Nobel Peace Prize recipients Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad.

Nobel Peace Prize recipients Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad.Credit:AP

Born and raised in the village of Kojo in northern Iraq,Murad,along with her family,was at the centre of the Islamic State's campaign of ethnic cleansing. Kojo,on the southern flank of Mount Sinjar,was one of the first Yazidi villages to be overrun by the Islamic State,which launched its attack from the south on August 3,2014.

Residents were herded into Kojo's only school,where women and girls were separated from the men. The male captives,including six of Murad's brothers,were loaded into trucks,driven to a field outside the town and executed.

The women and girls were forced into buses. Murad was taken to a slave market,where she was sold to an Islamic State judge. While the wives of Islamic State members were ordered to wear full-covering face veils and gloves,Murad was forced to wear makeup and suggestive dresses with spaghetti straps.

At night,the militant forced himself upon her,viciously beating her if she dared to close her eyes during the assault,she recounted. He warned her that even worse things would happen if she tried to escape. When he caught her jumping out of a window,he ordered her to undress. Then he sent in his bodyguards,who took turns raping her until she passed out.

"At some point,there was rape and nothing else. This becomes your normal day,"Murad wrote in her autobiography,The Last Girl."You don't know who will open the door next to attack you,just that it will happen and that tomorrow might be worse."

But she eventually escaped.

For years afterward,she refused to wear makeup. She embarked on a worldwide campaign,speaking before the UN Security Council,the US House of Representatives,the House of Commons in Britain and other global bodies.

Whereas other Yazidi survivors testified before the same bodies with a blanket covering them so that TV cameras would not capture their images,Murad broke with the norms of her honor-based society and insisted on showing her face.

In Yazidi villages in her former homeland,she has become an icon. Many carry her image on their phones,and posters of Murad adorn telephone poles.

Murad has said that she was exhausted by having to repeatedly speak out,but she said she knew that other Yazidi women were being raped back home:"I will go back to my life when women in captivity go back to their lives,when my community has a place,when I see people accountable for their crimes."

In Congo,the injuries that Mukwege has treated are ghastly:women who have had assault rifles stuck inside them;others pierced with chunks of wood;some victims collapsing on the hospital steps with deep rope burns on their necks from where they had been lashed to trees. Mukwege has also treated 2-year-olds and women in their 70s.

"It's not a women question;it's a humanity question,and men have to take responsibility to end it,"Mukwege once said in an interview."It's not an Africa problem. In Bosnia,Syria,Liberia,Colombia,you have the same thing."

In 2012,Mukwege delivered a fiery speech at the United Nations,upbraiding the Congolese government and other nations for not doing enough to stop what he called"an unjust war that has used violence against women and rape as a strategy of war."

His advocacy nearly cost him his life. Shortly after the speech,when he returned to Congo,four armed men crept into his compound in Bukavu. They took his children hostage and waited for him to return from work. In the hail of bullets that followed,his guard was killed,but Mukwege threw himself on the ground and somehow survived.

He spent more than two months in exile but decided that he had to return."To treat women for the first time,second time,and now I'm treating the children born after rape,"Mukwege said."This is not acceptable."

When he returned,he received a hero's welcome. Banners flew across town with messages like"Welcome our Superman."To the people in the crowd,Mukwege urged hope and forgiveness.

Though he has criticized the Congolese government for acts of sexual violence by its troops,the government congratulated him Friday for the prize,even while chiding him for politicising his work.

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