Nadia Murad, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2018, explains the torture she had faced at the hands of ISIS Terrorists and her survival in this harrowing memoir.
Born and brought up in a Yazidi family in Kocho, a small village in Northern Iraq, she was leading a peaceful life until 15 August 2014, the day when ISIS captured their village. The absurd reason for the capture was that the Yazidis did not have a holy book and they were nonbelievers.
Once ISIS took control of Kocho, the villagers were given a warning to either convert to Islam and be a part of the caliphate or face the consequences. Two days after, they were asked to assemble in a nearby school. The villagers did so, thinking that nothing bad will happen as long as they follow the instructions of the militants.
At the school, they separated men from women and children. Then the men were taken to the back of the school and were killed en masse. Older women were also executed. The young boys were to be used as human shields and suicide bombers.
Then the young girls were loaded onto buses and were taken to Mosul, the capital of the ISIS caliphate. They were to be used as Sabaya (sex slaves). ISIS considered Yazidis as infidels and raping a slave is not a sin for them. Nadia herself was traded multiple times between militants and raped over and over again, even at a checkpoint.
Nadia found a way to escape after months of torture. But she lost most of her family, along with thousands of other Yazidis’ life, in this genocide. And she came out in the open to tell her story, the story of Yazidis as a whole, to the world.
This is a must-read. Not that you enjoy reading it but if you have an iota of humanity, this memoir will tear you apart. And, no one should be spared for inflicting such unparalleled harm, torture and humiliation on their fellow human beings.
As her will is, let Nadia be the last ever girl to have a story like hers.
