Excerpt from Vogue’s 2018 profile on Amal Clooney by Nathan Heller:
In 2016, Murad met Clooney, who took on the Yazidis’ plight. Over months, Clooney interviewed other refugees and survivors, building a case that could carry through the international justice system.
“Not many people stepped up to help as she did,” Murad confides now, through a translator, as Clooney fusses in the kitchen. Murad is wearing jeans and a playful gray sweater with a cat embroidered on it, but she is still hauntedly thin. “I was surprised that someone like her—a successful lawyer with a strong record—would help us. We’re a very small community.”
The Yazidi case brought Murad and her lawyer to the floor of the U.N., in September 2016. There, in crisp barrister fashion, Clooney delivered a rending plea. “She has shown us the scars from cigarette burns and beatings,” she said of Murad. “Nadia’s mother was one of 80 older women who were executed and buried in an unmarked grave.”
She drew herself up. “Make no mistake: What Nadia has told us about is genocide, and genocide doesn’t happen by accident. . . . I am ashamed, as a supporter of the United Nations, that states are failing to prevent or even punish genocide because they find that their own interests get in the way.”
Progress followed incrementally. In late 2016, the German supreme court authorized an arrest warrant against a high-ranking ISIS commander. In 2017, following a second presentation by Clooney, the U.N. Security Council resolved to establish an investigative team to collect evidence about ISIS’s actions in Iraq. “It tells victims that they may finally have their day in court,” Clooney wrote in an opinion piece following the resolution. “Justice is now, finally, within reach.”
To help draw attention to what remains of the fight, Murad recently published a memoir, The Last Girl. (Clooney wrote the foreword.) In cooperation with the French government, she has started a fund-raising campaign, the Sinjar Action Fund, to support schools, clinics, and other infrastructural necessities in her home region. When the more than 350,000 displaced Yazidis can finally come home, Murad hopes to do what she dreamed of before her nightmare started: open a beauty parlor for women in Kocho, where there are none.
“She’s so eloquent,” Clooney says later. “There are many cases where I think, Well, the reality is, politically, nothing will be done. But there is actually no reason why nothing could be done on this case, where the perpetrators were confessing to the crime.” The Yazidi case, she says, is “a test of the whole international system—if the U.N. can’t take meaningful action, something is really fundamentally wrong.”