Nadia Murad’s Journey from Sex Slave at ISIS Camps to the Winner of Nobel Peace Prize 2018

Nadia Murad, the joint winner of this year Nobel Peace Prize 2018 is a human rights activist, who survived sexual slavery at the hands of ISIS in Iraq. She has used her traumatic experience of being kidnapped, enslaved and raped by ISIS fighters in Iraq in 2014 and become an advocate for the rights of Yazidi minority in Iraq on the issues of women’s right and refugees.

Nadia’s struggle for life started in the year 2014 when ISIS militants came to her village Kocho in Kurdistan in Iraq. Almost all members of her family were executed including her mother and six of her nine brothers and stepbrothers. The unmarried women in the village were taken as sex slaves and who were passed around the militants regularly.

In an interview, Nadia recalled her ordeal, when she said, “Nearly 6,500 women and children from the Yazidi were abducted and about 5,000 people from the community were killed during that day. For eight months, they separated us from our mothers and our sisters and our brothers and some of them were killed and others disappeared”.

As every normal childhood dreams, Nadia too had a dream of becoming a history teacher and makeup artist. Born in the year 1993 and studied in the local high school, her life changed forever when ISIS militants entered her villages and brutally crushed all her dreams. She escaped from ISIS camp to Mosul, where she was successful in obtaining a fake identity card, which helped her escape permanently from the ISIS territory.

At the age of 23 years in 2016, Nadia was named the United Nations first goodwill ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking. She then urged the US Congress to fight the terror group ISIS more aggressively, during a speech, she said, “Daesh will not give up their weapons unless we force them to give up their weapons. The Yazidi people cannot wait”.

She also addressed in the UN Security Council, where she shared her ordeal with all the member nations, describing how she was gang raped. She said, rape is considered legal under ISIS rule and Yazidis can be utilized because they do not practice Islam, therefore they can be used as slaves on religious grounds, she said, “They sold girls, girls that were underage, because ISIS considered that permissible under Islamic law. They came not just to attack certain people, but they came for all Yazidis”.

Nadia Murad has also won the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize, the Sakharov Prize, the Clinton Global Citizen Award and the Peace Prize from the United Nations Association of Spain. She has published her memoir titled “The Last Girl”, which is a New York Times bestseller.