Survivor who brought Daesh atrocities to the fore
Nadia Murad survived the worst cruelties inflicted on her people, the Yazidis of Iraq, before becoming a global champion of their cause and winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
Yesterday, Murad and Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege were jointly awarded the prize for their “efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war,” Nobel committee chairwoman Berit Reiss-Andersen said in Oslo.
New Iraqi President Barham Salih yesterday hailed the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Murad, calling it “an honour for all Iraqis who fought terrorism and bigotry”.
In a tweet, Salih said he had spoken with Murad to congratulate her, saying the prize was “an acknowledgement of [the] tragic plight” of the religious minority and “recognition for her courage in defending human rights of victims of terror & sexual violence”.
The 25-year-old Murad, her thin, pale face framed by her long brown hair, becomes the first Iraqi to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She once lived a quiet life in her village in the mountainous Yazidi stronghold of Sinjar in northern Iraq, close to the border with Syria.
Continuing the fight
But when Daesh stormed across swaths of the two countries in 2014, her fate changed forever and her nightmare began. One day in August that year, pickup trucks bearing the black flag of Daesh swept into her village, Kocho. Daesh set about killing the men, taking children captive to train them as fighters and condemning thousands of women to a life of forced labour and sexual slavery.
Today, Murad and her friend Lamia Haji Bashar, joint recipients of the EU’s 2016 Sakharov human rights prize, continue DENIS MUKWEGE ■ the fight for the 3,000 Yazidis who remain missing, presumed still in captivity. Daesh fighters wanted “to take our honour, but they lost their honour,” said Murad, now a United Nations goodwill ambassador for survivors of human trafficking.
It is an evil she personally experienced during a harrowing three months. After being captured by Daesh fighters, Murad was taken by force to Mosul, the de facto “capital” of the group’s self-declared caliphate. During her ordeal she was held captive NADIA MURAD and repeatedly gang-raped, tortured and beaten.
Daesh organised slave markets for selling off the women and girls, and Yazidi women were forced to renounce their religion. Like thousands of Yazidis, Murad was forcibly married to a Daesh terrorist, beaten and forced to wear make-up and tight clothes — an experience she later related in front of the United Nations Security Council. “The first thing they did was they forced us to convert to Islam,” Murad told AFP in 2016. Shocked by the violence, Murad set about trying to escape, and managed to flee with the help of a Muslim family from Mosul.
Highlighting crimes
Armed with false identity papers, she managed to cross the few dozen kilometres to Iraqi Kurdistan, joining crowds of other displaced Yazidis in camps. There, she learnt that six of her brothers and her mother had been killed. With the help of an organisation that assists Yazidis, she joined her sister in Germany, where she lives today.
She has since dedicated herself to what she calls “our peoples’ fight”, becoming a wellknown spokeswoman even before the #MeToo movement swept the world.
Slight, and softly-spoken Murad has now become a global voice, campaigning for justice for her people and for the acts committed by Daesh to be recognised as genocide.
She has focused on support for survivors, and a long-term search for justice, calling on the world to collect and preserve evidence that would allow Daesh militants to be brought to trial.
It has proved a long and often thankless campaign, even though she has built an extraordinary alliance of supporters, from celebrity lawyer Amal Clooney to Samantha Power, US ambassador to the UN under Barack Obama.
The world was appalled when news first seeped out that Daesh had revived sexual slavery. But, as Daesh’s self-declared caliphate shrank, the fate of Yazidi women faded from the news.
In August, Murad announced her engagement to fellow Yazidi activist Abid Shamdeen.
2009: 2008: 2007:
Barack Obama (US) Martti Ahtisaari (Finland) Al Gore (US) and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Mohammad Yunus (Bangladesh) and the Grameen Bank
2006: 2005:
International Atomic Energy Agency and Mohammad Al Baradei (Egypt) Wangari Maathai (Kenya) Shirin Ebadi (Iran) Jimmy Carter (US) Kofi Annan (Ghana) and the United Nations
Kim Dae-Jung (South
2004: 2003: 2002: 2001: 2000:
Korea)
1990s
Tweet by President of Iraq Barham Salih