Nobel Peace Prize recipient Nadia Murad told her story of surviving unimaginable atrocities at the hands of ISIS and then becoming an advocate for human rights at a John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum this month. The program was co-sponsored by the Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights and Institute of Politics.
In his introduction, HKS Dean Jeremy Weinstein described how, in 2014, Murad was kidnapped by ISIS after more than 600 people in her Yazidi community—including her mother and other members of her family—were killed. The Yazidis are a Kurdish-speaking ethnic minority in Iraq. Murad was among the 6,000 Yazidi women and girls that the Islamic State took prisoner and forced into human trafficking, tortured, and raped. She was 21.
After her escape, Murad traveled to the United States to speak to the United Nations, where she first met Samantha Power, who was the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations in the Obama administration. Despite the horrors of her captivity and her unfamiliarity with English and the United States, Murad was determined to share her story for the sake of the others in captivity.
“Addressing the U.N. Security Council, she urged the assembled governments to liberate the thousands of women and children enslaved and trafficked by ISIS to eradicate the terrorist group and to help Yazidis and other minorities to resettle,” said Weinstein.
“I had to share my story to rescue the people that I loved the most, my nieces and my sisters.”
Less than two years after that first address, Murad was a driving force behind the unanimous passage of U.N. Security Council resolution 2379, which established an investigative team, UNITAD, to promote accountability for crimes committed by the Islamic State. “Over six years, UNITAD investigated and documented ISIS crimes in Iraq, including against the Yazidi, Christian, Shia, Turkmen, and Sunni communities,” said Weinstein.
In conversation with Power, the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at HKS, Murad shared her journey from victim to advocate. Drawing on her new book, I Choose My Beginning: A Story of Courage and Activism, Murad spoke candidly about her experiences and her determination to not let these atrocities go unheeded.
“I had to share my story to rescue the people that I loved the most, my nieces and my sisters,” said Murad. “I have heard from survivors of genocides that when you survive something like that and others don’t, you do feel guilty. You feel responsible for sharing your story. And I feel guilty. I felt that responsibility to keep sharing and sharing, even though I was treated so many times just as a victim, as a story.”
Since that meeting, Murad has been meeting with global leaders to raise awareness of the genocide against the Yazidi people and the systemic use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. “When I first shared my story, I didn’t know if it was going to be used against me or not,” said Murad. “I also didn’t know that what happened to me had a name, conflict-related sexual violence.”
Today, Murad is the president and chairwoman of Nadia’s Initiative, which actively works to persuade governments and international organizations to support the sustainable re-development of the Yazidi homeland, as well as survivors of sexual violence globally.
Power, who led USAID from May 2021 to January 2025 before returning to HKS where she had previously been a faculty member, asked Murad what message she would send to nongovernmental organizations based on her experience.
“I would say listen first,” replied Murad. She said that many times while she was in the refugee camp, various organizations would give her a dress, take a photo, offer food. But that was not enough. “If organizations took the time to listen to us, we would explain to them that we needed more than food, we needed more than clothes. We needed IDs, documents to show that we were citizens of that country or that we were registered,” she explained.
The entire discussion is available for streaming on the Institute of Politics YouTube Channel. Future forums can be found on the IOP webpage.
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Photographs by Martha Stewart.
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