By Stefanie Cohen. November 18, am Updated November 22, pm. Nadia Murad grew up dreaming of owning a beauty salon. The youngest of 11 children in a Yazidi family in northwest Iraq, she took photographs of all the brides in her tiny village, studying their makeup and hair.
Her favorite was of a brunette woman with curls piled high atop her head. Murad was captured, enslaved, sold, raped and tortured alongside thousands of her people in an effort to decimate their religion.
Murad, 24, managed a miraculous escape and is now a Nobel Peace Prize nominee fighting for freedom and justice for her people. But three years ago, on Aug. Yazidism is one of the oldest faiths in Mesopotamia, dating back 6, years, and has elements in common with many religions of the Middle East: Zoroastrianism, Islam, Judaism.
This belief has given the Yazidi people a reputation among radical Muslims as devil worshipers. As a result, followers, who have no formal holy book of their own, have often been the target of genocidal impulses. Before ISIS, outside powers, including the Ottomans and other radical Islamic sects, had tried to destroy them 73 times, Murad writes in her book. The local leader told the ISIS commander that they would never convert, believing his people would then be evacuated to a nearby town.
Instead, the men of the village were loaded onto trucks, ordered to dig a shallow grave and executed in one afternoon. The women, still in the schoolyard, could hear the shots just a short distance away. The older women and children were separated from the younger women. Murad was ripped away from her mother, whom she would never see again. On the way out of town, Murad, who was 21, screamed in an effort to stop one of the soldiers from grabbing her breast each time he walked by her on the bus.
