Nadia Murad was born in 1993 in Kocho, Iraq and is a human rights activist. She belongs to the Yazidi community – a religious minority found in the Kurdish regions of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey.
Murad was born to a farming family and led a relatively peaceful life. In 2014, when Murad was 19, her village was attacked by members of the Islamic State – a militant group also known as ISIS, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the United Nations.
The ISIS killed 600 men including many members of her family and kidnapped Nadia along with other Yazidi women, taking them captive to an ISIS camp.
Here she was brutally assaulted and tortured for a period of three months. She managed to escape one day when her captor left the door of her room open. She made her way to a refugee camp with the help of a kind family and later she was offered the opportunity to move to Germany where she presently resides.
Murad’s story highlighted the plight of the Yazidi community to the world. She was appointed the United Nations’ Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking in 2016.
She is the founder of ‘Nadia’s Initiative’, an organization advocating minority women’s rights. Her work is focused on meeting with global leaders to raise awareness of the ISIS and its genocidal campaign against the Yazidi people.
She has written a book called ‘The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity and my Fight Against the Islamic State’. In 2018 she was a co-recipient, with Congolese physician Denis Mukwege, of the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Picture Credit : Google
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