Nadia Murad: “I will be the last” | ANF ​​- Fides News Agency

Opinion

May 27, 2022 3:56 PM

It shudders to read over and over again the testimony of Nadia Murad, the young woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018. Nadia dreamed of being the last woman used as a sexual trophy by armed men who – like centuries ago – rape, torture and enslave to the wives, daughters, mothers of his enemies.

Murad dared to denounce the savagery of the militants of the self-proclaimed Islamic State against his Yazidi people, when they killed more than 5,000 innocent people and kidnapped many others, especially women. The girls were sold to merchants or to the military. Some teenagers, terrified by this fate, committed suicide by throwing themselves into the void from the mountains where the population had run to take refuge.

The jihadists attacked this Kurdish minority that lives mostly in Iraq because they consider that population to be “worshipers of the devil” because they have an ancient religion, close to Zoroastrianism. They were also accused of engaging in poetry and sacred dances, expressions abhorred by ISIS members.

The Yazudis aroused fear and admiration for their deep esoteric knowledge and mastery of their own body and mind. Different authors talk about them, such as Georg Gurdjieff and Peter Ouspensky, who describe how an imaginary circle can trap a person, just by force of thought. For this different knowledge they were secularly persecuted, like the gypsies. They have faced more than 70 massacres, but surely the one in 2014 is the most heinous.

Survivors recounted experiences so harrowing that they are difficult to reproduce: mothers forced to watch as their babies were dismembered and then eaten; parents who saw their children and grandchildren killed one by one and raped all the women in the family, even the smallest; others who knew how they were taken, as an old man recalls who lost his 19 children and grandchildren. They killed the males of the village, older than four years. infinite horror.

Nadia’s own mother and six of her nine siblings were killed. She was sold into slavery and gang raped every day by ISIS members. She managed to escape, receive support from Kurdish women, reach Germany and write her moving book. At the age of 25 she received the Nobel Prize and many other awards for her bravery.

However, as she assures, she does not want to be a militant all her life. She wants to live in a different world, where her own children have the right to dream, where the Yazidis can worship the seven angels, have inbreeding marriages, maintain their tolerance of adulterous women.

The Yazidis posed no threat to ISIS or the Moscow-backed Syrian forces. They simply killed them for “infidels”. In Sinjar there are dozens of mass graves, and no one knows when relatives will be able to honor their loved ones or when the hostages will be rescued.

Someone will say that ISIS is a group of fanatics. The serious thing is that today, as I write, other women are trapped as spoils of war, tortured, raped. The troops of Vladimir Putin (so close to Evo Morales) are committing similar atrocities against the Ukrainians.

At the borders, especially with Poland, girls arrive with their future broken forever. Pregnancies, which for most women are a joy, for them is a tragedy. International entities and multidisciplinary teams are deployed to help them. No one will bring back the past. As Murad pointed out: “They stole our lives, our memories, they destroyed us.” “My hope, she said upon receiving the award, is that all women are heard”. He now knows that she is not the last female sacrificed as a military trophy.

In Bolivia, the coordinators and other feminist groups remain silent.

Lupe Cajías is a journalist