Unlike many of his friends and neighbors, an Iraqi teenager named Khidir only pretended to be murdered in August after he was herded with others into a mass execution by members of ISIS. The opening of a survivor’s story, as told by Lauren Bohn in Foreign Policy:

“Duhok, Iraq — One sunny day this summer, 17-year-old Khidir lay on the ground and pretended to be dead for what seemed like an eternity.

On Aug. 15, masked Islamic State (IS) militants stormed into his village, Kocho, about 15 miles southwest of the town of Sinjar, ordering hundreds to gather in the village’s only school. There they took everyone’s mobile phones and valuable possessions — wedding rings, money, life savings, all gone in a flash. They told the villagers not to worry, that they would simply drive them all to Mount Sinjar to be with their fellow Yazidi people, who practice an ancient religion considered heretical to the Islamic extremists.

‘We had heard they might come to the village, but we didn’t actually believe they would,’ says Khidir, his hands brushing against a dirty white bandage on his neck.

They told Khidir he’d be among the first group of men to leave. A wave of relief washed over him. ‘I thought that maybe they weren’t so evil as we had thought,’ he recalls. 

He and 20 or so other men piled into a white Kia truck, unnerved to be separated from their families but hopeful about reaching the mountain, where thousands of Yazidis had fled from the Islamic State’s advance. About 10 minutes later, the truck stopped in the middle of a field, where two other men were waiting with machine guns. Khidir suddenly realized they weren’t going to the mountain after all.”