perfect repentance, with flawless submission.

But the God of Jesus runs. The God of Jesus sprints toward broken people with tears in his eyes and robes flying and arms open and a feast already prepared.

That God does not wait for you That God makes you worthy by running to I closed the Bible and I sat in the dark and I wept because I realized that I had been the prodigal my entire life.

Not in the sense of squandering money or living in sin, in the sense of being far from home, far from the God who made me, far from the love that was waiting for and the father, the real father, the Jesus father had been watching the horizon for waiting, scanning,   hoping to see my silhouette against the Kurdish mountains.

And now he could see me and he was running. The parable of the good Samaritan hit me with the force of a bomb.

A Jewish man is beaten and left for dead. A priest walks past. A Levite walks past.

A Samaritan, a member of a despised ethnic group, the enemy, stops. He bandages the wounds.

He carries the man to safety. He pays for his care. I thought about the tribal rivalries of Kurdistan, the Jaff and the Barzani, the PUK and the KDP, the Kurds and the Arabs, the Muslims and the Christians.

The entire structure of my society was built on the question, who is my neighbor?

And the answer was always, my tribe, my clan, my religion, my blood. Everyone else is other.

Everyone else is enemy. And Jesus said, your neighbor is the one who shows mercy, not the one who shares your blood, the one who shares your compassion.

The enemy who bandages your wounds is more your neighbor than the brother who walks past.

This was revolutionary. This was the dismantling of everything I had been taught about how the world works.

And it was spoken by a man who would later demonstrate it by dying for his enemies, not killing them, dying I need to stop here and say something directly.

If you are from Iraq, if you are Kurdish, if you come from a tribal culture where blood and clan define everything, I know what you are thinking.

You are thinking that I am a traitor, that I have betrayed my family, my tribe, my people, that by leaving Islam, I have cut myself off from everything that makes a Kurd a Kurd.

I understand why you think that. I would have thought the same thing a few years ago, but I want you to consider a different possibility.

What if leaving the religion is not the same as leaving the people? What if loving Jesus does not mean hating Kurdistan?

What if the God who made the mountains made them for the Kurds? >>   >> And the God who made the Kurds made them for something bigger than any tribe or religion can contain?

Stay with me. The hardest part of the story is coming, and so is the most beautiful.

If you are watching and this is resonating, subscribe now and drop a comment in your own language, Kurdish, Arabic, English, whatever you speak.

Every comment is a voice in the darkness, and the darkness needs more voices. My conversion happened at the clinic.

Dr. Sarah had been patient with me for months. We had talked, debated, questioned, explored.

She had answered my objection about the Trinity, about the divinity of Christ, about the supposed corruption of the Bible, with a combination of theological knowledge and personal testimony that was impossible to dismiss.

One evening,   after a particularly brutal day at the clinic, we had treated a family that had been caught in a car bomb, including a four-year-old girl with burns over 60% of her body.

I sat in the common room, and I could not stop shaking. The image of that little girl screaming, her skin blackened and peeling, was burned into my retina.

I could not unsee it. I could not unfeel it. Dr. Sarah sat next to me.

She did not say anything. She just sat. >>   >> And after a long time, she said quietly, “This is why he came.

This is why God became flesh, because the world is full of burning children, and a God who watches from a distance is not enough.

A God who enters the fire, who holds the burning child, that is the God the world I said through tears, I want that God.

I want the God who enters the fire. She said, he is here he has been here the whole time.

He was in the room today when we treated that he was holding her when we could not.

He is holding you now. I broke all the armor, the Kurdish toughness, my father’s silence, the peshmerga stoicism, it all fell away.

I crumbled. >>   >> I wept like the child I had not been allowed to be in a culture that equates manhood with emotional control and in the wreckage of my composure I prayed.

Not an Islamic prayer, not a memorized formula, a raw desperate honest cry from the deepest part of my soul.

Jesus, I believe you are the God who enters the fire. I believe you are the God who holds the burning children.

I believe you died for me and rose for me and you are alive right now in this room in this moment.

I surrender. I am yours. Take everything I am and make it into something new.

Dr. Sarah prayed with me. She put her hand on my shoulder and she prayed in English and I prayed in Kurdish and neither of us understood all the other words, but we understood the prayer because prayer is not about language.

Prayer is about surrender and we were both surrendering. She was surrendering me to God and I was surrendering myself.

The prayer was over. The shaking had stopped. The images of the burned girl were still there.

They would always be there, but they were held within a new framework, a framework of a God who did not cause the fire, who entered the fire, who held the burning ones, who wept over the ashes and   who would one day make all things new.

I was a Christian, a Kurdish Christian in Iraq and the fire was about to get very very real.

I kept my faith secret for about seven months. Seven months of reading the Bible in the hidden drawer.

Seven months of praying in Kurdish to Jesus behind locked doors. Seven months of attending the clinic and talking with Dr.

Sarah and learning what it meant to follow a God who is the fire. The discovery came through my phone.

I had been careless. I had downloaded a Christian worship song, a Kurdish worship song, one of the few that existed, and had forgotten to delete it from my music library.

My younger brother Soren borrowed my phone to make a call, and the song began playing automatically when he opened the music app.

A Kurdish voice singing the name of Jesus. Soren did not confront me. He went to Azad, my older brother.

Azad, the Peshmerga fighter, the one with the the one who had fought ISIS, the one who believed with absolute certainty that Islam was the shield that protected the Kurdish people, and that anyone who abandoned that shield was an enemy.

Azad came to my room that night. He did not knock. He walked in, closed the door, and stood over me with a face that was not angry.

It was something worse. It was the face of a man who had decided something.

He said, “Soren told me about the song on your phone. I want to hear it from you.

Are you a Christian?” I could have lied. I should have lied. In that moment, lying was the rational choice, the survival choice.

But, I had spent 7 months being transformed by a God who said, “The truth will set you free.”

And I could not deny him, not to save myself, not to save anything. I said, “Yes, Azad.

I am a Christian. I follow Jesus Christ.” The first blow came before I finished the sentence.

Azad’s fist connected with the side of my head, and I went down. He hit me again, and again.

He was strong, Peshmerga strong, combat strong, and he was not holding back. He hit me in the face, in the chest, in the stomach.

I curled up on the floor of my bedroom, covering my head with my arms, and I did not fight back.

Not because I could not. I am a strong man. I could have fought, but something in me, the Jesus in me, said, “Do not resist.

Turn the other cheek. Absorb the blow. >>   >> Do not become the violence that is being done to you.”

Soren heard the noise and came in. Instead of stopping Azad, he joined him. Two brothers beating a third in the bedroom of their childhood home because he had said the name of Jesus.

It lasted minutes, but felt like hours. When they finally stopped, I was on the floor, bleeding from a cut above my eye, my ribs screaming with Azad stood over me and said, “You have one day, one day to recant, to say the Shahada and ask Allah for forgiveness.

If you do not, I will tell the family. I will tell the tribe, and what happens after that will be worse than what just happened.”

They left. I lay on the floor of my bedroom bleeding, and I prayed, not for my safety, for my brothers.

Father, forgive them. They do not know what they are doing. I did not recant.

Azad kept his promise. He told my father. He told the extended family. He told the tribal elders.

Within 48 hours, I was summoned to a family not a discussion, a tribunal. My father, my uncles, my older cousins, about 15 men seated in a circle in my uncle’s guest room.

The room smelled of cigarette smoke and cardamom tea. The faces were hard. The eyes were cold.

My father spoke first. He   did not look at me. He addressed the room as if I were not there.

He said in Kurdish, “My son has brought shame on this family. He has left the religion of his fathers.

He has become a kafir. I ask the family to decide what is to be done.”

The discussion that followed was the most surreal experience of my life. 15 men, my blood relatives, debating my fate as if I were a problem to be solved, not a person to be heard.

Some argued for forced reeducation, sending me to a strict mosque, enlisting the help of a mullah, pressuring me until I returned.

Some argued for complete severance, cutting me off from the family, declaring me dead, never speaking my name again.

And some, a minority, but they were there, argued for something worse. My uncle Kak Omer, my father’s oldest brother,   said the word that made the room go silent, “namus”, honor.

He said, “This is not just a religious matter. This is a matter of family honor, and there is only one way to restore honor that has been this deeply violated.”

He did not say the words honor killing. He did not need to. Everyone in the room understood.

My father, to his credit, and I will credit him for this until the day I die, stood up and said, “No,   he is my son.

I will not allow that, but he cannot stay here. He must leave today.” The room argued, voices   rose.

Kak Omar pressed his case, others supported him. The debate went back and forth, and I sat in the center of it like a defendant at a trial where the jury could sentence him to death.

In the end,   my father’s position held, but barely. The compromise was this: I would be expelled from the family.

I would leave Sulaymaniyah. I would not contact any family member. My name would not be spoken.

If I was seen in the tribal areas, the family would not be responsible for what happened.

It was exile, not execution, but the line between the two was thin. I had two hours to pack and leave.

My mother came to my room while I was packing. She was crying soundlessly, the way Kurdish women cry, as if tears are a private language that men are not supposed to hear.

She pressed a small bundle of money into my her savings, hidden from my father.

She said, “Dara Kurdi, my son, I do not understand what you have done, but you are my son.

Take this. Stay alive. And if your God is real, ask him to bring you back to me.”

I held my mother. I held her the way a drowning man holds a lifeline, and I said, “He is real, Dayik.

He is the most real thing I have ever known, and I will come back to you.

I promise.” She kissed my forehead. Then she wiped her tears, straightened her back, and walked out of my room with the dignity of a Kurdish woman who has survived wars and dictators and chemical attacks, and now this, the loss of a son to a God she did not recognize.

I went to Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region, about three hours from Sulaymaniyah.

I stayed with a friend, a non-family contact who was sympathetic but nervous. In Kurdistan, harboring an apostate can bring trouble on your own family.

He let me stay for a few days while I figured out my next move.

Dr. Sarah’s organization helped. >>   >> They connected me with a Christian network in Erbil that assisted endangered converts.

The network found me a room, helped me with money, and began the process of getting me out of Iraq, but the tribe was not finished with The first attack came a week after I arrived in I was walking to a meeting with the Christian network when a motorcycle pulled up beside me.

The rider was my cousin Karwan, Kak Omer’s son. He did not get off the motorcycle.

He pulled a knife and slashed at me as he passed. The blade caught my left side just below the 4 inches of searing pain and then blood, warm, fast, soaking through my shirt.

Karwan did not stop. He sped off. The message was delivered. You are not safe.

Distance does   not protect you. The tribe has long arms. I was treated by a doctor in the Christian network, a Kurdish Christian, one of the rare ones, who had a small clinic.

He stitched the wound and said, “Dara, you need to leave Iraq. They   will not stop.”

I knew he was right, but leaving Iraq takes time, visas, paperwork,   money, and time was something I did not have.

The second attack came 3 weeks later. This one   was I was leaving a shop in a quiet neighborhood of Erbil when I heard a sound I recognized from my childhood, the crack of a gunshot.

I felt the impact before I heard the second shot. A bullet hit me in the lower back on the right side, just above the hip.

I fell. I lay on the pavement bleeding, staring up at the sky, and I thought, “This is how it ends, on a street in Erbil, killed by my own blood.”

But it was not how it end People came. An ambulance was called. I was rushed to a hospital.

The bullet had missed my spine by 2 cm. It had torn through muscle but hit no vital organs.

The doctor said I was lucky. I told them I was not lucky. I was loved by a God who was not finished with me.

I spent 10 days in the hospital. Dr. Sara flew to Erbil to be with me.

She sat by my bed and held my hand and cried and prayed and read me the Psalms in English while I drifted in and out of consciousness.

One of the Psalms she read was Psalm 23. “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are The valley of the shadow of I was in it, literally.

I had been knifed and shot by my own family. I was in a hospital in a country where my tribe wanted me dead.

The shadow was everywhere, but the next line, “For you are   with He was with me.”

In the hospital, in the pain, in the fear, in the blood-soaked gauze and the beeping monitors and the prayers of a British doctor become more family to me than my own blood.

He was   there. The God who enters the fire was in the valley of the shadow and I was not afraid, not brave, not fearless, just not afraid because fear cannot survive in the presence of that kind of love.

The days in the hospital were a strange kind of sanctuary. I was in pain.

I was afraid of another attack. >>   >> I could not walk properly, but I was also, paradoxically, at peace because the hospital was the one place where my tribe could not easily reach me, and in that temporary safety, I had time to think, to pray, to read.

Dr. Sarah brought me books, a Kurdish commentary on the Gospel of John, a collection of testimonies from other Kurdish and Arab converts, and a small devotional book with daily reading.

I read them all, devouring the words the way a starving man devours food. One passage in the devotional book struck me with the force of a revelation.

It was a reflection on 2 Corinthians 4:8-9. “We are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed, perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted, but not abandoned, struck down, but   not destroyed.

Hard-pressed, but not crushed.” I had been pressed by fists, by a knife, by a bullet, by the collective weight of a tribe’s judgment, but I was not crushed.

Something inside me, the Jesus inside me, was uncrushed, uncrushable, like a diamond that gets harder under pressure instead   of breaking.

“Persecuted, but not abandoned.” I had been abandoned by my family, by my tribe, by the social world that had been my entire reality, but I was not abandoned by God.

God was in the hospital room. God was in the stitches. God was in the beeping of the heart monitor that proved, with every electronic pulse, that my heart was still beating, that the blood was still flowing, that   the life was still there.

“Struck down, but not destroyed.” I had been struck down, literally, repeatedly,   and I was still here, still breathing, still believing, still alive.

Paul, the man who wrote those words, knew what he was talking about. He had been beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, imprisoned.

He had scars of his own. He was not writing theology from a comfortable study.

He was writing testimony from a bloody floor, and his testimony was my testimony. Struck down, but not destroyed.

I left the hospital with a new understanding of what it means to follow Jesus.

It means you will be hit. It means you   will bleed. It means the people you love may become the people who hurt you.

But it also means that you will not be destroyed, because the God who rose from the dead has planted that same resurrection power inside you.

And no knife and no bullet can kill what God has made alive. I am going to pause here, because I know this is heavy.

I told you at the beginning that this story has blood in it. It does.

My blood. And I need you to know that I am not sharing this for shock value.

I am not trying to make you gasp or cry or feel sorry for. I am sharing it because it is the truth, and the truth, even the bloody truth, especially the bloody truth, has the power to set people.

If you are watching this and you are from a tribal culture, Kurdish, Arab, Afghan, Somali, any culture where honor and blood and clan define your world, I want you to know that I understand the weight of what I am describing.

I understand the impossibility. I understand that what I did looks like suicide the inside, but I am alive.

I am standing, and the scars on my body are not signs of   defeat.

They are signs of resurrection. Share this video. Share it with someone who thinks that leaving Islam means dying, because I left and I lived,   and the God who kept me alive can keep anyone alive.

After I was discharged from the hospital, the Christian network accelerated my evacuation. The shooting had made the situation untenable.

My tribe knew I was in Erbil. They had already attacked me twice. A third attempt would likely succeed.

The details of my departure from Iraq are something I cannot fully share, for the same reasons that other converts in these stories protect their escape routes.

What I can tell you is that it involved multiple countries, multiple organizations, and the kind of underground network that exists specifically to save people like me, people whose families want them dead because they chose to follow Jesus.

I can tell you that there were moments of pure terror, border crossings where my name could have flagged a system, transit points where the wrong question from the wrong official could have ended everything.

Hours in vehicles with strangers who spoke languages I did not understand,   trusting that the network was real, that the safe house was real, that the next country was real.

And through it all, I held the Kurdish Sorani Bible that Dr. Sarah had given me.

I held it like a talisman, like a weapon,   like a love letter from God.

I read it in cars, in waiting rooms, in cheap hotels. I read it until the pages were soft and the spine was cracked and the margins were full of my handwriting, prayers, questions, moments of terror, moments of peace.

I eventually reached a European country and applied for asylum as a persecuted religious minority.

The process took months, but the organization that had helped me escape also helped me navigate the bureaucracy.

They provided lawyers, translators, advocates. They provided a room in a safe house. They provided food, clothing, medical care for my still healing and they provided a church, a small multicultural church where refugees and locals worshiped together, where Kurdish and Arabic and Farsi and English and the local European language all mingled, where a man with a knife scar on his side and a bullet wound in his back could stand among other survivors and sing about a God who had the fire.

The first Sunday I attended that church, I could not sing. I stood among the congregation and I opened my mouth, but no sound came out because the last time I had been in a room full of people who knew my name, they had been debating whether to kill me.

My body remembered. My nervous system was still in the tribal council room. My muscles were still braced for the blow.

A man standing next to me, an Iranian convert, a man with his own scars, his own story, noticed my silence.

He did not say anything. He just put his arm around my shoulder and held me while the music played.

He held me the way Dr. Sarah had held me, the way my mother had held me, the way God holds everyone who is too broken to stand on their own, and eventually I sang.

It took weeks, but I sang.   One line, then two, then a whole verse, then a whole song.

And when the full voice finally came, my Kurdish voice, strong and deep and alive, it filled the room like water filling a dry riverbed.

And the man next to me, the Iranian,   looked at me and smiled and said in broken English, “Your voice is back.”

My voice was back. Not just my singing voice, my whole voice, the voice that my family had tried to silence, the voice that my tribe had tried to kill, the voice that said, “I am Dara.

I am Kurdish. I am Christian. I am alive, and no knife and no bullet and no tribal council can change what God has declared.”

Four years have passed. I am 32. Let me tell you where I am. I have asylum, I have an apartment, I have a job.

I work as a translator and cultural mediator for a refugee services organization, helping newly arrived Kurds, Arabs, and Afghans navigate the asylum process.

The work is meaningful because I know their fear. I know the disorientation of arriving in a country where nothing is familiar.

I know the weight of the stories they carry, and I can say to them in Kurdish, “I understand.

I was where you are, and it gets better.” The scars have healed. The knife wound is a thin white line.

The bullet wound is a puckered circle on my lower back. I do not hide them.

They are part of my testimony. When people ask about them, I tell them the truth.

My family tried to kill me because I chose to follow Jesus,   and Jesus kept me alive.

I am in contact with Dr. Sarah. She returned to the UK after her posting in Kurdistan, and we talk regularly.

She has become one of the most important people in my life, a spiritual mother, a mentor, a friend.

She reminds me when the darkness presses in why I am still here. You are alive for a purpose, Dar.

God did not save you from the bullet just to waste your I am part of a growing community of Kurdish Christians in Europe.

We are small, but we are real. >>   >> We worship in Kurdish. We read the Bible in Sorani.

We eat Kurdish food, dolma and biryani and kubba. And we celebrate Kurdish holidays, and we are unapologetically Kurdish and unapologetically Christian, because following Jesus did not make us less Kurd.

It made us more Kurdish. It connected us to the deepest, truest,   most beautiful parts of our culture.

The hospitality, the loyalty, the courage, the poetry, while freeing us from the parts that were poisoned by violence and honor obsession and My mother contacts me secretly through a phone she keeps hidden from my father.

She calls me once a month, always late at night, always in a whisper. She asks if I am eating, if I am warm, if I am safe.

She never asks about my faith, but she always ends the call the same way.

Dara, be alive. Just be I tell her I am alive, more alive   than I want to tell you about what healing looks like, because people who hear stories like mine often imagine that the suffering ends when the escape begins.

It does not. The body heals.   The scars close, but the mind and the soul take longer.

For the first year in Europe, I had nightmares every night. Sometimes I was back in my bedroom in Slemani, and Azad was hitting me.

Sometimes I was on the street in Erbil, and the motorcycle was coming. Sometimes I was in the tribal council room, and the faces were closing in.

I would wake up sweating, my hand   pressed against the knife scar, checking if it was fresh, checking if the blood was real.

I saw a trauma counselor, a Christian psychologist who specialized in working with persecuted believers.

She   helped me understand that my body was stuck in survival mode, that the fight-or-flight response, which had kept me alive in Iraq, was now firing in situations that were safe.

A loud noise, a stranger walking too close behind me, a car slowing down next to me on the street.

My body did not know that the war was over. It was still in the tribal council room, still bracing for the blow.

The healing came slowly, through therapy, through prayer, through the patient, persistent love of my church community, who did not try to fix me, but simply accompanied.

They sat with me when the nightmares were bad. They cooked Kurdish food for me when I was too depressed to cook for myself.

They prayed over me in Kurdish and Arabic and English, and the sound of those languages rising together was itself a kind of healing, a reminder that the world is bigger than one tribe, one council room, one family’s judgment.

I also found healing through exercise. I started running, not metaphorically, literally running through the parks and streets of my new city in the early morning   when the air was cold and clear and the world was quiet.

Running felt like freedom. My legs moving, my lungs burning, my heart pumping. The same body that had been beaten and stabbed and shot was now strong enough to run.

Every mile was a victory. Every breath   was a prayer. Every step said, “I am alive.

I am alive. I am alive.” I ran my first [snorts] half marathon last year, 13 miles.

When I crossed the finish line, I was crying, not from exhaustion, from gratitude, because the legs that carried me across that finish line were the same legs that had carried me out of my father’s house, through   the streets of Erbil, into the hospital, out of Iraq, and into a new life, and they were still running, still strong, still alive.

My father and my brothers have not spoken to me since the day I was expelled.

Azad, the one who beat me, has reportedly told people in Sulaymaniyah that I died in a car accident abroad.

Another funeral for a living person, >>   >> another grave dug for a man who is still breathing.

But I pray for every day. I pray for Azad, whose fists broke my face but could not break my faith.

I pray for Soran, who found the song on my phone and set the whole chain in motion.

I pray for my father, the Peshmerga fighter who fought Saddam and ISIS but could not fight the tribal code that demand I pray for Kak Omar, who said the   word namus and meant it.

I pray for all of them, because the God who enters the fire entered the fire for them, too.

And the God who kept me alive can reach anyone, even the men who tried to kill me.

My name is Dara Hassan. I am 32 years old. I am Kurdish, from Sulaymaniyah, Iraq.

I have a knife scar on my left side and a bullet wound in my back.

I was   beaten by my brothers, exiled by my tribe, and declared dead by my family, and I am alive.

Not because I am strong. The knife went through my strength. The bullet went through my courage.

Everything I had, every defense, every wall, every piece of Kurdish armor, was penetrated and destroyed.

I am alive because the God who enters the fire entered mine. He did not stand at a distance and give instructions.

He   came into the room, into the hospital, into the valley of the shadow, into the bleeding, breaking, burning center of my life.

And he held me, and he said, “I am not finished.” If you are in a fire, if the flames are close, if the heat is unbearable, if you can feel the knife or the bullet or the words that cut   deeper than either, I want you to know that you are not alone in the fire.

There is a God who enters it, who has entered it before, who will enter it again, for you.

The fire does not have the last word. The scars are not the end of the story.

They are the beginning. My name is Dara. I am alive. I am scarred. I am free.

And this is my testimony. Thank you for watching. I know this was not easy.

This is not a comfortable story. It is a story with knives and bullets and blood.

But, it is also a story with a God who is stronger than all of those things.

And I believe you needed to hear it today. If this testimony shook you, I am asking three things.

First, leave a comment. Tell me what part of this story hit you the hardest.

Was it the tribal council? The knife? The bullet? My mother’s midnight phone calls? Whatever it was, tell me.

Because your response tells me that Dara’s scars are not in vain. Second, share this video.

Send it to someone who thinks that following Jesus is easy. It is not. It costs everything, but everything it costs, it gives back a hundred times over and someone needs to know that.

Third, subscribe. This channel exists because stories like mine need to be told. The world needs to know what is happening to Christians from Muslim background.

The persecution is real. The cost is real, but the God is real, too, and he is winning.

Subscribe to be part of that story. Until next time, be brave, be alive, be held.

My name is Dara and God is not finished with me. Supas. Thank you. God bless you.