Theirs is a harrowing story of utter inhumanity. Bertrand Borg interviewed the two Yazidi women awarded the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought last Tuesday.

Nadia Murad and Lamiya Aji Bashar are dressed in black from head to toe. It is attire fit for the story they are about to tell.

The previous day, the two young Yazidi women received the European Union’s greatest human rights accolade. Now, they recount how they and their people have witnessed the depths of human depravity, as victims of a likely genocide.

“When Daesh came, they took our men and women and enslaved us,” Ms Aji Bashar recalled, using the Arabic term for Islamic State.

She was just 15 when militants attacked her village Kocho in northern Iraq in August 2014.

READ: Yazidi women who escaped sexual slavery win Sakharov Prize

Ms Murad was 19, and preparing for her final year of high school. Parents, siblings, uncles and aunts were killed. The two teens were taken into sexual slavery.

“They showed no mercy at all. The only thing that interested them was to kill all the ‘infidels’.” Murad’s voice hardens as she furrows her brow. “That’s why they tortured us, raped us… they showed no mercy at all,” Ms Murad said.

Her friend has similar recollections. Her jaw clenches when she is asked if any of her captors ever showed her a modicum of kindness. “No.” She practically spits out the word. “No. During my captivity, I never saw anyone who treated us as human.”

Both tried to escape. Both were caught, and brutally punished. After months of abuse and being traded among militants like cattle, they eventually managed to steal away, separately, to safety. But rather than retreat into the shadows, they have channelled their courage into drawing attention to their people’s plight.

They tortured us, raped us… they showed no mercy at all

“We had good relations,” Ms Aji Bashar recalls of her Muslim neighbours. “There were no problems.” That changed when Islamic State terrorists arrived. “The neighbours attacked us before others. We lost social order,” she had told MEPs the previous day in her Sakharov Prize acceptance speech.

The younger of the two has a quiet voice which she projects into the distance as she speaks. A landmine exploded as she and two others were fleeing captivity. The blast cost her one eye and two friends.

Ms Murad is older and perhaps more used to reaching into her painful past when speaking to strangers asking deeply personal questions. She looks people straight in the eye and measures out her words.

“Us Yazidis, they did not consider us people of the Book. We were considered infidels. Christians had an option. They could pay a tax, or leave. But for us it was different.” For people like the two women and their families, it was Islam or death.

“Yes,” Ms Murad says. She closes her eyes and bows her head.

She now campaigns to have the international community acknow-ledge that Islamic State’s ultimate aim is to wipe out the Yazidi people. She is a UN goodwill ambassador and was nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

But the plaudits mean little if her people are forgotten. “Daesh wanted to break our willingness to live. My community has been disintegrated under the weight of genocide. Half a million people don’t know where their future is.”

The two hope that the Sakharov Prize will help mobilise the European Commission and member States to do more to help their community, either by ensuring they are safe in their homeland or by providing them with asylum. So far, Germany stands alone in Europe in offering special protection to Yazidi women and children.

Their role as ambassadors for the Yazidi cause has landed them in the cruellest of places. Having survived terror, they must now relive it time and time again, in the hope that people will listen and act.

Will they ever be able to forgive?

Ms Murad stiffens as she hears the question. “My mother taught me mercy. But when they raped and tortured me, they didn’t only do that to me. They did that to many, many women. We cannot have mercy towards that. We cannot forgive them for what they did. Those crimes are unforgivable.”

To donate to Nadia’s Initiative, visit www.nadiamurad.org.

Who are the Yazidis?

A displaced woman from the minority Yazidi sect, who was kidnapped by Islamic State militants but managed to flee, with her child in northern Iraq. Photo: Reuters/Ari Jalal

Yazidis are ethnic Kurds mainly found in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Their faith is monotheistic, and combines elements of Islam, Christianity and Zoroastrianism. Like Muslims, they pray five times a day. But extremists consider them to be devil-worshippers, and Islamic State sees them as barely human and allows fighters to enslave Yazidi girls barely out of puberty.

What has Islamic State done to them?

Within the so-called Caliphate, Yazidi girls as young as eight are bought and sold in markets or traded in online auctions. Children are separated from their families. Men are killed, as are women who are considered too old to be useful to the sex trade.

According to the UN, thousands of Yazidi have been slaughtered since 2014 and an estimated 400,000 have been displaced, forced to flee to survive. Since 2014, Islamic State has enslaved more than 6,500 Yazidi women and children. An estimated 2,600 have managed, like Nadia Murad and Lamija Aji Bashar, to escape their captors. Around 3,500 remain in captivity. Hundreds are believed to have committed suicide.