Nobel Prize Winner Nadia Murad Meets Trump

Yazidi Nadia Murad and Donald Trump at the White House

Nadia Murad is an Iraqi Yazidi human rights activist who lives in Germany. In 2014, she was kidnapped from her hometown Kocho and held by the Islamic State for three months. 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. 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, northern Iraq. She was out of ISIS territory on early September 2014 or in November 2014.

Murad is the founder of Nadia's Initiative, an organization dedicated to "helping women and children victimized by genocide, mass atrocities, and human trafficking to heal and rebuild their lives and communities.” 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. Nadia Murad was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018, after risking her life to raise awareness of wartime sexual violence. In 2014, she was sold into sex slavery by ISIS militants, who also executed most of her family.

Murad is also part of the first court case against Islamic State extremists in Iraq and Syria on charges of genocide and sexual violence being litigated by Amal Clooney. Of the 550,000 Yazidis in Iraq before ISIS emerged in 2014, around 100,000 have moved abroad. 360,000 remain internally displaced. Twenty-seven refugees who have survived religious persecution met with President Donald Trump at the White House in 2019. She made a tearful plea to President Trump to help the Yazidi people who were terrorized by ISIS.

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