As a teenager living in Kocho, a village in Sinjar, Iraq, Nadia Murad was a total beauty obsessive. When she was 13, she set up a makeshift salon in a sheep house on the family farm, where she lived with her 10 siblings and mother, and would invite friends and neighbours and do their hair and make-up. “So many times,” she recalls, smiling, “I was sent back from school because I was wearing lipstick.”

But in 2014 her world was obliterated. It will be 10 years this August since Isis arrived in Sinjar. Ten years since the jihadist group killed thousands of men and older women, and took the younger women and children into captivity. Ten years since Murad’s mother, and six of her brothers and step-brothers, were murdered. All because of their Yazidi faith.

Murad, then aged 21, was one of the many young women to be abducted, tortured, raped and sold into sexual slavery. After she was kidnapped, one of her abusers forced her to apply make-up. “It was that one time,” she says, “that I never wanted to wear make-up. It was like someone [was] forcing me to put the blood of my brothers and my mother on my face.”

After Murad escaped with the help of a local family, first to a refugee camp and later to Germany, she started telling her story to journalists, then to the United Nations and world leaders. She became the face of the Yazidi genocide and, in 2018, won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work to end the use of rape as a weapon of war, along with Congolese gynaecologist Denis Mukwege. In 2022, in partnership with the UK government, she launched the Murad Code, which sets out ethical standards for interviewing sexual violence survivors. “[It’s] something I’m so proud of,” she says today from her home in DC, where she is about to graduate from the American University in Washington with a degree in sociology. “When I see other survivors have it, and they know their rights, I feel sorry for myself 10 years ago, when I didn’t know what to do.”

Now she is returning to Sinjar, to put the finishing touches on the Nadia’s Initiative Women’s Center, which will offer skills training, empowerment initiatives, literacy and language training, as well as health and psychosocial support. In a full-circle moment for Murad, the teen with aspirations to be a beautician, women will be able to access cosmetology training schemes, run in partnership with a major international beauty conglomerate that I’m not allowed to name, but which you’ve definitely heard of. Rebuilding Sinjar will be Murad’s life’s work. “When you survive,” she explains, “you have this feeling of responsibility. OK, I made it. I am now able to do something, even if it’s very small. But so many people didn’t survive.”

Murad, wearing a simple black blouse, without jewellery or any other adornments, cuts a slight, friendly presence, but she also possesses the gravitas of someone used to meeting the world’s most powerful statespeople – she is on close terms with French president Emmanuel Macron and has had two private audiences with the Pope – which she usually conducts in English, her fourth language. There’s also a sweetness and sincerity to her that reminds me of her fellow Nobel Laureate, girl’s education campaigner Malala Yousafzai.

Why, I wonder, is it often young women like Murad and Yousafzai – not to mention climate change activists Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate – who are the ones at the forefront of these crucial global campaigns? “When you’re young,” Murad says, “you’re not afraid of risking things.” She has met young female activists from all over the world. “You may see some of us on social media, or at the UN,” she says, with a knowing smile. “But believe me, there are so many of us out there, and time will tell.”

Indeed, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who has been working with Murad since 2016, sees Nadia as “a leader for our times. A beautiful soul. A brilliant and determined advocate. Someone I am very lucky to call my friend.”

For the past eight years, Murad and Clooney have been doggedly trying to bring Isis fighters to justice. Last year, Clooney’s legal team secured the third conviction of an Isis fighter for genocide against the Yazidis in Iraq, in a German court. “Thanks to the courage of Nadia and other Yazidis, including one who is Nadia’s cousin, we have seen Isis brought to justice,” Clooney tells me from her office in London. Murad is also the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit Clooney filed in December 2023 in a New York court against a French firm that allegedly provided Isis with funding and materials. “These are important milestones,” Clooney says, “but we are working on many more cases, and there is no way we will be giving up.”

When the pair first met, Murad “was really shy”, remembers Clooney. “She was reluctant to make eye contact and didn’t speak a word of English. But she always had great courage that shone through, and a determination to help others.”

Clooney, says Murad, is “a friend. I go to her for advice, for work. She’s so inspiring.” Clooney taught her about accountability. “Accountability is so important if we want to prevent future atrocities and sexual violence,” Murad says. “Because these people don’t mind being killed… The only thing they worry about is facing survivors in a courtroom.”

As part of her work with Nadia’s Initiative, the non-profit she founded to end the abuse of women and girls during war, as well as rebuild the community in Sinjar, Murad has met sexual violence survivors from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and Ukraine. “They all want to have their day in court,” says Murad. “For us, it’s the only form of justice [so] that we can move forwards, knowing they will never be able to harm any other women.” But even if that never happens for Murad’s rapists, “I think I had my day in court,” she says, “in front of the whole world, when I told my story.”

At points in our conversation, the oppressive weight of what Murad has endured hangs over us like a storm cloud. But other times, it vanishes, revealing Murad as another regular young woman about to finish university, who loves to run. “I’ve only been to therapy once,” she says. “I feel like running is my therapy. When I was in captivity, the only thing I could think about was running away, and never looking back.”

What Murad survived is unimaginable, and she was able to endure it, she says, because of the strength she inherited from her mother. Shami raised 11 children on her own after her husband, Murad’s father, remarried. “She had nothing,” says Murad. “She never went to school. She only had some sheep and a farm that we shared with my dad.” Shami taught her about “tolerance and acceptance… every step I take is based on what she taught me.” Before every event, speech, or interview, Murad thinks about her. “People will never understand how much she sacrificed to raise 11 children on her own.”

I suspect that motherhood is on her mind. In August 2018, she married Abid Shamdeen, also a Yazidi human rights activist, after meeting him at a friend’s house in New York. Falling in love, Murad said, made her realise that “I am actually alive inside. Like, you may see me on an interview crying and not wearing nice clothes or make-up, or talking about rape and violence. But actually, inside, I can love. And that’s what I want other survivors to know.” Now coming up to her sixth wedding anniversary, Murad wants to have children. “I would love to,” she says, “when the time is right.”

Although she is now based in Germany, Sinjar will always feel like her home. She misses “that simple life, the small things”, she says, like “being on a rooftop with my family, eating sunflower seeds, or just working on the farm”. She would give up everything she has achieved – the honours, the recognition – to go back to her life before Isis. “Without hesitation,” she says. “This is not what I dreamt of.”

She lights up when I ask her about ordinary pleasures, like fashion and make-up, her great passions. After she escaped Isis, Murad cut her hair short and stopped wearing make-up. She felt like it sent the wrong statement. She’d dress in the cheapest outfits she could put together from high street stores – she met Macron in a Primark dress. When Murad won the Nobel, a friend connected her with the designer Naeem Khan, who gifted her a dress to wear to the ceremony. “The dress arrived,” says Murad, “And it was like nothing I had ever seen before. It was so beautiful.” She wore it as she was practising her speech. But before the ceremony, she looked in the mirror, and took it off. “The dress,” she says simply, “was too beautiful for my story.”

Clooney helped her rediscover her love for beauty, connecting her with beauty mogul Charlotte Tilbury, who gave her five boxes of products. “It was,” says Murad, who is wide-eyed at the memory, “everything I could ever dream of.” Playing with the cosmetics felt like letting “light into my life again”. It felt, she says, like rediscovering the person she was before Isis came to her village.

The hardest part of her work is feeling powerless to rescue kidnapped Yazidi women and children. Murad’s own niece, nephew and sister-in-law are still in captivity, along with around 3,000 other missing people. Her nephew, who was kidnapped as a child, used to call, and Murad would do her best to give him hope, but she hasn’t heard from him since 2017. His mother lives in Germany. “When I go to her,” says Murad, “I feel like, so disappointed, because I have not been able to rescue him. I see the pain in her eyes. [But] she’s amazing, and she knows this is something that is bigger than me.”

Last October, Murad returned to Solagh, a village in Sinjar, to open the Grave of the Mothers. It is a memorial to all the victims of the Yazidi genocide, located at the site of the mass grave where more than 80 older Yazidi women, including Murad’s mother Shami, were murdered by Isis. It was in Solagh that Murad saw Shami for the last time, before Isis fighters tore them apart and marched Shami to her death.

Murad cut a diminutive figure that day as she stepped up to the podium. Other people might have been overcome with emotion, but not Murad. She spoke calmly and forcefully about the horrors inflicted on her community. “We thought,” Murad told the assembled dignitaries, as her hair blew in the warm breeze, and her voice thickened only slightly, “that we would be rescued. But when we reached this place, all hope died, and the world lost its conscience.”

Opening the memorial “felt emotional but it also felt good”, she says. “What I was able to do, [for] all they have sacrificed for us. All these mothers.”

Unlike earlier speeches, Murad wore make-up that day. She’d curled her long black hair, and pinned a bow in it. She stood there, the Nadia she always was, the Nadia that Isis could never destroy.