Today, the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize has gone to campaigners against rape in warfare, Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege. I followed Nadia Murad’s amazing efforts o raise awareness about of ISIS atrocities against Yazidis since 2015. Here is my piece about her visit to Egypt, in which I argued that Public pressure, not political pressure, is the only way that can force religious scholars to confront their own demons and stop the current stagnation of Islamic thoughts.
Nadia Murad Basee Taha, the 21-year old Yazidi woman brutally tortured and raped by ISIS fighters in Iraq, has embarked on a very tricky mission: to confront the Muslim world with the crimes of ISIS. She is visiting Egypt to raise awareness of the atrocities committed by the Islamic State.
Murad was living in Kocho, a village near northern Iraq, with her mother, brothers and sisters. On August 15, 2014, ISIS fighters stormed her village; they executed six of her brothers and then took her to the Iraqi city of Mosul, where they “distributed” her and many others to be enslaved by the fighters “They took us to Mosul with more than 150 other Yazidi families. In a building, there were thousands of Yazidi families and children who were exchanged as ‘gifts’,” she said.
Murad testified at the U.N. Security Council (watch the whole video here) and gave several…
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