Nadia Murad: Escaped Yazidi Isis sex-slave on why she will continue to fight persecution after group vows to recapture her

‘If it’s going to take my life alone to save lives of millions of people and to expose the crimes they have committed, then that’s fine’

(Getty)

Nadia Murad is only 23 and yet already a number of labels have been ascribed to her. Escaped Isis sex-slave. Yazidi advocate. UN goodwill ambassador. Human rights activist. Award-winner. Survivor.

When Isis came to Kocho in northern Iraq in 2014, Murad had just passed eleventh grade and was getting ready to start the twelfth. She was 21, living with her brothers, their wives and children and her mother. Her days were spent working on a farm and attending the local school.

“This was a life of a village; a simple life,” says Murad. “This was a life away from things I am in now.”

Murad has now travelled the world, given evidence before the United Nations and addressed various heads of state. But before Isis came, her whole world existed inside the village she had never left.

Kocho was the village Amnesty International would later say Isis “tried to wipe off the map” in one of the worst reported massacres in the weeks after the group launched its insurgency. It took the human rights organisation days to find survivors.

Isis’s devastating assault was rapid. Thousands fled to Mount Sinjar, but militants quickly surrounded Murad’s village and those inside could not escape. Six hundred men, including her brothers, and women who were deemed too old to be sexually exploited were rounded up the day she was taken and slaughtered. Murad’s mother was among those killed.

She was part of a group of 150 women and children who were taken to the city of Mosul and then separated. Each militant took one woman. From that moment on, they began to inflict what an investigation by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI) would go on to describe as “unimaginable horrors” on the women. Murad’s simple life was suddenly overcome with pain and dehumanisation. She was beaten, raped and abused by her captors every day.

“Before August 2014, we did not know there was something called human trafficking. I only heard this for the first time when they took us to Mosul and they said to me: ‘You are an enslaved captive.’”

When she spoke at the United Nations Security Council and gave a full account of the barbarity the group unleashed on her, recalling how Isis militants would gang rape her until she fell unconscious, the men in the room cried.

Former Isis prisoner Nadia Murad delivers her speech after winning the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize in the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, 10 October, 2016 (EPA)

The Independent met Murad after she delivered the keynote speech at the Trust Women Conference in London where she bravely relived her trauma, as she has done countless times, to launch a rallying cry for the world to do more to prevent the persecution of the Yazidi community. More than 5,500 Yazidis have been murdered by Isis in the two years since she was taken. At least 3,000 are still being held by the group. “Isis really changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, not just for me but for the women who have lost their husbands, for the children, for the 6,500 who were taken.”

Softly spoken and small framed, she has summoned incomprehensible strength in order to repeat her nightmare again and again.

One of the oldest minorities in Iraq, Isis considers Yazidis heretics and has declared non-Muslim women and children to be taken and sold as slaves. A disturbing pamphlet distributed by Isis deemed it “permissible” to rape a female slave “immediately after taking possession of her” and “permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn't reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse”.

After a failed attempt at escaping, Murad eventually fled via an unlocked door and, with the help of a Muslim family, made it to a refugee camp. Now she is the most powerful voice to emerge from the Yazidi community and an advocate who uses the abject horror of her own experiences to draw global attention to the crimes inflicted on her community.

In October Murad was jointly awarded the Sakharov Prize, the most prestigious human rights prize in Europe. Now living in Germany, she visits refugee camps and travels around Europe to raise awareness of the brutality Isis subjects women to.

“I’ve been trying to change the world for a year, trying to show the images of humans and victims before the eyes of leaders, politicians and world leaders the tragedy in order to stand with us, so they stop terrorism and trafficking.”

Murad’s fight for justice has been bolstered by the presence of Amal Clooney. The human rights lawyer stood before the UN Security Council to condemn the inaction of world leaders over the persecution of Yazidis, where those present were unprepared for what she would say. “This is the first time I have spoken in this chamber,” Clooney began. “I wish I could say I'm proud to be here but I am not. I am ashamed as a supporter of the United Nations that states are failing to prevent or even punish genocide because they find that their own interests get in the way.”

Not one member of Isis has been held accountable for the atrocious crimes they have committed against the Yazidi community. In no uncertain terms, Clooney told delegates that Murad and other women who have suffered so egregiously at the hands of Isis deserve to see their abusers held to account.

Murad’s fight is one Clooney takes with her when she travels, most recently using her keynote speech at the Texas Conference for Women in Houston to call on women to take action where world leaders have not by uniting against the persecution of Yazidi women and the abuse of women worldwide.

Clooney has shone a light on the Yazidi cause, says Murad, and with that, given them a small ray of hope. “When Amal said that (she felt ashamed), thousands of people in the camps were very happy because people thought that if the world can feel ashamed then they might do something.

“She came in while the world was vastly silent about these crimes and she is an international lawyer. She is doing this for free for us and she is someone who fights for human rights. We are very lucky that she has taken on this case.”

Murad is contacted constantly by the families of captive Yazidi women desperate for help in rescuing their loved ones. Isis often asks for tens of thousands of pounds as ransom money, which many displaced families living in refugee camps simply cannot pay.

Her advocacy has made her a public figure, and this visibility comes at great personal risk. Murad recently received a message from her niece, who said when Isis see her on television they vow to capture and enslave her again.

“It is a dangerous thing to speak against them publicly, but when you see the enormity of what they have done, of their crimes, what type of tragedy they have caused... If it’s going to take my life alone to save lives of millions of people and to expose the crimes they have committed, then that’s fine.

“It is not an easy thing to go and speak about the rape, the genocide, to say that you were the victim of genocide and rape. But it is something that I feel obligated to do because they are following us, attacking us with the intention to exterminate us. And if they are capable of doing that, they will do that. Unless we can end the terrorism and the ideology of terrorism, we cannot feel safe.

“Freedom is the most valuable thing that a human being can ever have. Freedom is life itself. When your freedom is restricted you find yourself worthless, to be used in the manner you could never imagine.”