Ten years ago, Nadia Murad, CAS/BA ’24 lost everything that mattered: her family, her homeland, her peace, her security.

But on May 11, when her name was called during American University’s 147th commencement, Murad—who survived four months in ISIS captivity—threw her arms up triumphantly and bounded joyfully across the Bender Arena stage to collect that which can never be taken away: her college degree.

Her mother, Shami, didn’t live to see the last of her 11 children become the first in the family to graduate. Murad was left instead to wonder what Shami—a single parent who couldn’t read or write, but who toiled in the fields of their Iraqi village to send each of her sons and daughters to school for at least a couple of years—would think of the pomp and circumstance.

“She never met anyone who went to college, but she believed that education could change families and communities,” Murad says. “I still don’t know how she saw that, but she did.

“When I was going to school [as a child], people in our village would ask, ‘Why Nadia? She should just join her siblings on the farm,’” Murad recalls. “And my mom would always say, ‘You will see, my daughter will be something one day.’”

Murad was 21 and on the cusp of starting her senior year of high school when, under the cover of darkness on August 3, 2014, Islamic State militants surrounded the Sinjar region of northern Iraq. The area is the ancestral home of the Yazidis, an ethno-religious minority whom the terrorists referred to as kuffar—devil worshippers who had to be exterminated. 

With ISIS quickly closing in on her family’s quiet farming village of Kocho, Shami instructed Murad and her siblings to remove photographs from the walls of their single-story mud brick home. Murad delivered the pictures to her mother, who knelt before the squat tandoor in the courtyard, removing them from their frames and tossing them by the handful into the bread oven. The corners of the photos curled as the flames lapped at the faces of smiling brides and grooms, of babies being baptized in a nearby spring, of Murad on her first day of school, crying at the prospect of being separated from her mother.

“Our past is ashes,” Murad thought to herself.

But Shami remained steadfast, feeding the flames with a pile of her clothing to ensure that decades worth of cherished memories were completely charred. “I won’t have them seeing who we were,” she told Murad.

Days later, on August 15, ISIS pounced. The terrorists executed about 600 Yazidi men in Kocho who refused to renounce their religion and convert to Islam and 80 women too old to be sold into slavery, burying their bodies in unmarked graves. Among the dead were six of Murad’s brothers and Shami, who was 63.

Murad, her sisters, two nieces, and hundreds of other Yazidi women and girls from Kocho, some as young as nine, were captured and taken to Mosul, where they were enslaved, raped, and sold by ISIS in markets or on Facebook—sometimes for as little as $20. “My body, my soul, were occupied and used by people who look like humans, but they are not human,” she says.

After four months, Murad—aided by the eldest son of a Sunni Muslim family who risked his life to save hers—made a harrowing escape when her jihadist captor left the door unlocked.

But Murad’s freedom was not free. 

“The second I escaped captivity, I felt a responsibility to share not only my story, but the story of so many women and girls that I left behind: my nieces, my best friends, my neighbors, my cousins,” she says. In all, 18 members of Murad’s family were either killed or enslaved. “I think when you’re lucky enough to survive something like I survived, there is no way you can stay silent.” 

Murad was living in a converted shipping container at a camp for internally displaced people in Dohuk, Iraq, in February 2015 when she went public. Using the alias “Basima,” she recounted the details of her abduction and enslavement for an article in the Belgian newspaper La Libre. In one of the photos accompanying the story, Murad sits, folded into herself, on a brown blanket, her left arm clutching her leg tightly against her chest and her right hand shielding her anguished face. The depth of her pain, the enormity of her loss, is palpable.   

Since then, the 31-year-old has made it her life’s work to advocate for other victims of sexual violence and human trafficking—those who don’t have a voice or who have been forever silenced. According to the US Department of State, more than 27 million people are trafficked worldwide at any given time—including the approximately 2,800 Yazidi women and children who are still being held in captivity by ISIS.

After delivering the first-ever briefing on human trafficking to the United Nations Security Council in December 2015, Murad—who was then living in Germany as part of a resettlement program for victims of ISIS—was named the UN’s inaugural Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking.

In her role, she began meeting with heads of state, diplomats, and politicians and giving interviews to journalists and filmmakers from around the world about the plight of Yazidi victims of slavery and sexual abuse. Their story always starts with hers, which has gotten easier to tell with every recounting—although it will never be easy. 

“Each time you speak it, you relive it,” she writes in her 2017 memoir, The Last Girl. “Still . . . my story, told honestly and matter-of-factly, is the best weapon I have against terrorism.” Each time she shares it, “I feel that I am taking some power away from the terrorists.” 

Murad is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed with 400 Yazidi Americans in December against Lafarge, a French cement maker that pleaded guilty in 2020 to paying millions of dollars to ISIS for a Syrian factory. Human rights attorney Amal Clooney, who has represented Murad since the two met in London in 2016, filed the suit—which alleges that Lafarge conspired to provide material support to a campaign of violence by the Islamic State—under civil provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act. 

About 5,000 Yazidis were killed in the Sinjar massacre and 6,000 women and children were captured. A decade later, only eight people have been held legally accountable, Murad says. 

“ISIS were doctors, teachers, engineers, people with families, people who were able to recruit tens of thousands of individuals—women and men from all around the world—to join them in Iraq and Syria. And they were so proudly public about their crimes,” she says. 

“The lawsuit sends an important message that if you support ISIS, there is a high price that you will pay. And if you join these groups, you will be held accountable,” Murad continues. “I think the only way for the international community to prevent future atrocities is to do it through the justice system.”

Murad still bears the same scars as the woman photographed in the shipping container—but a decade on, she carries them differently. Head held high, eyes unflinching, she is powerful, strong, defiant. “I know now,” she writes, “that I was born in the heart of the crimes committed against me.”

Growing up, Murad aspired to teach history or own a beauty salon. 

“I always loved hair and makeup. I would sometimes get sent home from school for wearing it,” she says with a sly smile. “But beauty salons are not just about what you put on your face. It’s about what happens when women come together and raise new ideas.”

Murad didn’t know any women who went to college. Yazidis who did pursue higher education had to travel to Mosul or Baghdad or Erbil and were in constant danger because of their religion; some young men were even killed.

But by 2018, that which had never seemed possible in Kocho suddenly was.

That year, she married Abid Shamdeen, SIS/MIS ’19, a fellow Yazidi activist, whom she met in New York City two years earlier after speaking at the United Nations. Murad and Shamdeen are also cofounders of Nadia’s Initiative, a global nonprofit that spearheads community-driven and survivor-centric sustainable development projects. 

Shamdeen worked for five years as a translator and cultural advisor for the American military in Iraq and immigrated to the US in 2010, earning his bachelor’s in political science from the University of Nebraska. After enrolling in the School of International Service’s executive master’s program—just a week after he and Murad wed—he brought his new wife to campus.

“I had visited colleges before to give speeches, but something about AU felt like a dream. It was so beautiful,” she recalls. As the couple strolled hand in hand across AU’s tree-lined quad, something took root in Murad.

“Sometimes people look at Nadia and they only see a survivor—she’s that and more,” Shamdeen says. “To do something for herself at that point, to just be a college student, was really important.”

Over the next two years, Murad juggled the demands of learning English—her third language—with the advocacy work that took her around the globe. One day she was learning how to ask, “Which way to the airport?” and the next she was flying off to Oslo to accept the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize alongside Congolese gynecologist Denis Mukwege for their efforts to end sexual violence as a weapon of war. (Murad is the first Iraqi and the first Yazidi to win the Nobel.)

When she enrolled at AU in 2020, Murad declared a major in sociology. Although history was close to her heart, she worried that studying it would be too painful. “Most of the people that I told I loved history were no longer with me. I was scared it would be traumatizing,” Murad says. 

Sociology afforded the opportunity to explore issues of inequality and poverty that she experienced firsthand in Kocho. “I wanted to know why some people have been marginalized for generations, why women and girls have been fighting for their rights since the beginning of time, why women like my mother had to fight the stigma of divorce. I thought sociology was the best place to find answers.”

Murad decided to maintain a low profile as a student. She wanted to be able to offer her opinion on a reading or contribute to classroom discussion from the perspective of a typical undergrad—not as a Nobel laureate. Just as important, she didn’t want her classmates, once they googled her, to look at her with pity. “When I’m in a grocery store or coffee shop, people talk to me like a normal person. But sometimes, when they learn who I am, they feel sorry for me.”

Before the start of each semester, Murad emailed her professors to introduce herself, offer a heads-up about speaking engagements and events that would keep her from class, and ask for their help in maintaining her anonymity. “I’m so grateful that they respected my privacy. And if I missed a deadline, they [docked] points, just like [they did for] any other student,” she says with a laugh.

Professor Michelle Newton-Francis, CAS/PhD ’08, bookended Murad’s AU experience, teaching research methods early in her major and advising on her capstone project in her last semester. In between the two women developed a lifelong friendship.

“My interactions with Nadia are inspiring,” Newton-Francis says. “I don’t know if that’s something that she just evokes, but I think it’s her compassionate spirt and her commitment to humanity and justice.”

Murad’s capstone project, the Murad Code, outlines best practices for working with survivors of systemic and conflict-related sexual violence to safely and ethically investigate and document their experiences. It has already been translated into a dozen languages, including Kurdish, Arabic, and Ukrainian.

“Nadia is very sociologically minded. She’s applying what she learns in the classroom globally, but she also elevates the classroom by sharing her extensive experience,” Newton-Francis says. “It’s been the privilege of my career to get to know and work with her.” 

Murad may have missed a few classes here and there to attend the 2024 Time Women of the Year gala, where she was honored alongside Barbie director Greta Gerwig and tennis star Coco Gauff, and to speak at the Forbes 30/50 Summit in Abu Dhabi. And she had to bolt out of class after giving a presentation in early March to meet with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken—but she still graduated in just three-and-a-half years.

Days after commencement, Murad flew to Germany to celebrate with her 21 nieces and nephews—the children of her slain brothers—who saw her in her cap and gown on AU’s livestream. “There were so many times where I was close to giving up because of work and grief and trauma, but I felt like my mother was always in my heart, telling me ‘You got this,’” she says. 

Now Murad gets to say the same thing to the next generation.

A decade after the massacre—the 74th firman, or genocide, perpetrated against the Yazidi people over the last few centuries, according to Murad—about 200,000 refugees remain in camps in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

Murad returned to Kocho for the first time in 2017 after Iraqi forces liberated the village from ISIS. Her family’s mud brick house had been looted, and everything left behind was burned. Still, it felt like home. 

“Longing for a lost place makes you feel like you have also disappeared,” she writes in The Last Girl. “I have seen many beautiful countries in my travels as an activist, but nowhere I wanted to live more than Iraq.”

Her work with Nadia’s Initiative has taken her back there many times to celebrate the opening of a hospital or a school she helped build, as Yazidis—150,000 and counting—return to the Sinjar region to reclaim their land and their lives.

Murad has also realized, in a roundabout way, her childhood dream of owning a beauty salon by helping other Yazidi women open their own shops. In October, she visited one of the shops owned by a woman whose husband died in the war. “She’s thriving,” Murad says. “Every afternoon, women come together at the salon to share their thoughts and get their hair and makeup done. It’s a real gathering space for women.”

Murad says the owner is even making enough money now to send her daughter to college.