Nadia Murad is a Yazidi human rights activist who was kidnapped from her hometown Kocho held by the Islamic State for three months and sold into sex slavery by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; also known as ISIS) in August 2014.
She escaped three months later and began speaking out about human trafficking and sexual abuse, particularly as they related to Yazidi women. Murad also addressed the general abuse of the Yazidi population. She was named the United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Human Trafficking Survivors in 2016 and has earned other honours. In 2018, she shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Congolese surgeon Denis Mukwege.
Murad was born in the Yazidi-majority village of Kocho in Iraq’s Sinjar District. Her family were farmers from the Yazidi minority.
Murad is the youngest of 11 siblings, not counting her four elder half-siblings. Murad’s father married her mother when his first wife died, leaving him with four children. Murad’s parents were both ardent Yazidis, though she had little knowledge of the religion as a child. Murad’s father passed away in 2003.
Murad wanted to own a hair salon since he was a child. She was attached to her house and would never consider leaving Kocho to live somewhere else.
ISIL launched a campaign to take Yazidi villages in August 2014. According to Britannica, Murad’s brothers were slaughtered. Murad’s mother and other older women were also slaughtered. The remaining women, including Murad, were transferred to Mosul, Iraq, ISIL’s largest city at the time, to be sold as sex slaves. ISIL trafficked almost 5,200 Yazidi women in total in 2014, killing over 5,000 males. Murad was sold and purchased multiple times before fleeing in November. Her initial effort at escape resulted in a gang rape as punishment, and she resolved not to try again. She fled one day after discovering that a door had been left unlocked. She found herself in the care of a Muslim household unaffiliated with ISIL, who helped her flee to Kurdish-controlled territory.
Murad fled to Germany in 2015 as part of a refugee program for ISIL survivors. In December of that year, she was summoned to testify before the United Nations Security Council about human trafficking, and her appearance drew numerous requests for interviews. Her testimonials not only brought attention to the Yazidi community’s continuous suffering and the atrocities of ISIL, but also to the fact that sexual abuse as a weapon of war is not unique to ISIL. The United Nations recognized her as Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Human Trafficking Survivors in 2016.
The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity and My Fight Against Imprisonment was her memoir about her captivity and escape from the Islamic State. Murad established the Global Survivors Fund in October 2019 with her fellow 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Dr. Denis Mukwege. The Fund seeks to guarantee that survivors of conflict-related sexual violence have access to reparations and other kinds of redress around the world.
The Global Survivors Fund (GSF) expands on the work of the United Nations Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict (SRSG-SVC). In an April 2019 statement, the UN Secretary-General approved GSF, and Security Council Resolution 2467 mentioned GSF. In its Declaration on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in August 2019, the G7 also confirmed its support for GSF.
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