Brave ISIS Sex Slave Survivor Nadia Murad’s Heart-Wrenching Tale

Nadia Murad is a Yazidi human rights activist from Iraq. She has won the 

Nobel Peace Prize 2018. Earlier she was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize 2016 by Iraq government. She is the first Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking of the United Nations (UNODC) since September 2016. Nadia’s mission is sponsored and supported by Yazda: Global Yazidi Organization. She was kidnapped and held captive as sex slave by the Islamic State terrorists in August 2014. She somehow escaped their captivity and returned to her home village of Kojo after three hellish years.

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Nadia Murad

Nadia Murad was born in the village of Kocho in Sinjar, Iraq. Her family belonged to the Yazidi community- an ethnic and religious minority and were farmers.  Nadia was was one of the more than 5,000 Yazidi women taken captive when Isis attacked Yazidi territories in northern Iraq.  She has told the world about her horrific experiences by Isis terrorists, who bought and sold her and other young women like “sabia” or slaves.

Addressing students at Cairo University, she revealed that Isis militants “used to force captives to pray and then rape us”.

“We were not worth the value of animals. They raped girls in groups. They did what a mind could not imagine,”

During her visit to Egypt, Nadia Murad met with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and urged him and “the Islamic world to stand firmly and clearly against Isis”. “They commit rape and genocide crimes in the name of Islam,” she said.  She spoke in the UN in New York, to raise awareness about the pitiable condition of the Iraqi and Syrian people and requested more action by the world to protect refugees from the conflict with Isis.

Nadia describes the heart-wrenching tale when she was a student living in the village of Kocho in northern Iraq.  Isis fighters took all Yazidis, killing 312 men in just an hour. They then took all the younger women into sex slavery. They were taken to Mosul. Nadia and the other women were held captive for three days before being “distributed” among  ISIS fighters.  Nadia was taken as a sex slave by a man who had a wife and daughter. She was kept in a single room. After one failed escape attempt, she told in the UN, she was mercilessly beaten up and brutally gang-raped by six militants as a form of punishment.

“They continued to commit crimes to my body until I became unconscious,” she said.

Some women committed suicide. But Nadia said she never considered doing so. She told Time magazine: “I did not want to kill myself — but I wanted them to kill me.”  Nadia was finally able to escape when her captor left the house unlocked while he had gone out. She escaped successfully in November 2014, after three months of physical and emotional abuse and inhuman torture. She was taken in by a neighboring family who managed to smuggle her out of Isis territory. From there she went to a refugee camp in Duhok in northern Iraq where she met Western journalists. Eventually, Nadia was one of 1,000 women selected for a refugee program run by the regional government of Baden-Wurttemberg in south-west Germany in 2016. From there Nadia became a social and women rights activist and was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2016.

In her book The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State she writes:

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