The Last Girl

My story about my life in captivity and my fight against the "Islamic State.".
Foreword by Amal Clooney.

Nadia Murad was born and raised in Kocho, a small Yazidi village in northern Iraq. Her family leads a modest but peaceful and happy life, and she dreams of becoming a history teacher or opening her own beauty salon.

On August 15, 2014, Nadia’s life was turned upside down. Islamic State fighters massacred the residents of Kocho—the men who refused to convert to Islam and the women who were too old to become sex slaves. Nadia’s mother and six of her brothers were killed, and their bodies were dumped in mass graves. Twenty-one-year-old Nadia was abducted and taken to Mosul, where she was forced to convert to Islam and become a sex slave like thousands of other young Yazidi women. Her life is a series of rapes and humiliations, and death seems like a welcome relief. But she manages to escape and tell the whole world about the "Islamic State’s" genocide against the Yazidis and the horror to which Yazidi women in captivity are subjected.

The unimaginable atrocities have left indelible scars on Nadia’s body and soul, but they have not broken her. Today, she is the voice of every Yazidi, every abandoned refugee, every raped woman, and she fights tirelessly to achieve her greatest goal—to be the last girl in the world to suffer such a fate.

The 2018 Nobel Peace Prize. The Václav Havel Human Rights Prize. The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.