Iraqi human rights activist against the use of women and sexual violence as a weapon in wars, 2018 Nobel Peace Prize laureate
Nadia Murad (b. 1993) is a Yazidi activist living in Germany. The Yazidis are an ethnic and religious group originally from the Middle East that live spread through different countries. The biggest Yazidi population lives in the Iraqui Kurdistan and their population is estimated to be around a million.
Nadia was born in Kocho, a small town in Iraq and when she was 16 ISIS killed more than 600 Yazidi men from her village, including several members of her family. Naida and other Yazidi women were taken as hostages by ISIS and were subject to beatings and rape. However, Nadia managed to escape and made her way to a refugee camp and in 2015, she moved to Germany where she currently lives.
Since then, Nadia has become an advocate and has shown the world the situation of the Yazidi minority in Northern Iraq. In 2015, Nadia was the first person ever to brief the United Nations Security Council about human trafficking. Since then, Nadia has worked on advocating about the use of rape and sexual abuse as a weapon of war and has been awarded several peace prices because of her activism.
Some of the most representative prices were the Nobel Peace Prize that she received in 2018 or the Sakharov Prize that was awarded to her in 2016. Nadia is an inspiration for many Human Rights activists all over the world and continues advocating for the Yazidi cause and against human trafficking and rape as a weapon of war.
Photo source: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2018/murad/facts/