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Yazadi human rights activist Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist treating victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, were awarded the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize on October 5.
The duo received the award for their "effort to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict", Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Nobel Committee, announced at a press conference in the Norweigan capital, Oslo, on Friday.
Nadia Murad is a Yazidi Kurdish human rights activist from Iraq, and since September 2016 the first Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking of the United Nations (UNODC). She was captured by the ISIS and repeatedly raped and subjected to other abuses. The committee says she showed “uncommon courage in recounted her own suffering”.
"Nadia Murad is the witness who tells of the abuses perpetrated against herself and others. Each of them, in their own way, has helped to give greater visibility to wartime sexual violence", said the Nobel Committee.
Murad, 25, is the second youngest Nobel peace prize laureate after Malala Yousafzai, who was 17 when she won in 2014.
Murad became an activist for the Yazidi people after escaping the IS in 2014. She campaigned to help put an end to human trafficking and won the European Union's prestigious Sakharov Prize in 2016.
In testimony to the US Congress in June 2016, Murad detailed how she and thousands of other Yazidi women and girls enslaved and raped by their IS captors. She recounted how six of her brothers and her mother were executed by the terror group in a single day.
