‘They gave you Nobel for what?’ clueless Trump asks Yazidi activist Nadia Murad

When a group of survivors of the religious persecution, including Murad, met Trump in the Oval Office on the sidelines of a major meeting at the State Department, he said: “And you had the Nobel Prize? That’s incredible. They gave it to you for what reason?”

What followed was a brief pause by the Nobel Peace Prize recipient until she repeated her story.

Read | Who is Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad?

“After all this happened to me, I didn’t give up. I make it clear to everyone that ISIS raped thousands of Yazidi women,” she said, referring to the Islamic State group. “Please do something. It’s not about one family,” she was quoted as saying by news agency AFP.

The US president also appeared at a loss when Murad asked him to press the Iraqi and Kurdish governments to create safe conditions for the Yazidis to return. “But ISIS is gone and now it’s Kurdish and who?” Trump asked, before later telling her, “I know the area very well.”

Trump has often taken the credit of crushing the self-styled caliphate of the Islamic State group that once stretched across Iraq and Syria.

(Inputs from AFP)