The Extremely Powerful Story Of Nadia Murad, Nobel Peace Winner Who Survived Islamic State

This is the story of one of the recipients of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize, which was jointly awarded to Nadia Murad, an Iraqi Yazidi rape survivor, and Denis Mukwege, a physician who has dedicated his life in helping the victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Its a story of how a young girl went through anguish and trauma, and survived to tell her tale and become the face of a campaign to free Yazidis from the exploiting clutches of the Islamic State.

Pre-Captivity life

Nadia was born in 1993 in the village of Kojo in Sinjar District in Iraq. Her family, of the Yazidi ethno-religious minority were farmers.

And the Tragedy Struck

In the year 2014 Nadia’s community was attacked by Islamic State militants. She was just a 19 year old student when the Islamic State militants attacked the Yazidi community in their village. More than 600 people from the village were killed, including Nadia’s mother, 6 brothers and step brothers, while the younger women were taken into slavery.

In 2014 alone, more than 6,700 Yazidi women were taken prisoners by the Islamic State in Iraq. While the men were killed, children were taken as captives to be trained as fighters and women were made to live a life of forced labour and sexual slavery.

Nadia’s miseries began soon-after

Nadia was captured on 15th September 2014, held as a slave in the city of Mosul and beaten, burned with cigarettes and raped whenever trying to escape. There were slave markets, organised for selling women and girls who were also forced to renounce their religion. The millitants would hit her if she closed her eyes while being raped, when she tried to escape, she was gang-raped by six guards as a punishment. Nadia, like many other Yazini women, was forcibly married off to a terrorist, beaten up and occasionally forced to wear tight clothes and make up and serve the guests.

The final escape

Nadia eventually managed to escape after her captor left the house unlocked. She was then taken in by a neighboring family who were able to smuggle her out of the Islamic State controlled area. With the help of false papers, she managed to cross many miles to Iraqi Kurdistan. She joined the refugee camp in Duhok, northern Iraq and finally got out of the Iraq in early 2015 and went to Germany as a refugee. What followed was nothing short of a worldwide and an impactful achievement.

In Germany, she met some Western journalists and was selected as volunteer for a refugee programme run by the regional government of Baden-Wuttemberg in south west Germany. She wanted to tell her story to the entire world to raise awareness and told BBC Persian’s Nafiseh Kohnavard not to do the interview anonymously. She went on to become an acitivist for Yazidi people to fight against sex slavery and human trafficking.

In November 2015, in a UN Forum (on minority issues) in Switzerland, she spoke about her story in front of a large audience for the first time. As per her, the decision to be completely honest with the audience was one of the toughest decisions she ever had to make and she was shaking while reading her speech. She wanted to tell them about everything, from her captivity to endless rapes, to the children who died of dehydration while fleeing Isis, to what her brothers witnessed at the site of massacre and families that were still stranded on the mountain. She says, “I told them about my brothers who had been killed. It never gets easier to tell your story. Each time you speak it, you relive it”. Nadia believes that her story is the best weapon she has against terrorism and she plans to use it until the terrorists are put on trial.

In the year 2016, she was awarded the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize by the Council of Europe. It was followed by her being named the UN’s first goodwill ambassador for survivors of human trafficking.

First hand account of her journey to freedom

Nadia’s book, The Last Girl : My Story of Captivity and My Fight Against the Islamic State, is a memoir which depicts her ordeal as she pens down a heart touching and soul-wrenching experience of those traumatic years of captivity.

And excerpt from the book reads:

“If felt like fire. I had never been touched like that before. My tears fell on his hand, but still he didn’t stop”.

Some words from her recent interviews that brought tears

1.

“I did not want to kill myself, but I wanted them to kill me”.

2.

“Now the militants touched us anywhere they wanted, running their hands over our breasts and legs as if we were animals”.

3.

“They are virgins, right?” the militants asked a guard who nodded and said, “Ofcourse!” like a shopkeeper taking pride in his product.”

4.

“I howled and screamed, slapping away hands that reached out to grope me. Other girls were doing the same, curling their bodies into balls on the floor or throwing themselves across their sisters and friends to try to protect them”.

5.

“You don’t know who will open the door next to attack you, just that it will happen and that tomorrow might be worse.”

6.

“When I tell someone about the checkpoint where the men raped me, or the feeling of Hajji Salman’s whip across the blanket as I lay under it, or the darkening Mosul sky while I searched the neighborhood for some sign of help, I am transported back to those moments and all their terror.”

7.

“I told them that I wanted to look the men who raped me in the eye and see them brought to justice.”

8.

“I want to be the last girl in the world with a story like mine.”

Present Day

Nadia Murad is currently living with her sister in Germany and recently announced her engagement to fellow activist Abid Shamdeen. She has dedicated herself to what she calls “our peoples’ fight” and continues to campaign for justice for her people and and the acts committed by the ISIS recognised globally as genocide.