Good morning, everyone.
I'm very happy today to be in a country like Canada and to be among you this morning. I'd like to thank you for your support of minorities who are subjected to criminal acts committed against them. I'd like also to thank you for the good work that you are doing for our cause. I'd like to thank Michelle, Rona, and everyone who stands for the truth.
My name is Nadia Murad. I am from the Yazidi minority. I'm 22 years old. I lived in Sinjar, in northern Iraq, in one of the Yazidi villages, the village of Kocho. I was a student in the fifth class. I was so happy with the life among my family and friends. In the village we lived peacefully, and as a peaceful society we lived together with the Muslims, in Bashiqa, in Bahzani, and also with the Christians. With everybody, basically all the other minorities, we coexisted peacefully.
On August 3, 2014, ISIL attacked the Yazidis. They killed more than 4,000 members of the Yazidi community, and as well there were explosions. More than 4,000 Yazidi individuals ran to the mountains on one of the hottest days of the year and more than 6,000 women and children were taken as hostages. Simply because of our religious identity, ISIL acted with the Yazidis in a very different way from the other minorities because they consider them to be infidels or kafirs. When they were attacked, the goal of ISIL was to destroy the Yazidi identity, to kill all the men and to take girls and children as hostages. That's what happened to me.
I was in the village, along with more than 1,700 individuals, and we were seized for two weeks under the control of ISIL. We asked for help from all sides because we knew that our destiny would be for the men to be killed and for the women and children to be taken hostage. We asked for help, but unfortunately we did not get help. On August 15, they gathered us at the village school, they separated the men from the women. They killed our men. More than 700 men in a matter of two hours were killed in the village of Kocho. We saw our fathers, our brothers, and our sons getting killed at the outskirts of the village.
Then they took us, the women and children, and they divided us up by age. Girls from the age of 9 to 25 or 27 years were taken to Mosul. As for the older women, more than 80 of them, they were killed because they were older. The male children were taken to the training camps. The married women who had more than three children each were taken to a different location. They acted towards them just like the girls, but after 40 days they basically violated them because they were with the Yazidis. This is what happened as far as my village is concerned.
This is the same story that was repeated in hundreds of other Yazidi villages, where thousands of people were killed in Sibaya, in Gir Azêr, and in Hardan. In all the other Yazidi villages, thousands of Yazidi people in Bashiqa and Bahzani had to be displaced.
When they took us, the girls and children, we were not simply held prisoners, but they committed crimes against us. They forced us to change our religion. They raped us. They sold us. They leased us. This continues today against more than 3,000 women and children in Iraq and Syria. There is no place in Iraq or Syria under the control of ISIL where girls were not distributed. Girls who were 10 years old were in my company and they would be raped, and they would be sold among themselves. Until today, some girls continue to be raped by tens of ISIL members, This is not a secret; it's done in public. ISIL videographs the girls, and they're proud of what they are doing toward those girls.
Thousands of other Yazidis in the camps struggle with extreme poverty. Thousands of Yazidis had to migrate. Hundreds drowned in the Aegean Sea. Thousands of widows in camps are not able to raise their children. More than 35 mass graves have been discovered so far in the areas that have been liberated in Sinjar, and they have not been documented to date. With the grave where my mother is buried, for more than nine months I knew that my mother was buried there, but she has not been properly identified. Imagine human beings having to see more than six or seven of their siblings killed and not be able to even go to collect their remains. You see your mother killed with no guilt other than her Yazidi identity that meant others considered her an infidel.
We're talking about not being able to buy a container of milk for the children in the camps in Greece, Turkey, Syria, and Iraqi Kurdistan. The Yazidis are being eliminated. Since August 3, 2014, no Yazidi child is being helped by any side. Yazidis are not getting help from anyone.
We're talking about girls who have been raped tens of times, and they're currently in the camps of Iraqi Kurdistan. They've lost their mothers, their fathers, and their brothers. They are living just like other refugees in the camps after having been the victims of ISIL, but they're not receiving any help or assistance. I know of girls who have been liberated. They're in the camps, but there is nobody to help them.
As Yazidis, we feel that the world is negligent toward us, especially when it comes to the survivors, the widows, and the orphans. We do not know for how long we will continue to be in this situation where we're being killed off.
The campaign to eliminate us continues. About this time two years ago, I was a student. I was on a vacation from studies, but I was a student. I was getting ready to go to grade 6, and during my vacation I was preparing myself by studying so that I would get good grades once I made it to grade 6. But 15 days after that we were attacked by ISIS or ISIL. I could not even see my books. I had hoped to be able to obtain the certificate from my school so that I could show it to my mother, but I was not able to get the certificate from that school. In that very schooI, I got separated from my family and friends and village residents. I did not even have the chance to say goodbye to my mother. Six of my siblings were in the school. They had been going to that school, and I saw them being taken in cars to face death. I did not even have the chance to say goodbye to them.
For more than a year our children have been brainwashed in the ISIL camps, and the world is silent about this. Frankly speaking, I don't know what else to tell you about this kind of suffering, about the very painful cases that I witnessed among young women and children. The whole world is negligent when it comes to standing up for the rights of the Yazidis. We are a peaceful community that has been subjected to more than 74 genocides, and we continue to put up with this genocide. It's our hope that one day the world would feel for our situation and would see how a peaceful community like us is facing genocide for no reason other than being of a different religion. We only want to live peacefully. That's the only thing we want. There is no one in the world who would accept that their daughter be held as a hostage for more than a year at the hands of terrorists or to see a wife being taken hostage by terrorists. For women, their husbands were killed before their very eyes, and they were taken hostage and then they were raped.
When I was besieged I heard that thousands of girls had been taken as hostages. I thought, well, maybe they would take me as a hostage, and perhaps I would try to reason with them, try to convince them that I am a human being, that I have done nothing to deserve to be raped, to be sold for nothing. I thought I would try to reason with ISIL because they are human beings, but when they took me away they did not give me any chance to say anything, to say that I was a young girl, that I had the right to live. When ISIL did not give me the chance, did not want to hear from me, I said I was going to talk to the world, and the world would understand me. For more than six months I went to more than 17 countries, talking to presidents, to parliamentarians, and other people, and saying, “Listen up, we're talking about girls who are being raped in the jails of ISIL, people who are dying of starvation in the camps, thousands of children who have been deprived of education.” And they were just simply silent, quiet about it, quiet about our right as Yazidis.