Amal Clooney and Nadia Murad team up to take down ISIS

Meenakshi Sathish
Features Editor

​         Amal Clooney is not just “George Clooney’s wife.” The Lebanese-British lawyer specializes in international law, extradition, human rights, and criminal law. One could go on talking about her accomplishments, but it is better to ask what she has not done if they are in a rush. Her involvement in high-profile, international cases, advisory roles in the United Nation, and contribution to Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict initiative is enough to say that Clooney is no idle celebrity figure. Her reign for helping others continues as she assists the human trafficking survivor Nadia Murad. 

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         The twenty-three year old Nobel Peace Prize nominee Nadia Murad has come to the spotlight for her fight against the genocide ISIS conducts against the Yazidi group settled in Northern Iraq. Yezidi has been under the cruelty of ISIS because they do not practice Islam. The terrorists of ISIS, as narrated by Murad in Times News, came in pillaging her town. After immediately killing the men, including Murad’s father and step-brothers, most of the women were killed, like Murad’s mother, and the terrorists took with them the women who were considered young and pretty. These are the women who were victims of ISIS’s unspeakable system of sexual slavery. Within ISIS is also a market where women are sold and traded among fighters as a “commodities or rewards.” Murad was able to escape to a refugee camp on Nov. 14, 2015, and then was chosen for a program in Germany. While she was in safety, she could never forget her nieces and other women she left behind. With the help of Amal Clooney and the Yazda organization, Murad testified in front of U.N. Security council to “raise awareness about the Yazidi genocide, the plight of Yazidi women and girls, and speaking against ISIS, a group that continue to threaten the entire world." ISIS has been threatening Murad extensively, saying things like “We will get you back …we will do everything to you,” and Amal Clooney knows the risk in taking up Murad’s case. Nevertheless, she and her husband, actor George Clooney, have taken Murad into their home. After hearing her story, both Clooney and her husband knew that they could not back away. Amal Clooney affirms to People magazine that she is ashamed that the United Nations is behind on preventing such atrocities from happening and how they are “failing...even punish genocide, because they find that their own interests get in the way.”