Nobel laureate Murad to build hospital in Iraq
SINJAR: Nadia Murad, an Iraqi Yazidi woman held as a sex slave by Islamic State militants who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, said on Friday she intended to use the prize money to build a hospital for victims of sexual abuse in her hometown.
The Yazidi survivor was speaking to a crowd of hundreds in Sinjar, her hometown in northern Iraq.
“With the money I got from the Nobel Peace prize, I will build a hospital in Sinjar to treat ill people, mainly widows and women who were exposed to sexual abuses by Islamic State militants,” she said. She thanked the Iraqi and Kurdistan governments for agreeing to her plan and said she would be contacting humanitarian organisations “soon” to start construction. Murad was awarded the $1 million prize alongside Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. She was one of about 7,000 women and girls captured in northwest Iraq in August 2014 and held by Islamic State in Mosul, where she was tortured and raped. She escaped after three months and reached Germany, from where she campaigned extensively to appeal for support for the Yazidi community. The Yazidi area in Sinjar had previously been home to about 400,000 people, mostly Yazidis and Arab Sunnis. In a matter of days, more than 3,000 Yazidis were killed and about 6,800 kidnapped, either sold into slavery or conscripted to fight for ISIS as the religious minority came under attack. Theresa May scraped through the “vote of no confidence” in her leadership by 200 to 117. This is not a respectable result. Once those on the government’s payroll have been subtracted, the math looks worse—52% of Conservative backbench MPs do not have confidence in May’s leadership. Somehow the meme that May could do better in the negotiations with Brussels and that Brexit will be delayed and/or abandoned, got traction, but the clincher was when May promised that she would not stand in the next general election. After the secret ballot, outside No10, the Prime Minister trotted out as if on autopilot the same old tropes as before, indicating that 117 votes against her had barely had any effect. May still plans to deliver her interpretation of the Brexit people voted for—52% for leaving the EU and 48% against, an unacceptable compromise of democracy.
The binary positions of the Cabinet and MPs are evident. Philip Hammond called Brexiteers/Eurosceptics “extremists”, and Jacob Rees-Mogg called for May’s resignation on the grounds the Prime Minister cannot