One among the 7,000 Yazidi women, who were abducted from their villages by the Islamic State militants, Nadia Murad, the noble price prize winner for 2018, is now the face of a campaign to free the people of her land.
She shared the honours with physician Denis Mukwege, for their constant effort to put an end to the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.
Here’s all you know need to know about Nadia Murad:
<> An Iraqi Yazidi, Murad was tortured and raped by Islamic State militants after having been abducted at the age of 21, four years ago.
<> She lived with her mother, her brothers, their wives and children in Kochom northern Iraq and worked on a farm. She had just passed the eleventh grade.
<> When ISIS militants arrived, they put her and other young women on a bus. The members started groping women which were just the start of a traumatic ordeal. Nadia was offered up at a slave market.
<>She, along with other women, was imprisoned and raped so as to pressurize them to convert to Islam.
<> On her visit to London, she described her experience saying ISIS would kill the men in Yazidi and take away the women and children “They were committing all kinds of crime: murder, rape and displacing people by force in the name of Islam. Many people may think my story is difficult, but many more had more difficult than mine,” she said.
<> After one of her escape attempts failed, she was gang-raped as a punishment. However, she was successful in her second attempt. She fled via an unlocked door walking swiftly through the dark dingy streets of Mosul.
<> One of the families helped Murad by letting her in late at night. She was smuggled out of ISIS territory passing off as the wife of one of the man. She also noticed various fliers with her photo and a writing underneath ‘wanted escapees’ when she went through the last checkpoint.
