Escaped ISIS sex slave appears on CNN with Amal Clooney to demand that her captors face justice in an international court
A Yazidi woman from Iraq who was held captive for months as a sex slave by spoke about her harrowing ordeal Sunday on CNN alongside her lawyer, famed human rights advocate .
The international human rights lawyer and the wife of actor is trying to bring attention to the plight of Nadia Murad and other Yazidi women who are routinely abused at the hands of the militants.
Clooney appeared on Fareed Zakaria‘s show on Sunday alongside Murad, who recalled a harrowing ordeal that began when ISIS gunmen arrived in her village in Iraqi Kurdistan nearly three years ago.
‘Early morning on August 3, 2014, they attacked us,‘ Murad said.
‘Nearly 6,500 women and children from the Yazidi were abducted and about 5,000 people from the community were killed during that day. For eight months, they separated us from our mothers and our sisters and our brothers, and some of them were killed and others disappeared.‘
Murad said that her mother and six of her brothers and stepbrothers were executed by ISIS.
The group also took Murad and other unmarried women as sex slaves and passed around by a number of ISIS men.
Murad recalled that she was once gang raped until she passed out as a punishment for attempting to escape ISIS captivity.
‘They sold girls, girls that were underage, because ISIS considered that permissible under Islamic law,‘ Murad said.
‘They came not just to attack certain people, but they came for all Yazidis.‘
ISIS has long claimed that they are permitted to take Yazidi women under their rule as sex slaves because the Yazidis do not practice Islam.
Murad was abducted and held by Islamic State fighters for three months in 2014 in Mosul.
She told her story to the UN Security Council in December 2015 and since then has been campaigning for justice.
Clooney, who is representing Murad and other Yazidi women with similar stories, says the time has come to not only wage military war against ISIS, but also a legal one.
She noted that there hasn‘t been a ‘single prosecution against ISIS in a court anywhere in the world for the crimes committed against the Yazidis … for any international crimes.‘
Clooney addressed the issue during an appearance last week before the UN Security Council.
She urged the 15 governments that comprise the council to begin collecting evidence of war crimes.
‘ISIS is not a local threat, it‘s a global threat,‘ Clooney said.
‘So, my message to the UN was, this is a global threat. It needs a global response.‘
‘And part of that response must be a judicial one. It cannot be only on the battlefield.‘
‘You can‘t defeat ISIS on the battlefield alone, because you have to also deal with future recruiting.‘
‘And I think trials and exposing the brutality of ISIS and trying to make a dent in some of their shiny propaganda by showing that it‘s not a holy war and showing what they‘re really doing to children, to women, is one way to help that,‘ she said.
‘ISIS has set up a whole bureaucracy involving the slave trade where they‘ve set up committees, they‘ve set up courts, so there are documents, there‘s DNA, there are mass graves, and nobody is actually collecting this evidence,‘ she said.
‘And if it gets lost, it means we can never have trials and we can never have justice.‘
Clooney says that the Security Council is ready to authorize an investigation into ISIS war crimes, but it can only do so if the government of Iraq makes an official request.
‘There‘s already a resolution drafted and ready,‘ she said.
‘And if Iraq just sends the letter, then there will be a vote. And from all of my conversations, including with the Russian ambassador and the United States ambassador and others, it seems that there‘s actually broad support in the Council.‘
‘So, this actually should move forward. It‘s in line with the Iraqi government‘s interests, because they‘re going after ISIS.‘