Vatican City, 26 August, 2021 / 8:40 pm (ACI Africa).
Pope Francis on Thursday met with Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, a human rights advocate who has been speaking out on behalf of women and girls in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Murad’s meeting with the pope on Aug. 26 comes as the survivor of ISIS enslavement has expressed concern for the future of Afghan women under Taliban rule.
“I know what happens when the world loses sight of women & girls in crises. When it looks away, war is waged on women’s bodies. This must not happen in Afghanistan. The international community must act so that the Taliban doesn’t continue to rob women of their rights & freedoms,” Murad wrote on Twitter on Aug. 16, the day after the Taliban took control of Kabul.
The private papal audience at the Vatican was Murad’s third meeting with the pope. She also met with Pope Francis in Dec. 2018 shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize for her “efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.”
Murad said that she had an “in-depth discussion about the Yazidi community’s experience of genocide” during their last meeting.