Daily Times

STRASBOURG, France: Two Yazidi women who survived a nightmare ordeal of kidnapping, rape and slavery at the hands of Islamic State militants won the European Parliament’s prestigious Sakharov human rights prize on Thursday.

Nadia Murad and Lamia Haji Bashar have become figureheads for the effort to protect the Yazidis, followers of an ancient religion with more than half a million believers concentrated in northern Iraq. “They have a painful and tragic story but they felt compelled to survive to bear witness,” European Parliament chief Martin Schulz told the assembly in Strasbourg.

“The courage of these two women, the dignity they represent defies all description.” According to UN experts, around 3,200 Yazidis are currently being held by IS, the majority of them in war-ravaged Syria.

Given each year by the European Parliament, the award is named after the dissident Soviet scientist Andrei Sakharov, who died in 1989, and honours individuals who combat intolerance, fanaticism and oppression, often falling foul of their governments as a result.

Murad, a slight, softly spoken young woman, was taken by IS from her home village of Kocho near Iraq’s northern town of Sinjar in August 2014 and brought to the city of Mosul. As a captive of the reviled extremist group, Murad, who today is 23, said she was tortured and raped.

Bashar, who was just 16 when she was taken and is also from Kocho, witnessed family and friends being slaughtered by IS militants before being enslaved and sold. After 20 months in captivity she escaped but then fell into the hands of an Iraqi hospital director who also abused and raped her and several other victims.