YAZIDIS HONOURED
Sakharov Prize recognised bravery of former sex slaves
Sakharov human rights prize for two women captured and held as sex slaves by ISIL,
GENEVA // Two Yazidi women who survived the ordeal of kidnapping, rape and slavery at the hands of ISIL won the European Parliament’s Sakharov human rights prize yesterday. Nadia Murad and Lamia Haji Bashar – now the faces of a campaign to protect Yazidi people from a genocidal threat – were among thousands of women and girls abducted and held as sexual slaves by ISIL after they rounded up Yazidis in their village of Kocho, near Sinjar in north-west Iraq, in the summer of 2014. According to the UN, about 3,200 Yazidis are being held by ISIL, most of them in Syria. Ms Murad, now 23, was taken by ISIL from Kocho village near Iraq’s northern town of Sinjar in August 2014 and taken to Mosul where she was held captive, tortured and raped.
ISIL militants made her disavow her Yazidi faith, an ancient religion with more than half a million adherents near the Syrian border in northern Iraq.
“The first thing they did was they forced us to covert to Islam,” Ms Murad said this year at the United Nations in Geneva, through an Arabic translator.
Ms Bashar, also from Kocho, was 16 when she was taken.
She tried to break free of her captors several times during her 20 months in captivity before finally succeeding.
But after her escape, she fell into the hands of an Iraqi hospital director in the town of Hawjiah who also abused and raped her and several others.
She finally escaped with two friends. But en route to the city of Kirkuk, one of her friends trod on a landmine and was killed instantly, said Mirza Dinnayi, founder of the German-Iraqi aid group Air Bridge Iraq who has been looking after Ms Bashar since April.
She suffered burns to her face from the blast and lost her right eye. The Sakharov human rights prize, named after dissident Soviet scientist Andrei Sakharov who died in 1989, is given each year and honours individuals who combat intolerance, fanaticism and oppression, often falling foul of their governments as a result.
Parliamentarian Beatriz Becerra Basterrechea said the prize was “a recognition of Nadia’s and Lamiya’s fight throughout their life. Both have impressively overcome the brutal sexual slavery they were exposed to by jihadist terrorists and become an example for all of us”.