By Magda Cristina Butucea
Nadia Murad Basee Taha is a human rights activist and 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 was born in Kocho - Northern Iraq in 1993. In 2014, Murad was kidnapped and held by the Islamic State for three months. At the age of 19, Murad was a student living in the village of Kocho in Sinjar, northern Iraq when Islamic State fighters rounded up the Yazidi community in the village, killing 600 people and taking the younger women and girls into slavery. That year, Murad was one of more than 6,700 Yazidi women and girls enslaved by Islamic State in Iraq. She was held as a slave in the city of Mosul, where she was beaten, burned with cigarettes, and raped repeatedly. She successfully escaped after her captor left the house unlocked. Murad was taken in by a neighbouring 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.
In February 2015, she gave her first testimony to reporters of the Belgian daily newspaper La Libre Belgique while she was staying in the Rwanga camp, living in a converted shipping container. In 2015, she was one of 1,000 women and children to benefit from a refugee programme of the Government of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, which became her new home.
In late 2015, she went to Switzerland to speak about massacre of Yazidi minority group, slavery and human trafficking. She continued her campaign to raise awareness on human trafficking. In 2016, she founded Nadia’s Initiative, to provide help and advocacy to the victims of massacre and human trafficking.
She has received several awards and honors including ‘Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking of the United Nations’, ‘Council of Europe Vaclay Havel Award of for Human Rights, Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, and the 2018 Peace Nobel Prize for her efforts against sexual violence in war.