Nadia Murad: A Light that Escaped the Savage Dark

PHOTO: Nadia Murad Addressing the European Union. Credit Vincent Kessler/Reuters

While the patriarchy systematically subjugates American women with the help our President, there is at least one good news from elsewhere in the world where sexual assault survivors, and those helping them, are being honored not punished.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced on Oct 5th that Congolese Dr. Denis Mukwege and Yazidi activist Nadia Murad would share the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for their campaigns to end the use of mass rape as a weapon of war. I will write about Dr. Mukwege’s heroic and Godlike work in a subsequent post and focus on his co-recipient in this one.

Amongst the hundreds of women who are brutalized, bought and sold, systematically raped and murdered by ISIS and other terrorist organizations, there are many heroic survivors who escaped and have chosen to speak up. Nadia Murad, one of the most courageous and awe-inspiring women I have recently come across, is one of them. Speaking up, being identified as a “sabaya” or sex-slave even after being released is a shameful burden to carry in some communities. One can only imagine the inner resolve and strength needed to become an activist while dealing with the trauma of having lived through hell. I had read of the mass slaughter of the Yazidi community by ISIS in August 2014, but learned more about the tiny community that lives in Northern Iraq and Syria when I was researching ISIS while volunteering in Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon in 2016.

The Yazidi’s practice a gnostic, monotheist religion that predates Islam and Christianity and believe in a peacock angel, which ISIS consider to be the devil. Straddling two Muslim-majority countries, the Yazidi’s have been persecuted throughout modern history. In 1620, during the Ottoman Empire, 40,000 soldiers attached Yazidi villages around Mount Sinjar, killing more than 3,000 Yazidis, setting fires to their homes and murdering thousands more hiding in nearby caves. In 1892, an Islamization initiative ordered by Sultan Abdulhamid II resulted in mass murder of thousands of Yazidis, Christians and Armenians.

More recently, after Mosul fell to ISIS, the town of Sanjar was attacked by its soldiers, causing its 200,000 citizens including 50,000 Yazidis to flee to nearby mountains where they were trapped, starved, dehydrated and hundreds of men summarily executed. Various estimates suggest that during Aug. and Oct. 2014, between 2,000-4,500 Yazidi’s were murdered, 4,000 to 10,000 abducted and hundreds of girls and women taken to Tal Afar, Si Bash Khidri, Ba’aj and other towns where they were raped, forcibly married to ISIS leaders and sold multiple times as sex slaves.

Nadia Murad was one of them, and the horrors that she and thousands of other Yazidi children and women have endured have been reported and documented extensively but the world’s tragic “empathy fatigue”, our distraction with domestic affairs and lack of urgent, concrete action have not helped this oppressed community. Nadia Murad escaped her captors through sheer courage and audacity with the help of a Muslim family, and was smuggled out of Iraq to Germany in 2015 as a refugee. She lost her entire family, her sisters, six brothers and her mother to the brutalities of ISIS.

Soon after arriving in Germany Nadia began to recount her story and campaign to end human trafficking of Yazidi women. Her testimonies are obviously painful for her and the audience but they are a vital and urgent document of the unchecked horrors of our time that should galvanize us to support her campaign. With the help of her lawyer, Amal Clooney, Nadia wants ISIS leaders and soldiers to be brought to justice under International law, the plight of the Yazidi people to be known to the world, and urgent action taken to rescue the women who are still in captivity.

Becoming a UN Goodwill Ambassador and winning the Nobel Peace Prize come with a lot of prestige and media attention for the recipients, but these are hollow honors if the cause they are fighting for is not helped. It has been very hard for me to read and listen to many of Nadia Murad’s interviews, but I did so because I want the plight of her people to seep through my consciousness so I too can carry a small part of the burden of repair that is so urgently needed by them.

I urge you to read and listen to her story, to be horrified by the extent of human depravity, and lifted by the courage and resolve of this incredible woman. I hope you will also be motivated into acting on her behalf to help the Yazidis and other vulnerable communities in our world.

I donated to Nadia’s Initiative and the Free Yazidi Foundation and will share her story as widely as I can. I hope you will too.

Will also post essential links as comments.

I urge you to watch this to the end:

LEARN & SHARE
I was an Isis sex slave. I tell my story because it is the best weapon I have
Nadia Murad`s Speech at UN General Assembly opening Session, 19 2016
Amal Clooney on the Global Threat of ISIS
The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State

DONATE
Nadia’s Initiative