A Testimony That Became a Nobel Prize

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Nadia Murad was twenty one in August 2014 when the Islamic State attacked her village of Kocho, in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq, home to one of the world's largest Yazidi communities. The men of the village, including six of Murad's own brothers, were separated out and killed. Murad and thousands of other Yazidi women were taken into captivity and sold into sexual slavery. She escaped months later and eventually reached Germany, where she began speaking publicly about what had happened to her and her people. The Last Girl, published in 2017 with journalist Jenna Krajeski and a foreword by human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, is her own account of that captivity and of the advocacy that followed it, addressed to the United Nations Security Council and to governments around the world. The book was not written as a religious text or a work of theology; it is testimony, structured as a personal narrative rather than an argument. Its consequence was public and specific: in 2018, the year after its publication, Murad and the Congolese physician Denis Mukwege jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war, and the book itself is widely read as the document that carried her case, and by extension the Yazidi genocide, into a global audience that had not been listening before.