By Olivia Harper • January 29, 2026 • Share
August 3, 2014. A small village in northern Iraq. Nadia Murad was 21 years old when the trucks came. She was Yazidi—an ancient religious minority that ISIS had marked for extermination. When the militants surrounded her village of 1,700 people, they separated families with terrifying precision. Men and boys to one side. Women and girls to the other.
Nadia’s six brothers were taken with the other men. They were executed. Her mother was taken with the older women. She was killed too. The younger women and girls—Nadia among them—were loaded onto buses. They were being taken to become sabaya. Sex slaves. What followed were three months of unspeakable horror.
Nadia was trafficked to Mosul, ISIS’s stronghold, where she was held with hundreds of other Yazidi women and girls. Some were as young as nine. ISIS fighters came to select their captives like merchandise. Nadia was purchased by an ISIS judge who raped her repeatedly. When he tired of her, he sold her. Over three months, she was bought and sold seven times.
She was beaten when she resisted. She was burned with cigarettes. She tried to escape once—she was caught, brutally assaulted by multiple men as punishment, and beaten so badly she couldn’t walk. In November 2014, Nadia found a door accidentally left unlocked. She ran.
A neighboring Muslim family—risking their own lives—helped her escape. Through underground networks, she reached safety and was eventually granted asylum in Germany. She was alive. She was free. And she faced a choice.
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