Nadia Murad, a Yazidi victim of ISIS turned champion of victimized women is a winner of the 2018 Noble Peace Prize. Nadia Murad: A Yazidi Beacon of Light Against Slavery Nadia Murad, now a United Nation Goodwill Ambassador on Trafficking of Persons, is the co-laureate of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2014 when she was 21, she and her neighbors in a predominantly Yazidi village in the Simjar mountainous area of Iraq were attacked by the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). These forces were following a pattern of targeted killings, forced conversions to Islam, abductions, trafficking of women, sexual abuse and slavery. In Murad’s village, most of the older men were killed, the younger men were taken to be soldiers in the ISIS forces, and the women were taken into slavery, primarily as sex slaves, in Mosul, the city which served as the headquarters of ISIS. There were some 500,000 Yazidi in Iraq through Iraqi demographic statistics are not fully reliable. Yazidi leaders may give larger estimates by counting Kurds who had been Yazidis but had converted to Islam. There had been some 200,000 Yazidis among the Kurds in Turkey but now nearly all have migrated to Western Europe, Australia, and Canada. Many of the Yazidi are ethnic Kurds and the government of Sadam Hussein was opposed to them not so much for their religious beliefs but because some Yazidi played important roles in the Kurdish community seen as largely opposed to his government. After a time in Mosul, Nadia Murad, with the help of a compassionate Muslim family, was able to escape Mosul and make her way to the Iraqi Kurdistan area where many Yazidis from the Sinjar area had already arrived. Once there she joined a newly created association of Yazidi women...

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