Nadia Murad

Nadia Murad (born 1993, Kawjū (Kocho), Iraq) is a Yazīdī human rights activist who was kidnapped by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; also called ISIS) in August 2014 and sold into sex slavery. She escaped three months later, and shortly thereafter she began speaking out about human trafficking and sexual violence, especially as these issues pertained to Yazīdī women. Murad also spoke about the mistreatment of the Yazīdī community more broadly. She was appointed the United Nations’ Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking in 2016 and received several accolades. In 2018 she was a corecipient, with Congolese physician Denis Mukwege, of the Nobel Prize for Peace.

Capture and escape

In August 2014 ISIL undertook a campaign to capture Yazīdī villages for the purpose of human trafficking. The Yazīdī community, largely located around the Sinjār Mountains in Iraq, had long suffered persecution and discrimination. Unlike many other religious minorities, such as Jews and Christians whose religious proximity to Islam allowed them certain protections through the dhimmah system, the Yazīdīs had often been singled out for persecution on the basis of their teachings. Drawing on this background, the propaganda machine of ISIL was able to target the Yazīdīs as a religiously sanctioned source for sex slavery in an effort to lure young men to join the militant group.

On August 15 Murad’s village of Kawjū (Kocho) was captured by ISIL. The Yazīdīs were rounded up, and the men and women were separated. The men, including six of Murad’s brothers, were massacred. Some older women, including Murad’s mother, were also killed. The rest of the women, including Murad, were taken to Mosul, Iraq, the largest city held by ISIL at the time, to be marketed as sex slaves. More than 5,200 Yazīdī women in total were trafficked by ISIL in 2014, while about 5,000 men were killed.

Murad was bought and sold several times before escaping in November. Her first attempt at escaping had resulted in a gang rape as punishment, and she decided then not to try to escape again. One day, however, she discovered that a door had been left unlocked, and she fled. She found her way into the protection of a Muslim family not connected to ISIL, who helped her escape to Kurdish-controlled territory.

Activism

In 2015 Murad left for Germany as part of a refugee program for survivors of ISIL. In December of that year she was asked to speak before the UN Security Council on human trafficking, an appearance that prompted a number of requests for interviews. Her testimonies not only drew attention to the ongoing suffering of the Yazīdī community and to the horrors of ISIL but also to the fact that sexual violence as a weapon of war is far from unique to ISIL. In 2016 the UN appointed her Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking. She wrote a memoir on her capture and escape, The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State, and founded Nadia’s Initiative, an organization advocating for the rights of women and minorities and assisting in redeveloping minority communities facing crisis.