Nadia Murad, from ISIS sex slave to women's rights champion. The story of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

NADIA MURAD NOBEL

Nadia Murad She is 25 years old but in her short life she has been forced to descend into hellIn 2014, when she was only 21 years old and still dreaming of a bright and peaceful future, ISIS militants arrived in Kocho, the village where she lived in northern Iraq, killed the men, disappeared the elderly women, and kidnapped her along with other girls and children. She has since become a sex slave of the militiamen who for three months humiliated, brutalized, and raped her. An agony from which, however, Nadia miraculously managed to escape, avoiding the death that instead befell so many girls like her. From that moment, she decided to to fight with all one's strength for those who did not make it through the revolutionary force of the witness. A few months after regaining his freedom, in fact, he began to tell the world about the sufferings of his community, the yazidis, at the hands of the Caliphate and the horror of the rape as a weapon of war. For this very commitment, on October 5th, she earned, together with the Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege, Nobel Peace Prize 2018.

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NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

The Norwegian Nobel Committee justified the honor by recognizing Murad and Mukwege's extraordinary commitment "to ending sexual violence in armed conflicts and wars." This is a mission that the 25-year-old Yazidi has continued to carry out for several years and which is recounted in a raw and unfiltered manner in her autobiography. 'The Last Girl' (published by Mondadori). In the book, which also boasts a preface by his lawyer Amal Alamuddin Clooney, Nadia has chosen, in fact, to report everything, without omitting anything of what she has suffered, so that the world can know the risks faced by millions of women living in war zones.

Inside the autobiography, you can read lines that are a real punch in the stomach, and which photograph the despair of a girl who many times, during those long months of imprisonment, wished for the death, considering theonly chance of salvation“At a certain point,” she writes in the book, “there’s nothing left but rape. It becomes your normality. You don’t know who will open the door next to abuse you, you just know it will happen and that tomorrow could be worse.”

SEXUAL SLAVERY

But one day, almost miraculously, she managed to escape from this hell: her jailer, through carelessness, did not lock the door of the house in Mosul where she was being held prisoner, so she took the opportunity and escaped, finding within herself a unexpected courage which allowed her to save her life and reunite with what remains of her family. Today the young Yazidi, thanks to her immense courage, has become "ambassador of good will” of the United Nations and won several firsts, including the Sakharov for Freedom of Thought 2016 and the Woman of the Year award, also in 2016. A commitment she continues to carry forward, shedding light on the genocide of her people and on three thousand girls who, like her, have been victims of rape and other abuses committed by ISIS militants since 2014. It is precisely to these women and the countless victims of sexual violence around the world that Nadia wanted to dedicate the Nobel Prize. in the hope that certain crimes can be eradicated forever.

The photo is taken from the Facebook page of Nadia Murad.

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