He was 21 when his village was surrounded. Four years later he would have received the Nobel Peace Prize.
But between these two moments there is a story that Nadia Murad chose to tell even when it meant reopening wounds impossible to forget.
On August 3, 2014, ISIS launched an extensive offensive against the Yazide communities in the Sinjar region in northern Iraq. On August 15 came the massacre of Kocho, the village of Nadia.
Men were separated from women. Many were killed.
Six brothers of Nadia died. His mother was murdered and buried in a common grave.
Nadia was kidnapped and taken to Mosul.
For his kidnappers he was no longer a person, but a property to buy, sell and trade.
In about three months he passed several times from one man to another, undergoing violence, persecution and systematic sexual abuse.
He also tried to escape.
It was resumed and subjected to a new, terrible violence.
The goal was not only to control his body. It was to break his identity, erase his dignity and reduce it to silence.
They couldn't.
In November 2014 Nadia saw a door left open.
He escaped.
A Muslim family of the place put their security at risk to hide and help her escape the ISIS controlled territory.
From there he first reached a refugee camp and then, in 2015, Germany.
He could only look for a life away from everything he had lived.
He chose instead of talking.
In December 2015, at 22, he told his story before the UN Security Council.
He talked about women and girls sold, destroyed families, empty villages and a people affected in an attempt to erase their existence.
His testimony helped to make it increasingly difficult to ignore what had happened to Yazidi.
In the following years Nadia transformed that voice into a concrete commitment: he worked for justice, for the reconstruction of the destroyed communities and for the support of the survivors.
In 2018 he received the Nobel Peace Prize with Congolese physician Denis Mukwege.
She was 25.
But the center of his battle had never been personal recognition.
They were still missing people.
Women still captive.
Families without answers.
The story of Nadia Murad is not only that of a survivor.
It is the story of a woman to whom someone had tried to remove even the right to belong to herself and who, once free, decided to use his name to ask justice even for those who could no longer speak.
They tried to turn it into something.
The world ended up listening to her as a witness.