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WORK TITLE: The Last Girl
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1993
WEBSITE: https://nadiasinitiative.org/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: Germany
NATIONALITY: Iraqi
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1993, in Kocho, Iraq.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Human rights activist. Nadia’s Initiative, founder.
AWARDS:Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize; European Parliament, Sakharov Prize, 2016; United Nations, Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking; Clinton Global Citizen Award; United Nations Association of Spain, Peace Prize.
RELIGION: YadzidiWRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Iraqi human rights activist and member of the minority Yazidi religious group, Nadia Murad endured captivity, slavery, and rape by Islamic State (ISIS) soldiers, which she documents in her New York Times bestselling memoir, The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight against the Islamic State, cowritten with Jenna Krajeski. After freedom, Murad founded the Nadia’s Initiative program to help survivors of genocide and human trafficking. She is also working with a Yazidi human rights organization and hopes to bring ISIS before the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. The United Nations has named her the first Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking. She also received the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize, Sakharov Prize, and Clinton Global Citizen Award.
Murad was born in Kocho in northern Iraq and practices the ancient Yazidi religion, which incorporates Islam, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity. Because Islam does not recognize the religion, Yazidi people are often targeted by extreme groups for discrimination and genocidal campaigns, forcing practitioners to live in isolation. During an ISIS attack August 15, 2014, Murad, at the age of twenty-one, was captured and her village massacred. She was taken to Mosul and sold into slavery, eventually bought by an ISIS judge who repeatedly beat and raped her. He also forced her to convert to Islam. She escaped and received help from a Sunni Muslim family who hid her and then, as she pretended to be the wife of one of their sons, smuggled her to safety. She eventually made her way to Germany. Now she speaks out about the barbarity of ISIS, as well as about the fear and exploitation of the Yazidi. “We became victims, later emigrants, later refugees,” said Murad in an article by Kristen Chick in Christian Century. “I came to tell all the world what had happened, not because I am strong, but only because we have nothing to lose,” Murad said.
“This is a disturbing book. Many readers will find parts of it hard to stomach. But anyone who wants to understand the so-called Islamic State (IS) should read it,” declared an Economist contributor. “With vivid detail and genuine, heartbreaking emotion, the author lays bare not only her unimaginable tragedy, but also the tragedies of an entire people whose plight is largely ignored,” noted a writer in Kirkus Reviews. In Booklist, Bridget Thoreson described the book as a heartbreaking elegy to a lost community and a call to action, adding that Murad “found she had a powerful weapon to wield against her tormentors—her story.”
“She writes with understandable anger but also with love, flashes of humor and dignity. In telling her story, Murad also offers glimpses of what has been wrought over recent decades in Iraq,” noted Alia Malek in Washington Post. Online at W24, Zakiyah Ebrahim observed: “You will be horrified and disgusted at the inhumanity of the Islamic State, but you need to read this memoir of survival for its raw truth—not just the truth of the heinous acts and war crimes carried out by ISIS, but by the failure of the UN to do anything about it.” Talking about the multiple layers in the book, Evening Standard contributor Arifa Akbar reported that Murad wants to talk about all aspects of her ordeal: “And she does, but The Last Girl’s focus is the grit and detail of her experience while the other horrors—the mass graves, the recruitment of Yazidi boys to IS—remain on the edges.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 15, 2017, Bridget Thoreson, review of The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight against the Islamic State, p. 4.
Christian Century, October 25, 2017, Kristen Chick, review of The Last Girl, p. 20.
Economist, December 2, 2017, review of The Last Girl, p. 73.
Glamour, December 2016, Eliza Griswold, review of The Last Girl, p. 206.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2017, review of The Last Girl.
Washington Post, November 22, 2017, Alia Malek, review of The Last Girl.
ONLINE
Evening Standard, https://www.standard.co.uk/ (November 9, 2017), Arifa Akbar, review of The Last Girl.
Nadia Murad Website, https://nadiasinitiative.org (May 1, 2018), author profile.
W24, https://www.w24.co.za/ (January 30, 2018), Zakiyah Ebrahim, review of The Last Girl.
Nadia Murad
Nadia Murad is a 24-year-old Yazidi woman who advocates on behalf of her community and survivors of genocide. She was among the thousands of Yazidi women who were abducted and enslaved by the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS). She was repeatedly raped and spent approximately one month in captivity. This includes an initial period when Nadia’s village was under siege by ISIS; a second period when she was held as a sexual slave at different ISIS sites; and a final short period in which Nadia was in hiding in a family home in the ISIS-controlled territory until she was able to escape. Nadia suffered the loss of six of her nine brothers who were slaughtered by ISIS in the Kocho massacre. Thousands of Yazidi men and older Yazidi women were murdered including Nadia's mother.
Nadia practices the Yazidi religion, which is indigenous to northern Iraq and also found in parts of Syria and Turkey. This ancient faith preserves pre-Islamic and pre-Zoroastrian traditions. Not recognized as “people of the book” by Islamic Law, the Yazidis have repeatedly faced genocidal campaigns and discrimination over many centuries. Brutal treatment drove them into their mountainous homelands where they persevered in relative isolation. In recent times, political pressures have almost eliminated the Yazidi presence in Turkey.
The ISIS genocide that began on August 3, 2014, now threatens the future of the Yazidi people in Iraq. Nadia grew up in the Iraqi village of Kocho, a quiet agricultural area that had good relations with its neighbors, both Christian and Muslim (Arab, Kurdish, and Turkmen). Nadia attended secondary school and hoped to become a history teacher or make-up artist. Her peaceful life was savagely interrupted when ISIS attacked her homeland in Sinjar with in the intention of ethnically cleansing Iraq of all Yazidis.
Nadia is a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, the recipient of the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize, the Sakharov Prize, and the UN's first Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking. She also received the Clinton Global Citizen Award and the Peace Prize from the United Nations Association of Spain. She has published a New York Times Bestselling memoir titled The Last Girl in multiple languages in order to share her story and advocate for other survivors, including those still in captivity.
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1-UNODC Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking, Sept. 2016
Appointment Ceremony of Ms. Nadia Murad Basee Taha as UNODC Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking.(co-organized by The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in partnership with the Permanent Mission of the United States). UN photo, Eskander Debebe
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2- Winner of Shakarov Prize 2016 by EU parlaiment
Nadia Murad and Lamiya Aji Bashar winners of 2016 Sakharov Prize. Nadia Murad (left) and Lamiya Aji Basharr ©AP Images/ European Union-EP & ©Enric Vives-Rubio/Público
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3- Nobel Peace Prize Nominee for 2016 by the Norwegian lawmaker, the leader of Norwegian Socialist party Audun Lysbakken and the Iraqi Government.
Nadia Murad Basee Taha at her visit to the refuge camp of Idomeni in Greece. Idomeni, Greece – 3 April 2016. Credit: NurPhoto
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4- Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize by the Council of Europe
Interview with Nadia Murad, winner of the 2016 Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize, COUNCIL OF EUROPE STRASBOURG, 10 OCTOBER, 2016
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5-One of the 100 most influential people for 2016 by Time magazine
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6- The 2016 Battle of Crete Award for courage by Oxi Day Foundation
WASHINGTON, DC, November 4, 2016 – The 6th Annual Washington Oxi Day Foundation Celebration
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7- One of the 2016 Glamour Women of the Year honorees
attends Glamour Women Of The Year 2016 at NeueHouse Hollywood on November 14, 2016 in Los Angeles, California.
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8- Honored with a Clinton Global Citizen Award
Former US President Bill Clinton, Sting, and Nadia Murad at the 10th Annual Clinton Global Citizen Awards. SEPTEMBER 23, 2016 4:50 PM, by EDWARD BARSAMIAN
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9- International Prize “The Woman of the Year Regionale Della Valle d’Aost/Italy
Received an award from the American University of Iraq, Sulaimania, 11th Feb. 2016.
Foto ricordo con le premiate, le Autorità e le Socie. Details
Offered a fully-funded scholarship in history, University of Ain-Shams, Cairo, Egypt, Dec. 2015.
“The Peace Envoy for 2016,” awarded by the Peace Envoys Initiative and Kuwait Association for Human Rights, Kuwait, 23rd Jan. 2016.
“Peace Ambassador,” The Iraqi Cultural Affairs, Iraq Embassy, Norway, 30th Jan. 2016.
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Murad, Nadia: THE LAST GIRL
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Murad, Nadia THE LAST GIRL Tim Duggan Books/Crown (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 11, 7 ISBN: 978-1-
5247-6043-4
A raw, terrifying account of religious genocide and life in captivity under the Islamic State by a young
Yazidi woman who survived it.Born and raised in Kocho, Iraq, Murad grew up hearing about the many
genocides her people faced throughout history, but she never imagined she would witness one herself. She
enjoyed a quiet childhood in her small farming village, surrounded by a large, loving extended family and
the tightknit Yazidi community. But just outside the town limits, danger lingered as Daesh, otherwise known
as the Islamic State, began to take control of northern Iraq. Murad was 21 years old when, in August 2014,
IS militants laid siege to Kocho and irreparably changed the lives of everyone in the town. After their
village leader announced that his people refused to convert to Islam despite threats of violence and death,
Kocho's men were rounded up, shot, and buried in mass graves while their mothers, sisters, wives,
daughters, and young sons watched from a schoolhouse window before being transported to an even
grimmer fate. Older women, such as Murad's mother, were later murdered, young boys were forced into IS,
and the girls and younger women like the author were sold into the IS slave trade, where they were
subjected to a daily routine of servitude, violence, and rape. Held captive by a group of particularly brutal
militants, Murad attempted to flee once before she was able to escape with the help of one remarkable
family willing to risk their lives to save hers. With vivid detail and genuine, heartbreaking emotion, the
author lays bare not only her unimaginable tragedy, but also the tragedies of an entire people whose plight is
largely ignored by the rest of the world. Human rights lawyer and activist Amal Clooney provides the
foreword. A devastating yet ultimately inspiring memoir that doubles as an urgent call to action.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Murad, Nadia: THE LAST GIRL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217638/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=44d2c76d.
Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504217638
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The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and
My Fight against the Islamic State
Bridget Thoreson
Booklist.
114.4 (Oct. 15, 2017): p4.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight against the Islamic State. By Nadia Murad. Oct. 2017.
320p. Crown/Tim Duggan, $27 (97815247604341.363.325.
Captured by ISIS, held as a sex slave to be repeatedly raped and beaten, Murad felt powerless. But after she
escaped and began telling the world what she had experienced, she found she had a powerful weapon to
wield against her tormentors--her story. As she eloquently recounts in this hard-hitting memoir, she was a
victim of the genocide of the Yazidi community in Iraq. When her village was taken over by ISIS, the
terrorists shot the men and forced some of the women, including 21-year-old Murad, to become their slaves.
The details of her imprisonment are chilling, such as the guard who delicately placed his glasses on the
table before violently raping her, and reveal a systematic campaign by the ISIS terrorists to eradicate the
humanity of their captives. Now the first UN Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human
Trafficking, Murad has written a heartbreaking elegy to a lost community and a resounding call for action
against the atrocities being committed by ISIS.--Bridget Thoreson
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Thoreson, Bridget. "The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight against the Islamic State." Booklist,
15 Oct. 2017, p. 4. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512776011/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f2034541. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A512776011
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The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and
my Fight Againstthe Islamic State
Nadia Murad
Library Journal.
142.11 (June 15, 2017): p18a.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
In this intimate memoir of survival, a former captive of the Islamic State tells her harrowing and ultimately
inspiring story.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
978-1-5247-6043-4 | $27.00/$36.00C | 100,000
Tim Duggan Books | HC | October
* 978-1-5247-6045-8 | * AD: 978-0-5254-9324-2
* CD:978-0-5254-9323-5
MEMOIR
Social: @NadiaMuradBasee; Facebook.com/NadiaMuradBasee: NadiaMurad.org
RA: For readers of I Am Malala, I Am Nujood, and A Long Way Gone Rl: Author lives in Stuttgart,
Germany
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Murad, Nadia. "The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and my Fight Againstthe Islamic State." Library
Journal, 15 June 2017, p. 18a. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495668268/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2cdb0a06.
Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495668268
Nadia Murad
Kristen Chick
The Christian Century. 134.22 (Oct. 25, 2017): p20.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Christian Century Foundation
http://www.christiancentury.org
Full Text:
Nadia Murad saw a chance for escape. Weeks earlier, militants from the self-described Islamic State had murdered much of her family and taken her captive. Along with other young Yazidi women, she was transported to Mosul, in northern Iraq. She was beaten and raped.
Murad, 21 years old at the time, had already attempted escape once. She was quickly caught and gang-raped as punishment. Now her latest captor was telling her he was going to take her to Syria and sell her to another fighter.
When he left the house unguarded, she put on garments covering her face and body and slipped quietly out into the street. Nearby was a mosque where ISIS fighters often went to pray. She walked in the opposite direction to look for help. When she came to an area where the houses were dilapidated, she decided to take a chance, reasoning that the militants would have commandeered nicer dwellings. She tapped on a door.
"Out came a family, and they pulled me in," she said. "I told them I am from Sinjar and what happened to me."
The family's eldest son drove her out of ISIS territory after she donned the robes again, posing as his wife.
Three years later, Murad has become the international face of Yazidi suffering--and resilience. Now living in Stuttgart, Germany, she has traveled to more than two dozen countries to tell her story. In 2016, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime appointed her a goodwill ambassador for the dignity of survivors of human trafficking.
This month she is publishing a German edition of her memoir, The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight against the Islamic State. She plans to use the proceeds to support survivors and hold ISIS accountable for its crimes.
Murad comes from a village in Sinjar, a region in northern Iraq that's home to the majority of the world's Yazidis, who number fewer than a million. The Yazidi faith combines elements of Zoroastrianism, Islam, and Christianity and has faced a long history of persecution. Today thousands of Yazidi women and children remain in bondage, and thousands of others are displaced, living in tent cities in northern Iraq.
Murad stepped into the spotlight in 2015 when leaders of Yazda, a Yazidi advocacy organization, learned that the UN Security Council wanted to invite a Yazidi survivor to speak. Several people suggested the soft-spoken Murad.
"She wasn't born to be an activist," says Murad Ismael, executive director of Yazda. "She wasn't born to be a leader, honestly."
What makes her accounts so powerful--the direct telling of her trauma--has also kept her from healing. She is preparing to step back from her public role.
When an audience member at a Hamburg event praised her for her strength, she objected. "We became victims, later emigrants, later refugees," she said. "I came to tell all the world what had happened, not because I am strong, but only because we have nothing to lose."--Kristen Chick, The Christian Science Monitor
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Chick, Kristen. "Nadia Murad." The Christian Century, 25 Oct. 2017, p. 20. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A513926414/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1c284fbf. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A513926414
Captive of the caliphate; Islamic State
The Economist. 425.9069 (Dec. 2, 2017): p73(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
Nadia Murad's courageous account of her time as a sex slave of Islamic State is horrific and essential reading
The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight against the Islamic State. By Nadia Murad and Jenna Krajeski. Tim Duggan Books; 306 pages.
THIS is a disturbing book. Many readers will find parts of it hard to stomach. But anyone who wants to understand the so-called Islamic State (IS) should read it. The jihadists who until recently controlled much of Iraq and Syria hit on a recruiting technique that was as crude as it was ingenious. They urged their fighters to capture and keep sex slaves--and convinced them to feel virtuous about it.
Nadia Murad was one of those slaves. Jihadists came to her village in Iraq and slaughtered all the adult men and the women they deemed too old to rape. The victims included Ms Murad's brothers and probably her mother--she is still not sure. Ms Murad, then 21 years old, was taken to a slave market in Mosul. ("When the first man entered the room, all the girls started screaming.")
She was sold to a judge, a thin, soft-spoken man whose job was to have people executed for trifling offences. He raped her every day, and beat her when he was displeased with the way she cleaned the house, or when he had had a hard day at work, or when she kept her eyes closed while he was raping her.
Even as he inflicted grotesque cruelties on her, he explained that what he was doing was just and righteous. IS had published rules explicitly stating that captured infidels were property and could be raped with a clear conscience. Ms Murad was a Yazidi, a member of a small religious minority that the jihadists particularly despised. They thought it their duty to exterminate this ancient faith through murder and forced conversion.
"You're my fourth sabiyya [slave]," [the judge told Ms Murad]. "The other three are Muslim now. I did that for them. Yazidis are infidels--that's why we are doing this. It's to help you." After he finished talking, he ordered me to undress.
Readers will find the jihadists' reasoning as baffling as it is odious. On the one hand, the judge said he was allowed to enslave Ms Murad because she was not a Muslim. On the other hand, he forced her to "convert" to Islam--ie, he ordered her to recite the shahada, the Muslim profession of faith, or die--and then he continued to treat her as a slave anyway. He told her that it was pointless to escape, because her male relatives would kill her for no longer being a virgin, and for having converted.
Ms Murad tried to escape anyway. The first time, she was immediately caught. The judge punished her by letting his guards gang-rape her. Then he sold her to another jihadist.
She escaped again, and this time she had better luck. After dark, she ran into a poor neighbourhood of Mosul and banged on a door more or less at random. The Sunni Arab family inside made a split-second decision to help her, despite knowing that it might cost them their lives. They bought a fake identity card for her and smuggled her out of Mosul in a taxi, with Ms Murad posing as the wife of one of their sons. At one roadblock, she saw her picture hanging there--a "wanted" poster for a runaway slave. However, she was wearing a niqab, and the jihadists at the checkpoint were reluctant to insult a fellow Sunni Arab by making his wife expose her face, so she was not recognised.
She escaped to Kirkuk, and thereafter to Germany. She now tours the world bearing witness to IS's barbarity, and urging the International Criminal Court to prosecute its leaders for the attempted genocide of her people.
There is hope in Ms Murad's story. The caliphate has failed. In recent months its fighters have been driven from most of the territory and all the major population centres they once controlled. Their vision and methods were so ghastly that many of those they expected to support them decided not to. In one telling example, Ms Murad says her sister-in-law escaped from slavery because her captor's wife was weary of his abuse of Yazidi girls and called an American air strike down on him.
Yet it is hard to be cheerful. Ms Murad is alive, but many of her family are not. Her young nephew, who was captured and brainwashed by IS, used to call and threaten her. The Yazidis have set aside their own traditions and welcomed back thousands of young women who are no longer virgins. But the jihadists have set a horrifying precedent: that zealots can raise an army by telling young men that their most savage impulses are holy.
The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight against the Islamic State.
By Nadia Murad and Jenna Krajeski.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Captive of the caliphate; Islamic State." The Economist, 2 Dec. 2017, p. 73(US). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A516524779/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2de30616. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A516524779
Nadia Murad
Eliza Griswold
Glamour. 114.12 (Dec. 2016): p206.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications Inc.
http://www.glamour.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Eliza Griswold Photograph by Jason Schmidt Stylist: Sarah Cobb
Nadia MURAD
Portrait of Courage
"If you want to impact others' lives, you have to speak out," says Murad, in the rose garden at the United Nations.
"She is more than a survivor.... She is a brave, resilient, determined, stubborn, soulful woman who has decided to go deep within herself and recount the worst horrors that any person could ever go through so that others don't have to go through the same thing."
-Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and 2014 Woman of the Year
W hen Nadia Murad, 23, escaped ISIS in the fall of 2014, she fled through the streets of the Iraqi city of Mosul, looking for a house that might shelter her. Terror lay behind her-three months of captivity and torture. Freedom was ahead if she chose the right door to knock on. Her life depended on that choice, on whether or not the people inside would help her or send her back to the men who'd kidnapped and gang-raped her. She took a deep breath and knocked. "I didn't believe that out of 2 million people in Mosul, anyone would be kind enough to help, but this family did," she says. After they took her in, they listened to her story-and later smuggled her out of the city as one of their own. For her, it was a lesson in the lifesaving power of kindness and the courage to stand up for what's right.
That's a lesson she herself is teaching now. Murad belongs to the Yazidi people, followers of an ancient religion in northern Iraq. She's one of 6,700 women and girls who have been kidnapped from their homes by the so-called Islamic State. Over the past two and a half years, as the group made headlines for beheading foreign aid workers and journalists, ISIS has committed genocide against the Yazidis and other minorities in its drive to seize territory in Iraq and Syria.
Now, in an act of astonishing moxie, Nadia Murad is trying to bring ISIS to justice.
"Justice for me," she says, "isn't to behead them. They don't care about getting killed. They blow up their own children." Instead, she is suing the terrorists in an international court and wants the fighters to listen to their victims' stories. "I want them to hear the five-year-old boy they kidnapped and the nine-year-old girl they raped and the 30-year-old mother whose children they killed," she says. That, she believes, is the first step to ending the genocide. "By listening to their victims, I want them to feel what they've done."
These crimes are often overlooked, says journalist and human rights activist Kati Marton, but Murad is putting them into the spotlight. "Nadia, a brave and eloquent witness of ISIS barbarity, is the voice of a new movement; she's making the U.S. and the International Criminal Court pay attention," says Marton.
Murad grew up in a quiet farming area called Kocho, nestled in the mountains of northern Iraq. "It was a beautiful village," she says, "and the prettiest thing in it was my home and my family." In August 2014, ISIS began attacking the area, and many Yazidis fled up Mount Sinjar to safety until United States air strikes allowed them to escape across the border to Kurdistan. Murad and the 600 people in her village weren't so lucky. On August 15, ISIS fighters in white Toyota pickups flying the group's signature black flags invaded the village and separated women from men. The women were taken to a school, where they watched from a window as the militants executed every man and teenage boy, including Nadia's six brothers. Inside, she could do nothing but listen to the gunfire.
Then the militants divided the women again, culling older from younger. Murad and her sisters were taken as sex slaves, while her mother was deemed too old and executed. Herded onto buses, the young women were raped on the drive to militant territory. In the following weeks some girls were chained to one another, auctioned off, and passed among 20 to 30 men. Many committed suicide. Murad tried to escape but was caught, beaten, gang-raped, and burned with cigarettes. Shuttled between compounds, she lost track of her sisters, of the days, of where she was.
It was after three months in captivity, in Mosul, that she spied an unlocked door and fled. Once she was smuggled into Kurdistan, she ended up in Zakho, a refugee camp in the Kurdish region of Duhok. There Murad joined hundreds of other traumatized women and girls who had fled ISIS territory; miraculously, her own elder sister Dimal, 28, also managed to escape and reach the camp alive. Most of these women had nothing: no money, no food, no coats for the freezing winter ahead. Their fathers and brothers had been massacred; their mothers and sisters were either missing or still enslaved by ISIS. To this day there's no going back to their homes; there's nothing left but ash.
Yet there was one thing the young girls at the refugee camp could do: Tell their stories. Yazda, a nongovernmental organization founded to support the Yazidi people, was collecting testimony from survivors to piece together what had happened to 5,000 of their people. Murad saw how speaking out could benefit others. "I want people to know this isn't what happened only to Nadia," she says. "This happened to thousands of girls. I want the world to know." Recognizing the power of Murad's voice, Yazda brought her to the United States to address the United Nations. She has now become a leader in the effort to bring ISIS to justice at the International Criminal Court for the crime of genocide in Syria and Iraq, and activists like Amal Clooney, who is serving as her attorney, have also joined her cause. "Nadia's a remarkable human being with a beautiful heart and spirit," Murad Ismael, executive director of Yazda, says. "It's never about her; it's about others. This is a way for her to live with that pain."
In April Murad received devastating news: Her niece Kathrine, 19, who'd also been kidnapped, had escaped her captors-but stepped on an IED planted by ISIS and was killed. Murad traveled back to northern Iraq to mourn her niece and found the most astonishing thing: She was welcomed by the thousands of ISIS victims still at the refugee camps. "Everywhere she goes, she is surrounded by young girls," Ismael says. "She is their hero."
And Murad promises to continue to speak out, whether in Iraq; or Stuttgart, Germany, where she now lives with Dimal and other survivors; or New York City, where she has begged the U.N. to get involved. "If beheadings, sexual enslavement, the rape of children, and the displacement of millions do not force you to act, when will you act?" she asked. Murad wishes she didn't have to do this work. She doesn't relish the limelight and yearns for the life and family she lost. "The happiest time of my life was being in my village with my mother," she says, "not meeting world leaders."
Still, she has become a powerful voice-and ISIS has noticed. The group has issued death threats against her, some chillingly delivered by members of her family who remain in captivity. ISIS has made a practice of brainwashing small boys and turning them into fighters; Murad's nephew, now 13, is one of them.
This summer she was at home in Stuttgart when her phone rang. It was her nephew, calling via WhatsApp and ordering her to come back to ISIS-held territory. "We know what you're doing; we've seen you on TV," he said. Then the commander holding him took the phone. "No one has been able to stop us, and you won't be able to either," he threatened. Murad did not cower. "You and your companions will be brought to justice," she told the man.
Despite those threats, Murad isn't stopping. She's started a global initiative against genocide at nadiamurad.org. The first aim is to help the Yazidi women stranded in Iraq's refugee camps as winter approaches once again. Then she hopes to fight genocide wherever it's happening in the world.
"I'm not afraid of them," she says. "What more can they do to me? There's no place in me for fear now."
Eliza Griswold, a Berggruen Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, was the winner of a PEN Prize for her translations of Afghan women's poetry, I Am the Beggar of the World.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Griswold, Eliza. "Nadia Murad." Glamour, Dec. 2016, p. 206. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A469326411/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=217e99eb. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469326411
Briefly Noted
Elisa Gonzalez
The New Yorker. 93.40 (Dec. 11, 2017): p78.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text:
Briefly Noted
The Last Girl, by Nadia Murad (Tim Duggan). Growing up in an Iraqi village as a member of the Yazidi minority, Murad led a happy life, revolving around her wise and funny mother, her extended family, and school (even if the history curriculum effaced her community entirely). But, in 2014, when she was twenty-one, ISIS militants attacked the village and made her a sex slave, along with thousands of other Yazidi women and girls. Through courage, luck, and the help of a Sunni family who risked their lives for her, she eventually escaped. This devastating memoir unflinchingly recounts her experiences and questions the complicity of witnesses who acquiesced in the suffering of others.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gonzalez, Elisa. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 11 Dec. 2017, p. 78. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A518635339/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c617a62d. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A518635339
Book World: 'Slow, painful death' of Yazidi woman's body and soul while enslaved by the Islamic State
Alia Malek
The Washington Post. (Nov. 22, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Alia Malek
The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State
By Nadia Murad with Jenna Krajeski
Tim Duggan. 306 pp. $27
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The Islamic State's attempt to exterminate the Yazidi people of Iraq did not involve only murder. When the militants swept through the north of the country after taking Mosul in the summer of 2014, they executed the religious minority group's men and elderly women. The children and the other women they took captive. They then brainwashed and conscripted the young boys and turned the women and girls into sexual slaves. The latter was justified by edicts based on religious interpretations rejected by nearly all Muslims.
In "The Last Girl," Nadia Murad tells the story of her captivity along with other members of her Yazidi village of Kocho. It is an intimate account of what she calls a "slow, painful death - of the body and the soul." As an insider, she is able to present a full portrait of her people as more than just victims. She writes with understandable anger but also with love, flashes of humor and dignity. In telling her story, Murad also offers glimpses of what has been wrought over recent decades in Iraq.
The Kurdish-speaking Yazidis live in northern Iraq, largely in underprivileged villages around Mount Sinjar. Most of their Kurdish and Arab neighbors view them with disdain, and they have long been persecuted for their religious beliefs. (Their monotheistic religion has elements in common with many other Middle Eastern faiths, including Zoroastrianism, Islam, Christianity and Judaism.)
The Yazidis inhabit disputed lands that Arabs and Kurds battle over, and they have often been caught between those competing nationalist ambitions. Murad writes that Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and Masoud Barzani's Kurdish Democratic Party pressured Yazidis to embrace identities as Arabs and Kurds, respectively, in their bids to assert claims to the land. (Both Arab and Kurdish nationalism imagine a basis for belonging in a most limited sense; their insistence on ethnic homogeneity, in a land where there is none, is doomed to leave out many.)
Internationally and in the region, very little attention was paid to the Yazidis - until the Islamic State came for them. Then they quickly became the subject of much reporting. The interest in the Yazidis, like stories about Middle Eastern Christians, perplexed many who had watched for decades as Iraqis experienced unrelenting horrors that traumatized much larger populations, with little global outcry. Resentment even arose over what seemed like an outsize focus on the suffering of minorities when, in absolute numbers, Muslims make up by far the most victims of the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, Shiite militias and others committing violence in the name of Islam.
Of course, it's important to pay close attention to what happens to minorities in all nations: They are the canaries in the coal mine, a gauge of tolerance, inclusiveness and equality in any society. But many observers close to the region are wary of giving a platform to stories of minority persecution in the Middle East out of fear that such tales can demonize Islam by pinning any shortcomings of majority-Muslim societies on the religion itself. Regrettably, these stories are frequently shared for just such purposes, and those who disseminate them lack a sincere concern for the victims. This is true of both Western Islamophobes and Middle Eastern sectarians.
Murad herself fell victim to the politicization of her plight. Iraqi Kurdish fighters known as peshmerga tricked her into telling her story on video and then released it to the news media without her consent; their goal was to embarrass their political rivals who are fellow Kurds. "I was quickly learning that my story, which I still thought of as a personal tragedy, could be someone else's political tool, particularly in a place like Iraq," Murad writes. "I would have to be careful what I said, because words mean different things to different people, and your story can easily become a weapon to be turned on you."
No doubt controlling her story was part of her motivation to tell it in this book. She takes the time to introduce Kocho and its people before the arrival of the Islamic State. We meet her resilient mother, who greets each new adversity with a joke, and her brother, who is in love with a girl above his station. Before the Islamic State's crimes turned Murad into a human rights activist, she dreamed of opening a beauty salon where she'd style village brides on their wedding days.
So when the Islamic State strikes, we know these are real people - and we know that the stakes are high and the devastation is visceral. During her three months in captivity, Murad was sold and bought, repeatedly raped and beaten. Her depiction of these horrors is unflinching. After her escape, she emigrated to Germany and sought justice for Yazidi victims, aided by human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who has written a foreword for the book.
As part of her mission, Murad seeks to de-weaponize the shame that keeps many victims silent (the same kind of shame that enables men all over the world - from Hollywood executives to politicians, comedians, powerful editors and others - to assault women daily and with impunity).
Her anger at those who destroyed her people's lives permeates the book - and targets not only the Islamic State. She fumes at the peshmerga fighters who had promised to protect the Yazidis but withdrew from their posts (just as the Iraqi army did in Mosul), abandoning the Yazidis to their fate.
Much of her ire is aimed at Arab Sunnis in northern Iraq, whom she deems either explicit or implicit supporters of the Islamic State. She offers evidence of specific men who committed specific acts and who should be held accountable, if they haven't already been killed in the airstrikes against the militants. But she also implicates the vast majority of Arab Sunnis who lived under the Islamic State for doing nothing. She believes that even if they couldn't have stopped the fighters, they could have protested their actions.
Murad does not, however, credit the many people who did protest and were killed for raising their voices. She notes that some dissented but indicts the rest because they didn't flee the Islamic State. For her, remaining in their homes meant they had no problem with the militants or their crimes. She repeatedly asks: Why else would they stay? What she doesn't ask, however, is: Where could they go? Fleeing to Kurdistan was dangerous for Arab Sunnis because their ethnicity and sect meant they were viewed as potential threats, since Islamic State fighters claim to be Sunni and many are Arab. (As Murad notes, Kurds and Turkmen are also in their ranks.)
Murad's presumptions are challenged when a poor Arab Sunni family in Mosul who did not flee takes her in, hides her and devises a plan to get her out of Islamic State territory - at great risk to themselves. What does it mean, then, if both the targets of her wrath and her saviors are Arab Sunnis? Murad's answer is that such people were merely the exception to a rule that she isn't ready to reject, even if it means she too easily gives in to scapegoating and collective guilt.
Murad's anger raises the question (one we confront in other atrocities in the Middle East and elsewhere): How should we judge the bystanders to evil? The question becomes all the more difficult in the case of people who are living under a brutal regime like the Islamic State and are themselves under the constant threat of violence. How fair is it to attribute their failure to act to their religion or ethnicity?
The pursuit of justice and the equally important goal of peace must include vigilance against the temptation to assign collective guilt. Sectarian scapegoating has long been the reason many Iraqis suffered unspeakable ordeals at the hands of their compatriots.
Nonetheless, Murad gives us a window on the atrocities that destroyed her family and nearly wiped out her vulnerable community. This is a courageous memoir that serves as an important step toward holding to account those who committed horrific crimes.
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Malek is a journalist and the author of "The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria" and "A Country Called Amreeka: U.S. History Retold Through Arab American Lives."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Malek, Alia. "Book World: 'Slow, painful death' of Yazidi woman's body and soul while enslaved by the Islamic State." Washington Post, 22 Nov. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515324376/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e3b10ece. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A515324376
The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity and My Fight Against the Islamic State by Nadia Murad and Jenna Krajeski - review
A Yazidi woman’s horrific account of being captured by the caliphate, Arifa Akbar
ARIFA AKBAR
Thursday 9 November 2017
Writing about his deportation to Auschwitz in 1947, Primo Levi referred to the “demolition of a man” to describe the way in which he and fellow Jews were stripped of their humanity in the course of a wagon ride from their homes to the concentration camp. Nadia Murad writes of a very different time and place — Iraq in 2014 — and a different genocide, that of the Yazidis by Islamic State militia but there is a bus ride in her memoir where the same rapid dehumanisation takes place, though it leads to the “demolition of a woman” in Murad’s case.
It comes after the people of her village have been rounded up by IS gunmen. The men are shot while women who are young enough are loaded onto a bus and taken from northern Iraq to Mosul to be sold as “sabaya” — sex slaves for IS men. Murad, then aged 20, is savagely groped by a gunman. She is shaken to the core and by the end of the journey “we were no longer human beings — we were sabaya”. The next day she is sold, forced to convert to Islam, repeatedly raped, and gang raped when she attempts escape.
Murad’s is a horrifying account that initially defers its shock: the first chapters combine a history lesson on the persecution of the Yazidis in Iraq with Murad’s own family history — her father’s bigamy and her mother’s poverty after she is cast out with 11 children. The next two sections deliver true horror, and a surreal sense of Murad’s parallel existence as a sex slave in a city filled with ordinary Sunni Muslim families.
She sees these families’ blindness to her enslavement as a betrayal, although she acknowledges that it is members of a Sunni family that risks their lives to help her escape to Kurdistan. Her enslavement seems medieval in its barbarism but also resembles a futuristic dystopia, in the mould of The Handmaid’s Tale, in which society has been reorganised to treat women as the lowest form of chattel. Islamic State had a glossy magazine, Dabiq, in which sabaya were featured, as well as pamphlets clarifying the finer points of owning them: whether it was permissible to have sex with them if they were pre-pubescent or menstruating.
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Murad’s activism after her escape has won her human rights prizes as well as a UN goodwill ambassadorship. Her celebrity as a campaigner is reflected in the marketing of this book — the cover is filled with Murad’s striking image and Amal Clooney’s foreword is flagged up. It is complicated by the politics of representation too: ghost-written by an American journalist, it follows in a certain tradition: stories of non-white women — Malala Yousafzai, Nujeen Mustafa — reaching the world in book form through the curation of white, western journalists.
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This might be the root of a subtle tension in this book between her story and the larger cause. Murad says: “Sometimes it can feel like all that anyone is interested in when it comes to the genocide [of Yazidis] is the sexual abuse of Yazidi girls...
I want to talk about everything…” And she does, but The Last Girl’s focus is the grit and detail of her experience while the other horrors — the mass graves, the recruitment of Yazidi boys to IS — remain on the edges.
Book review: The Last Girl by Nadia Murad
By: Zakiyah Ebrahim 30 January 2018
A story of horror, hope, escape and an ultimate fight for justice.
The Last Girl by Nadia Murad (first published in 2017 by Tim Duggan Books)
Nadia Murad lived a simple life in a house of mud bricks, but on the 3rd of August 2014 that was about to change when ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) attacked the Yazidis in Sinjar.
Three thousand men, elderly people, children and disabled people were massacred by the terrorist group.
Her six (of nine) brothers, all married, and mother were executed in one day and the women and girls captured to be sabiyyas (sex slaves).
On the 15th of August, then 21, Nadia, along with her three nieces and the other 100-something girls – some as young as 10 years – knew something bad was about to happen to them, but they had no way out.
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No help arrived and the remaining men, women and children were eventually given two choices – convert to Islam or be prepared to face their death.
They separated the men, took them to the edge of the village and shot them.
Traded, taunted, sold, beaten and raped by ISIS militants for months before she finally escaped, her memoir reveals how she had begged for death since her capture, but it never came.
She had tried to forget who she was because her identity as a sabiyya was who she had become.
She was forced to put on makeup and to cook and clean the house in which her captive held her.
At one point, she describes a loss of fear of Daesh (the Arabic term for ISIS) and rape, so much so that all she felt was numb.
She didn't fight or think about the world outside. Being sold or passed on to a different captor every week for three months came with the feeling of acceptance; that this was now her life.
When she got traded from terrorist to terrorist, her hopelessness became like a cloak, she says – heavy, dark and more obscuring than any abaya (a full-length garment worn by Muslim women).
But she escaped. Now she is fighting for justice. She wants those men to go to court, to face justice and to be prosecuted in an international court.
This is not a book for your enjoyment. You will be horrified and disgusted at the inhumanity of the Islamic State, but you need to read this memoir of survival for its raw truth – not just the truth of the heinous acts and war crimes carried out by ISIS, but by the failure of the UN to do anything about it.
Although she continues to face death threats from ISIS, Murad continues to fight and found a powerful advocate in human rights lawyer, Amal Clooney.
Not only has Clooney written the foreword of Murad's book, but she has been at the forefront of commanding the UN to hold ISIS accountable.
In her talk addressed to the UN, Murad says:
"If beheadings, sexual enslavement, the rape of children and the displacement of millions do not force you to act, when will you act?
"Life was not create solely for you and your families. We also want life and deserve to live it."
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Clooney rightfully makes the point that ISIS has confessed to their crimes against humanity and their war crimes online, hence why her speech at the UN drew attention to the paralysis of the intergovernmental organisation to do anything about it besides label it a genocide.
In an interview for BBC HARDtalk, Murad has one message to young men and women who wish to join Daesh:
"Before you join Daesh... you should know you will either be killed – or you will lose your humanity."