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Nadia Murad: from jihadist captive to Nobel winner
BAGHDAD, Dec 10, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Nadia Murad survived the worst of the
cruelties and brutality inflicted on her people, the Yazidis of Iraq, by the
Islamic State group before becoming a global champion of their cause and a
Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Murad, who was taken hostage by IS in 2014 but escaped, is the first Iraqi
to receive the prestigious award.
The 25-year-old won the Nobel in October alongside Congolese doctor Denis
Mukwege for their “efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of
war”.
“For me, justice doesn’t mean killing all of the Daesh members who
committed these crimes against us,” she said shortly after winning, using an
Arabic acronym for IS.
“Justice for me is taking Daesh members to a court of law and seeing them
in court admitting to the crimes they committed against Yazidis and being
punished for those crimes specifically,” she said.
Murad once lived a quiet life in her village in the mountainous Yazidi
stronghold of Sinjar in northern Iraq, close to the border with Syria.
But when the jihadists stormed across swathes of the two countries in
August 2014, her nightmare began.
IS fighters swept into her village, Kojo, 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.
Murad was taken to Mosul, the Iraqi “capital” of the IS’s self-declared
caliphate, where she was held captive and repeatedly gang-raped, tortured and
beaten.
IS fighters wanted “to take our honour, but they lost their honour”, said
Murad, now a United Nations goodwill ambassador for survivors of human
trafficking.
– Seen as heretics –
For the jihadists, with their ultra-strict interpretation of Islam, the
Yazidis are seen as heretics.
MORE/FI/ 1514 hrs
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The Kurdish-speaking community follows an ancient religion, revering a
single God and the “leader of the angels”, represented by a peacock.
Like thousands of Yazidis, Murad was sold and forcibly married to a
jihadist, beaten and — in contrast to the official wives of IS leaders —
forced to wear makeup 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.
She set about trying to escape, and managed to flee with the help of a
Muslim family from Mosul.
Using false identity papers, she crossed the few dozen kilometres (miles)
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 was re-united
with her sister in Germany, where she lives today.
Even there, she says she is still fearful, for herself and other innocent
women.
“I am a joyful person, I am an outgoing person, I don’t want to live in
fear,” she told reporters at a press conference on Sunday.
– ‘Our peoples’ fight’ –
The Yazidis numbered around 550,000 in Iraq before 2014, but some 100,000
have since left the country.
Many others who fled their hometowns to Iraqi Kurdistan remain reluctant
to return to their traditional lands.
Murad has dedicated herself to what she calls “our peoples’ fight”.
She and her friend Lamia Haji Bashar, joint recipients of the EU’s 2016
Sakharov human rights prize, have advocated to reveal the fate of some 3,000
Yazidis who remain missing, presumed still in captivity.
She has also campaigned for displaced Yazidis to be taken in by European
countries and for the acts committed by IS to be recognised internationally
as genocide.
The Yazidi cause has won a high-profile supporter — Lebanese-British
lawyer and rights activist Amal Clooney, who also penned the foreword to
Murad’s book, “The Last Girl”, published in 2017.
That same year, the UN announced it would begin gathering evidence on IS
war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide that would be used to try IS
militants in Iraqi courts.
Announcing the Nobel winners in October, committee chairwoman Berit Reiss-
Andersen said: “A more peaceful world can only be achieved if women and their
fundamental rights and security are recognised and protected in war.”
– Happier times –
Murad was in the United States when she heard about her prize, and said
she was “scared” initially.
“The first thing that came to my mind was my mother, I cried a lot,” she
said on Sunday.
“It was very difficult. I have received the Nobel Peace Prize from the
hardship, the difficulties that all these people have been faced with and
from all the hard work that we have been doing.”
In contrast to all the tragedies that have befallen her, recent pictures
on Murad’s Twitter feed show happier times.
In August, she announced her engagement to fellow Yazidi activist Abid
Shamdeen.
“The struggle of our people brought us together & we will continue this
path together,” she wrote.
Underneath, a photo showed her next to a young man in a bow tie, her face
still framed by her long brown hair, but this time, bearing a broad smile.
BSS/AFP/FI/ 1515 hrs