Table of Contents
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNER “NADIA MURAD”
- Nadia Murad Basee Taha is a German-based Yazidi-Iraqi human rights activist. She was kidnapped and held by the Islamic State for three months.
- In 2018, she and Denis Mukwege were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict”. She is the first Iraqi to be awarded a Nobel prize.
- Murad is the founder of Nadia’s Initiative, an organization dedicated to “helping women and children victimized by genocide, mass atrocities, and human trafficking to heal and rebuild their lives and communities”
LIVING HELL
- Murad was born in the village of Kojo in Sinjar District, Iraq IN 1993.Her family, of the Yazidi ethno-religious minority, were farmers.
- Nadia Murad was born and raised in the quiet agricultural village of Kocho, Iraq – Yazidis and other communities lived harmoniously as neighbors.
- Nadia was in secondary school and had dreams of becoming a history teacher and a make-up artist.
- Nadia’s peaceful existence ended on August 3, 2014, when the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), attacked her village, beginning its savage genocidal campaign against the Yazidi people. Six of Nadia’s nine brothers were executed on the spot.
LI VING HELL
- That year, Murad was one of more than 6,700 Yazidi women taken prisoner by Islamic State in Iraq.She was captured on 15 September 2014
- The captives were given a choice – convert to Islam or be executed. Along with forced conversion, the young girls were enslaved and endured sexual violence and trafficking, and s
- At the age of 19, Murad was a student living in the village of Kojo in Sinjar, northern Iraq when Islamic State fighters rounded up the Yazidi community in the village killing 600 people including six of Nadia’s brothers and stepbrothers – and taking the younger women into slavery.
LIVING HELL
- She was held as a slave in the city of Mosul, and beaten, burned with cigarettes, and raped when trying to escape.
- Nadia was able to escape after her captor left the house unlocked. Murad was taken in by a neighbouring family, who were able to smuggle her out of the Islamic State controlled area, allowing her to make her way to a refugee camp in Duhok, northern Iraq.
CAREER AND ACTIVISM
- On 16 December 2015, Murad briefed the United Nations Security Council on the issue of human trafficking and conflict. This was the first time the Council was ever briefed on human trafficking.
- Murad reached out to refugee and survivor communities, listening to testimonies of victims of trafficking and genocide.
- She was named the first Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human trafficking of the United Nations (UNODC).
- Murad’s memoir, The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State, was published by Crown Publishing Group on 7 November 2017.
DEATH
- In 1960, he suffered a heart attack. He was treated by top doctors in India, including his friend Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy, the then Chief Minister of West Bengal.
- His health started deteriorating and he died on 7 March 1961 at the age of 74, from a cerebral stroke. At that time he was still in office as the Home Minister of India.
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