Yazidi Women who escaped IS Group Win European Union's Sakharov Human Rights Prize

Iraqi activist Nadia Murad wins human rights prize for Yazidi campaign

 

The European Parliament has awarded its Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought and expression to Nadia Murad and Lamiya Aji Bashar, two women from Iraq’s Yazidi community who suffered attack and persecution by Islamic State

 

Murad and Bashar were among thousands of women and girls abducted and held as sexual slaves by Islamic State fighters after they rounded up Yazidis in their village of Kocho, near Sinjar in northwest Iraq, in the summer of 2014.

The Yazidi are a religious sect whose beliefs combine elements of several ancient Middle Eastern religions