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“I thank the pope for welcoming me back to the Vatican,” said Nadia Murad, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018, on her Twitter account on August 27, 2021. The day before, during a private audience, the two personalities spoke in particular of the tragic events in Afghanistan, said Nadia, a victim of abuse by ISIS in Iraq in 2014 and spokesperson for the cause of its martyred people.
“We discussed the importance of supporting #Yazidis & other minority communities in Iraq. In light of the heartbreaking events in #Afghanistan, we exchanged ideas concerning the defense of women and survivors of sexual violence,” writes Nadia Murad on the social network.
The Vatican had not given any details regarding this audience, which was not on the pontiff’s official agenda. This was the third meeting between the pope and the young woman born in 1993.
In May 2017, a first brief interview took place after a general audience in Rome. The Iraqi woman then asked the Bishop of Rome for a private audience to recount the tragedy of her people, which he granted her a year later.
In the meantime, the pope had read “So that I could be the last” (Fayard, 2018), a sinister story in which a young woman testified to the barbarism of Daesh on the Yazidi community of Sinjar, west of Mosul.
It was decisive reading for the pontiff. “For me, that was the inspiration of God to make my decision [to go to Iraq],” said the Bishop of Rome on the plane that brought him back from his historic trip to Iraq in March 2021.
And today we celebrate...