U
nited Nations: Nadia Murad, a former ISIS sex slave, has been appointed as Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking by United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
The Nobel Peace Prize nominee, who survived trafficking at the hands of IS, will be appointed UNODC Goodwill Ambassador today.
The 23-year-old Yazidi woman from Iraq endured a three-month nightmare as a sex slave of the Islamic State (IS) group.
After her harrowing escape with the help of a fake religious ID nearly two years ago, Murad has a message for world leaders striving to crush the extremists: IS leaders must stand trial for genocide.
The IS group has said it despises the Kurdish-speaking group because Yazidis are not “people of the book”, meaning their faith does not adhere to the theological tradition that begins with Abraham of the Old Testament and extends through the Koran.
She was taken by ISIS from her home village of Kocho near Iraq’s northern town of Sinjar in August 2014 and brought to Mosul.
“The first thing they did was they forced us to covert to Islam,” she said. “After conversion, they did whatever they wanted to do.”
In a December speech at the UN Security Council, Murad recounted her so-called “marriage” to one IS captor, who subjected her to horrific abuse.
“I was not able to take any more rape and torture,” she told the council, so she decided to flee.
On the run in Mosul, Murad said she was terrified that no one would take her in, but she ultimately found shelter with a Muslim family in the city.
“They made me an Islamic ID,” she said, which she used to cross the border into Iraqi Kurdistan.
There she lived in a camp for displaced people and, with the support of the Yazidi welfare organisation Yazda, relocated to Germany, where she now lives with her sister.
Bureau Report
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