Nadia Murad

Nadia Murad Basee Taha (نادیە موراد بەسێ تەھا،; نادية مراد باسي طه; born 10 March 1993) is a Yazidi human rights activist who lives in Germany.

Murad's father died in 2003.

As a child, Murad dreamed of owning a hair salon.

She was attached to her home and never imagined leaving Kocho to live elsewhere.

At the age of 19, Murad was a student living in the village of Kocho in Sinjar, northern Iraq when Islamic State fighters rounded up the Yazidi community in the village, killing 600 people – including her mother and six of Nadia's brothers and stepbrothers – and taking the younger women and girls into slavery.

That year, Murad was one of more than 6,700 Yazidi women and girls taken prisoner by Islamic State in Iraq.

In 2014, she was kidnapped from her hometown Kocho and held by the Islamic State for three months.

Murad is the founder of Nadia's Initiative, an organization dedicated to "helping women and children victimized by genocides, mass atrocities, and human trafficking to heal and rebuild their lives and communities".

She was captured on 15 August 2014.

She was held as a slave in the city of Mosul, where she was beaten, burned with cigarettes, and raped repeatedly.

She successfully escaped after her captor left the house unlocked.

Murad was taken in by a neighboring 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, Kurdistan Region.

She was out of ISIS territory in early September or in November 2014.

In February 2015, she gave her first testimony – under the alias of "Basima" – to reporters of the Belgian daily newspaper La Libre Belgique while she was staying in the Rwanga camp, living in a converted shipping container.

In 2015, she was one of 1,000 women and children to benefit from a refugee programme of the Government of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, which became her new home.

On 16 December 2015, Murad spoke to the United Nations Security Council about human trafficking and conflict.

This was the first time the Council was ever briefed on human trafficking.

In 2016, Murad was appointed as the first-ever Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Murad was born in the village of Kocho in Sinjar District, Iraq, populated mostly by Yazidi people.

Her family, of the Yazidi minority, were farmers.

Murad is the youngest of 11 children, not including her four older half siblings.

Murad's father married her mother after the death of his first wife, who left him with four children.

Both of her parents were devout Yazidis, though Murad did not know much about the religion growing up.

In 2016, Murad was named the first UNODC Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking.

As part of her role as an ambassador, Murad participates in global and local advocacy initiatives to bring awareness of human trafficking and refugees.

Murad has reached out to refugee and survivor communities, listening to testimonies of victims of trafficking and genocide.

In September 2016, Attorney Amal Clooney spoke before the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to discuss the decision that she had made in June 2016 to represent Murad as a client in legal action against ISIL commanders.

Clooney characterized the genocide, rape, and trafficking by ISIL as a "bureaucracy of evil on an industrial scale", describing it as a slave market existing online, on Facebook and in the Mideast that is still active today.

Murad has received serious threats to her safety as a result of her work.

In September 2016, Murad announced Nadia's Initiative at an event hosted by Tina Brown in New York City.

The Initiative intends to provide advocacy and assistance to victims of genocide.

On 3 May 2017, Murad met Pope Francis and Archbishop Paul Gallagher in Vatican City.

During the meeting, she "asked for help for Yazidis who are still in ISIS captivity, acknowledged the Vatican support for minorities, discussed the scope for an autonomous region for minorities in Iraq, highlighted the current situation and challenges facing religious minorities in Iraq and Syria particularly the victims and internally displaced people as well as immigrants".

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 and Yazidi to be awarded a Nobel Prize.

In 2018, Murad's activism focused on security and accountability.

Along Nadia's Initiative, Murad worked with the Mine's Advisory Group (MAG) to demine more than 2.6 million square meters of land in Sinjar, Iraq.

She was also instrumental in drafting and passing UN Security Council Resolution 2379.

The resolution called for the creation of an Investigative Team, headed by a Special Advisor, to support domestic efforts to hold ISIL (Da'esh) accountable by collecting, preserving, and storing evidence in Iraq of acts that may amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed by the terrorist group ISIL (Da'esh).

Murad's activism focused on accountability and gender equality in 2019, as she aided in the prosecution of an ISIL militant's wife in Germany and the collection of evidence of ISIL crimes.