BBC 100 women: failing to bring IS to justice is a failure for the UN – Nadia Murad

In a Munich courtroom, Nora sat across from the person who bought her as a slave, abused her and murdered her five-year-old daughter.

Nora and Reda were held captive in Iraq by the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) in 2015, the year after the start of what the UN describes as a genocidal campaign against the Yazidi religious minority.

They were “bought” as slaves by ISIS husband and wife Taha al-Jumailly and Jennifer Wenisch, who had traveled to Fallujah from Germany.

At the end of July, five-year-old Reda became ill and wet the bed.

To punish her, Taha al-Jumailly took her outside and chained her to a window in 50-degree heat. He and his wife left the child to die of dehydration while his mother, locked inside, could only watch.

Wenisch became one of the first ISIS members to be tried and convicted for war crimes, in 2021. A month later, Al-Jumailly was convicted of genocide.

Nora's testimony was instrumental in their conviction.

“It's possible, it's been done,” says Nadia Murad, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Yazidi activist from the same village as Nora, who has spent the past decade campaigning for this type of justice.

“What people don't know about ISIS and similar groups is that they don't care about being killed. But they are so afraid to face women and girls in court,” she explains.

“And they will always come back with a different name if we don’t hold them accountable to the world.” »

In 2014, ISIS took over much of northern Iraq and persecuted religious and ethnic minorities. But they reserved their particular cruelty for the Yazidis, whose religion they despised. They killed thousands of Yazidi men, boys over 12, and older women, captured thousands of young women and girls as sex slaves, and indoctrinated boys into fighting. as child soldiers.

Of the tens of thousands of ISIS members, fewer than 20 have been convicted of war crimes – by courts in Germany, Portugal and the Netherlands. In Iraq, ISIS members have been prosecuted for terrorism-related offenses, but not for war crimes.

The convictions in Europe were obtained thanks to a seven-year investigation by Unitad, the United Nations investigative body, which Nadia Murad requested to create. This organization has collected millions of pieces of evidence.

But the investigation ended in September, when Iraq refused to continue its partnership with the United Nations. The evidence is now on a server in a building in New York.

Mr. Murad does not understand why there is no political will to obtain more convictions.

It is unclear how many ISIS members have been prosecuted in Iraq, many are detained on anti-terrorism charges, but the process is not transparent. The country's justice minister said last year that around 20,000 people had been charged with terrorist offenses and imprisoned, including 8,000 sentenced to death, although it was not known exactly how many of them were members of ISIS.

“It’s devastating for the survivors,” Murad says.

Most of Murad's family members were murdered. Like Nora, she was held captive and sold from one member to another, gang raped repeatedly.

No one came to help her; she escaped when her captor left the door open. She walked for hours before knocking on the door of a family who helped her smuggle out of ISIS territory.

“I felt guilty for surviving while my young nieces, friends and neighbors were still there,” she explains. “I took my survival as a responsibility to share my story so people know what was really happening there, under ISIS control. »

By speaking openly, Murad rejected the shame associated with sexual violence in Iraq. Many women she knows have tried to protect themselves from stigma by remaining silent. But Murad convinced relatives and friends to testify to Unitad.

Much of her work has involved protecting the rights of victims of sexual violence. As part of her campaign, she developed a set of guidelines, known as the “Murad Code,” to help survivors control what they want to share when speaking to investigators or reporters.

“Sexual violence and rape persist long after the end of the war. They are eternal and live in your body, in your mind and in your bones,” she says.

Without help from the United Nations, she worries how the Iraqi government will treat genocide victims. She is not encouraged by the way the exhumations of her loved ones were handled.

There are up to 200 mass graves of people killed by ISIS – and 68 were exhumed with the support of the UN mission, including 15 in the village of Murad alone.

This process is now in the hands of the Iraqi authorities, and only about 150 bodies out of thousands have been identified. Six of Murad's eight brothers were killed by ISIS, and only two of them were given a proper burial.

“My mother, my nieces, my four other brothers and my cousins ​​are all in a building in Baghdad,” she explains. “It's painfully slow for many of us who have been waiting for some form of conclusion.

Recently, when some victims were identified, their relatives learned about it on Facebook because Iraqi authorities had not contacted them.

Former Unitad director Christian Ritscher told the BBC that identifying the bodies was a long and difficult process. Although Unitad has accomplished a lot, he believes the investigation ended too soon.

On the tenth anniversary of the Yazidis genocide, Ms Murad minces no words about institutions such as the United Nations, which were created to prevent these crimes.

“These international organizations continue to disappoint people. Give me just one example where they managed to prevent war, whether in Iraq or Syria, Gaza and Israel, Congo or Ukraine.”

“They were supposed to protect the most vulnerable,” she adds. “They were more interested in what was best for their parties and their policies.

She fears the war in Gaza and Lebanon will spread and remnants of the Islamic State group will once again take advantage of the chaos in the Middle East.

“We cannot defeat an ideology like [IS] with weapons,” she said. “We know that many of them are still there and have gotten away with it.”

“I feel like I've gotten justice by not being silent, by not accepting the blame and the shame and the stigma, I feel like I've gotten some form of justice.

“But for my sisters, my nieces, my friends and my fellow survivors who have not shared their stories publicly, their pain is so real. And it’s this trauma that, I think, can only disappear with justice.”