Nadia Murad

Nadia Murad: The Witness Who Wrote the Rules

There is a document, adopted internationally, that governs how investigators and journalists are permitted to gather testimony from survivors of sexual violence in war. It is called the Murad Code. It exists because a young woman from a village in northern Iraq concluded that telling her own story was not enough — that the machinery for collecting such stories was itself causing harm, and that somebody had to fix it. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize before she had finished her undergraduate degree.

Kojo

Nadia Murad was born in 1993 in Kojo, a village in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq, into the Yazidi community — a small, ancient religious minority that has been the target of persecution for centuries. Before 2014 her life was, in the Nobel Foundation's phrase, peaceful, and entirely local.

August 2014

That August, Daesh — the Islamic State — attacked Sinjar. In Kojo around 600 Yazidi men were killed, and the young women of the village were abducted. Murad was among roughly 5,200 Yazidi women and girls taken and enslaved. She was held for about three months before she escaped, and she eventually reached Germany, where she was granted asylum.

The Yazidi genocide is one of the most thoroughly documented atrocities of the twenty-first century, and Murad's own account of her captivity is published in her own words. It is not retold here. What matters for the shape of her life is what she chose to do with it.

A Room in New York

In 2015 she stood in front of the United Nations Security Council and described what had happened to her community. She was twenty-two.

That decision is easy to underestimate. Testifying publicly means surrendering privacy permanently and accepting that your worst experience becomes your public identity. Murad did it anyway, and then kept doing it — in parliaments, at the UN, in courtrooms and in front of cameras — on the calculation that the Yazidi case would disappear if nobody made it impossible to ignore.

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The recognition came quickly. In 2016 the United Nations appointed her Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking, and she received the Sakharov Prize. In 2017 she published *The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State*, which became a New York Times bestseller. She has also received the Council of Europe's Václav Havel Award and a place on the TIME 100 and on Forbes' 30 Under 30.

In 2018, at twenty-five, she shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the Congolese surgeon Denis Mukwege. The citation was precise: the award was made "for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict."

Nadia's Initiative

Murad is President and Chairwoman of Nadia's Initiative, the organisation she founded to do the unglamorous work that follows an atrocity. Its object is the sustainable redevelopment of the Yazidi homeland — persuading governments and institutions to invest in Sinjar rather than merely mourn it — alongside support for survivors of sexual violence globally.

The programme areas are deliberately practical: women's empowerment, education, healthcare, livelihoods, water and sanitation, cultural preservation and advocacy. Rebuilding a water system is not the kind of work that attracts television crews. It is, however, the difference between a displaced community returning home and one that never does.

Accountability

The second strand of her work has been legal, and it is where she has been most effective. Working with the human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, and with the German mission to the UN, Murad campaigned for Security Council Resolution 2467, which expanded international commitments to end conflict-related sexual violence. She also drove the effort that established UNITAD, the United Nations investigative team charged with collecting evidence of Islamic State crimes for use in prosecutions.

That is the substantive achievement: converting a moral claim into an evidentiary apparatus. Genocide cases fail on evidence, not on sympathy.

The Murad Code

Her most original contribution is the code that bears her name. Launched on 19 June 2020 by the Institute for International Criminal Investigations, with support from the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office's Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative and in consultation with Nadia's Initiative, it is formally the Global Code of Conduct for Gathering and Using Information about Systematic and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence.

The problem it addresses is one only a survivor would have identified. Documenters — journalists, investigators, NGO researchers — arrive in the aftermath of atrocity meaning well, and repeatedly cause further harm: extracting testimony without consent or care, re-traumatising the people they interview, and producing accounts too compromised to be used in court. The code sets ethical minimum standards, and its central argument is a practical one rather than a sentimental one: an approach that upholds survivors' rights "is therefore not only more ethical, it is more effective."

In 2024 Murad completed a Bachelor of Arts in sociology at American University in Washington, DC. "Education provides hope and opportunity," she said. "I am living proof of that."

Why Nadia Is Called a Genius

The word must be used carefully here, and not as a euphemism for having endured something terrible. Endurance is not intellect, and describing a survivor as a genius for surviving would be a category error and an insult.

The defensible claim concerns what she built afterwards. Murad's distinctive quality is a form of systems thinking that is rare in advocacy of any kind: rather than campaigning only for recognition of a harm, she identified the specific institutional mechanisms through which the harm continued, and set out to redesign them. She saw that testimony gathered badly is both cruel and legally useless, and pursued a code of conduct to fix it. She saw that outrage without evidence produces no prosecutions, and pursued UNITAD. She saw that a Security Council resolution outlasts a news cycle, and pursued Resolution 2467. Each of those is a structural intervention, chosen over the easier option of simply telling her story again.

The counter-case deserves an honest hearing. The Nobel Committee honoured her "efforts," not her intellect, and the same is true of the Sakharov and Havel prizes; nobody with standing has called her a genius, and she has never claimed the word. The Murad Code was drafted by the Institute for International Criminal Investigations and the UK Foreign Office, in consultation with her organisation — she is its author in the sense that she supplied the insight and the authority, not the drafting. Much of her global platform derives from moral standing rather than analytical accomplishment, and naming an international instrument after a living survivor carries its own risk: that she is treated as a symbol rather than a strategist. The most accurate description is not genius but something harder to achieve — a witness who refused to remain only a witness.

Legacy

Murad turned a personal catastrophe into permanent architecture: a code of conduct, a UN investigative body, a Security Council resolution and an organisation rebuilding Sinjar. The measure of her work is that its beneficiaries will mostly be people who never hear her name, interviewed by investigators who will never meet her, under rules she made necessary.