Yazidi activist and former "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant" (ISIL) captive Nadia Murad was on Monday (October 10th) awarded the Council of Europe's fourth Václav Havel Human Rights Prize.
The award, worth 60,000 euros ($66,500), honours outstanding civil society action in defence of human rights. It was presented during a parliamentary session in Strasbourg, France.
In 2014, at the age of 21, Murad was kidnapped by ISIL in northern Iraq, along with thousands of other women and children. She was kept in slavery and abused for three months until she managed to escape and flee to Germany.
Since then, she has become a human rights activist, bringing the plight of the Yazidi community, in particular the forced sexual enslavement and human trafficking of women and children captured by ISIL, to the forefront of international attention.
