The Women Suing ISIS

Sold as a sex slave to brutal ISIS warriors at the age of 19, Nadia Murad ISIS made a desperate escape. Now she’s joined forces with human rights lawyer Amal Clooney to bring the men responsible to justice.

- Alexandra Carlton

Nadia Murad had a plan. The ISIS fighter who had purchased her body at a slave market weeks before was distracted downstairs. Since he had enslaved her, Hajju Salman had dressed the teen in flimsy clothes and make-up – something the modest young woman had never worn before – then raped and beaten her daily. Today, he had ordered her upstairs like a dog to await the moment he felt like using her again. But Nadia had other ideas. Alone and frightened, she stood at the second-floor window and spotted an empty oil drum on the ground below that she felt could be used as a stepping stone to freedom.

Pulling on a black niqab – an Islamic garment not worn by her people, the Yazidi, but that she thought would help disguise her once she made her escape – the 19-year-old put one leg through the window and then the other. She began to lower her torso to the ground, suddenly realising with despair that the drum was too far below her to reach.

As her feet stretched desperately to make contact with safety she heard the heart-stopping sound of a gun being cocked. A man’s voice yelled for her to go back inside. “I froze, my body folded over the windowsill,” she wrote in her memoir, The Last Girl. Heaving herself back into the room, she curled up in a ball, sick with fear, awaiting her fate.