Murad Ismael

Murad Ismael (Arabic: مراد إسماعيل) is an Iraqi Yazidi engineer, human rights advocate, and politician. A co-founder and former executive director of the advocacy group Yazda, he was among the Yazidi activists who helped bring international attention to the 2014 Yazidi genocide and later co-founded Sinjar Academy, an educational nonprofit for Yazidi youth. In November 2025, running as the lead candidate of the newly formed Yazidi Cause Alliance, he was elected to the Council of Representatives of Iraq on a general seat outside Iraq's minority quota system, becoming the alliance's sole member of parliament.

Early life and education Ismael is a Yazidi from the Sinjar District of northern Iraq. Their work as interpreters made them eligible for U.S. visas, and Ismael relocated to the United States, where he went on to earn master's degrees in environmental engineering from Norwich University and in geophysics from the University of Houston. The group travelled to Washington, D.C., where they formed the Sinjar Crisis Management Team to lobby the U.S. government for intervention. Working out of a hotel room, the team, including Ismael, compiled maps of Islamic State positions around Mount Sinjar for U.S. officials; within days, President Barack Obama authorized humanitarian airdrops and airstrikes against Islamic State positions besieging Yazidi civilians trapped on the mountain.

In December 2015, Ismael accompanied genocide survivor Nadia Murad to the United Nations Security Council, where her testimony brought international attention to the Yazidi genocide; he and Murad went on to travel together to meet heads of state and advocate for international support. In July 2024, ahead of the genocide's tenth anniversary, Ismael joined Free Yezidi Foundation director Pari Ibrahim and Yazda's Natia Navrouzov in a meeting with then-U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to press for a dedicated U.S. special envoy for minority security and justice in Iraq.

Sinjar Academy Ismael co-founded and became president of Sinjar Academy, a US-based nonprofit educational initiative offering online and in-person instruction in information technology, business administration, English, and vocational training, aimed at creating jobs and aiding Yazidi post-genocide recovery.

Arrest warrant dispute (2025) In April 2025, a court in Mosul issued an arrest warrant against Ismael on a charge of "insulting" Iraq's Migration and Displacement Minister, Evan Faeq Jabro, based on a complaint from her ministry; Ismael said he had received no summons before the warrant was issued, called the move politically motivated, and said he believed it was intended to preempt his candidacy in the upcoming parliamentary election. The Free Yezidi Foundation publicly condemned the warrant. He received close to 23,000 personal votes, among the highest totals of any candidate in Nineveh Governorate, and was elected on a general parliamentary seat rather than through Iraq's reserved Yazidi quota seat. Journalist Matthew Travis Barber reported that Ismael's election, alongside that of the separate Yazidi quota-seat winner, marked the first time since 2003 that no Kurdistan Democratic Party-aligned candidate won a Shingal-area parliamentary seat.

Member of parliament

Six months into his term, Ismael described growing frustration with Iraq's political system, saying he sometimes felt "sickened" by a system that enriches a small elite, and that international attention to Yazidi concerns had receded amid conflicts involving Iran, Afghanistan, and Ukraine.

Later that month, Prime Minister Mohammed Shia' al-Sudani received Ismael in Baghdad for a meeting focused on the Sinjar file, according to the Prime Minister's office, discussing service, social, and economic conditions in the district, including the return and resettlement needs of displaced Yazidis; al-Sudani said the government was committed to serving all Iraqis, particularly communities targeted by ISIS.

In May 2026, amid a dispute over the relocation of Sinjar district administrative offices, Ismael said any administrative settlement affecting Sinjar and the Al-Shamal subdistrict needed to proceed through the legitimate representatives of the local population, and said the alliance had been following the administration file closely for months in pursuit of a durable resolution.