 Welcome back, everybody. Welcome back. I hope everybody enjoyed their lunches. I know there's been a lot of hubbub. That's a good sign. Delighted to have you back. We have a jammed afternoon. What we're going to do now is have two short, snappy segments that offer practical ideas and new insights on how do you build peace. We think of them as TED Talks for peace builders. And I'm delighted to introduce our first speaker, who is a colleague of mine at USIP and our director for Middle East programs. He focuses on Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Sarhang Hamasai was born in Iraq. He was displaced twice. And he came as a refugee to the United States. And he became a citizen this summer. So he brings to this talk a lot of personal experience and a lot of hard work on how to break the cycles of violent conflict. Sarhang Hamasai. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Can you hear me fine? The microphone working fine? It is my distinct honor to be speaking before you today. I'll be talking about conflict and peace building from a bottom up. By that I mean from the local level, connecting with national and international efforts. And bottom up is something that USIP's chairman of the board and former national security adviser, Mr. Stephen Hadley, often talks about how he got to appreciate after his NSA role. Often policy makers respond, view and respond to conflict from the top down from the perspective of national governments, from the perspective of international institutions. And that would mean responding to immediate results of a conflict through prisms of political cycles and immediate results. But leading to oftentimes missing local issues that are important that have long-term implications. I'll talk a bit about my journey through conflict and becoming a peace builder. But my primary purpose is to be the voice of those who live through conflict and become peace builders and work for peace. I was born into conflict. Actually, in a way, and as ironic as this may sound, I am a product of conflict. My parents met in Soleimaniya province after they came from two separate villages and became neighbors because their villages were destroyed. And there was, I was born and raised and spent most of my life. I was four years old when the Iraqi-Iran War broke out in 1980, a war that was devastating and caused hundreds of thousands of lives. By the time I turned 12 in 1988, Saddam Hussein, the political—the bath party, the Iraqi government had developed a reputation for suppressing the Iraqi people with brutal force and using violence against civilians. Some of these acts included using chemical gas against the city of Halabja, killing 5,000 people, leading the Anfal operation, which led to the destruction of 4,500 villages raised to the ground, including the villages of my parents again. And that was 10 miles from where I lived. The Anfal operations also killed 100,000 or more. These estimates are not final. And those people were taken to the middle and south of the country to be found later in mass graves. Thousands more were moved to concentration camps. The world around me felt burning, falling apart. It made me ask, it made others ask, where is the international community from all of this? Where is humanity from all of this? Where is God from all of this? From all of this killing? Questions that the people of Aleppo and Syria, the people of Taz in Yemen are asking today. Before I turned 30, actually Iraq had been in three major conflicts, major wars with neighbors and international actors, and as many, if not more, local armed conflicts. So the cycles of violence seemed without an end, one bleeding to another. And these, while they have cost me and my family dearly, and they have brought life-threatening experiences to me, whether it was the artillery bombardment of the Iranian army to my city, whether surviving a car bomb from one of ISIS's predecessors, I feel lucky I survived. And whatever is my journey through conflict is the light version of it. Others had it worse, much worse. They lost their lives, they lost family, loved family members. And one of my former colleagues lost 22 members of his family in the gassing of Halabja. So many, while these events and these conflicts did not kill me, but they did make me committed to preventing violent conflicts. They shaped who I am today and committed to preventing violent conflict and breaking cycles of violence for others. And many like me in the Middle East, especially the youth, are born into conflict. They are drawn into the conflicts of the Middle East. They are confronted with tough choices where religious actors, armed groups, unarmed groups, non-religious actors offer a combination of carrots and sticks. Join us, you'll have a job, you'll have power, you'll have a leadership, you'll have a future. But if you don't, you have no future. And these choices are at their worst when they are offered by an organization like Daesh, Al-Qaeda. These kind of conflicts have changed from the times of when the battles were fought in the front lines. These fights are in the communities, in the streets, in the homes, not far away front lines. But they're devastating effects. Go far reaching in the refugees that you see and the terrorism acts that are inspired by the budgets that are being drained thousands of miles away. In the interest of time, I will focus on Iraq and on Daesh and I'll tell a story from there. Much of the news that we get from Iraq today is overshadowed by Daesh, by ISIS, the terrorist organization there. And I'll use Daesh, the local term that's often used there. Daesh suppressed the communities and perpetrated barbaric acts against the communities, majority and minority communities, Sunni Arabs, Shi'a Arabs, Kurds, Christians, Shabbat, Yazidis and others. And what is less known for the outside world is how Daesh implicated local tribes, local communities, and has sown the seeds of division and violence on which they survive. On such acts in the city of Tikrit, in the province of Salah-e-Din in Iraq, they committed what is called the Spiker Massacre. And this is important. This is the breakdown of what's CVE, what's recruitment, what all that means comes to life. Tikrit falls at the fault line between the Sunni-Shia divide in Iraq in that area. So the massacre, which killed 1,700 Shi'a servicemen, mostly young cadets, from 20 Shi'a tribes from nine provinces of the south, that was a wound that was wide and deep. And you have to see this in the context of the Iraq war and Iraq violence, violence for 11 years before that. And at the heart of it was sectarian violence. So for the Shi'a, this was yet another act of the Sunnis, an attack against the Shi'a. It widened the schism towards that was between the two communities. For the Shi'a, they perceived the Sunnis to be either terrorists or supporters of terrorists. And this was yet another example. So this act, this massacre, had the potential to spiral out of control and leash cycles of violence that would have been extreme, at the tribal level, that would have been extremely difficult for the Iraqi army to control for the counter-Daesh coalition to respond to. And that kind of risk would have made Mosul, the liberation of Mosul, which we have before us today, even far more difficult if not further delayed. The USIP team, our Iraqi partners, partners in the network of Iraqi facilitators, Sunnis for Peace Building, organizations and individuals we trained in conflict resolution and peace building. We were monitoring the aftermath of the massacre. We knew what was at stake. We knew the danger that we're dealing with. We knew that the revenge cycle of violence will get out of control. So we designed a dialogue process that the facilitators, the Iraqi facilitators led and brought together the Sunni tribal shades from Tikrit and Salah-e-Din, the Shi'a tribal leaders from the south, and the representative of Grand Ayatollah, Ayuz-Sistani, the Grand Shi'a cleric, and the representative of Prime Minister Abadi's office, the National Reconciliation Committee, as well as parliamentary members, and talk about, here's your top-down, bottom-up working together. The dialogues culminated in a peace agreement in which the Sunni tribes disavowed membership of any of the members who have collaborated with Daesh, and they have also committed themselves to work with the judicial process to bring perpetrators to justice. The Shi'a tribal shades have disagreed to drop blanket statements and accusations that all Sunnis are responsible for this crime. They agreed to not go for tribal revenge. They both agreed, both of the Sunni tribes and the Shi'a tribal leaders agreed not to go to prevent politicization, and this is important. This was an effort to reverse the seeds of violence that Daesh left behind. This was preventing violent extremism at its core because the massacre had become a recruiting tool for the militias to go and revenge for the Shi'a, and it had also the risk of pushing the Sunni population furthermore in the direction of Daesh. So this was important, that it was prevented. The dialogue process did succeed in containing the tensions, including violence and preventing further loss of life. And it was also very important and came handy when Tikrit was liberated. Remember, we started this work four months before the city of Tikrit was liberated. And when Tikrit was liberated, the people did not trust the Iraqi security forces to go home because they had heard reports about how the popular mobilization forces, such as Shabi, have been... what's called the Shi'a militias have been attacking certain populations. And the Iraqi security forces, the Iraqi government, did not know who to trust to allow back to the city. They didn't know who was ISIS, who was supporter of ISIS. So that trust and the relationship we built between the tribal leaders and the Iraqi government interlocutors we worked with led to a vetting process that facilitated the return of the initial 400 families to Tikrit, about 1,200 people. And then the mechanism was used to facilitate the return of other people. And I'm happy to report that today more than 320,000 people, 320,000 people have returned to Salah-e-Din and Tikrit. And that's a major achievement. As someone who was displaced twice and has seen the hardships of displacement, I could tell you what that meant for these families to go home. So this was also important because when we embarked on this process, many people felt that the only response you can have to Daesh and the aftermath of Daesh is a military response. Civilian organizations like USIP and the Iraqi partners have no role in dealing with a problem like Daesh. But the work proved that actually there is. And these are the ways that you reverse the long-term effects. And we knew that because we had done that before. We knew that there are practical ways that you can respond to conflict and build peace. For many, the Spiker Massacre may seem like a unique story. And there may be unique things about it in terms of the high number of casualties and certain aspects of it. But what's not unique is that the revenge violence and local conflicts that the aftermath of the fight with Daesh has left behind is in every town, in every village, in every province that they were. And so as an organization from my personal experience, from the work of USIP and from the work of Iraqi partners, I can tell you, yes, recapturing land more than 50% is progress. Welcome progress. But I can tell you that more work needs to be done. Recapturing land from Daesh is not the end. Ending Daesh is not the end of violence. And the reason I say that, because we have more ingredients for violence today. And it's, as I said, it's revenge violence and local conflicts that are left behind. As USIP, we are working with the Iraqi government, the Kurdistan Regional Government, the United Nations and the Coalition to Counter Daesh, who all do great work to embark on this problem. There are 3 million Iraqi people who need to go home. And revenge and local conflict is a barrier that we need to address. Second, revenge violence and local conflict has the potential to give us a process that I usually call D-Daeshification or D-Icification. And by the I mean that is similar to the D-Bathification process that happened after 2003. The process to go after members of ISIS or perceived members of ISIS, oftentimes you'll find civilians there, could lead to a wider divide between the Sunnis and the Shia and the Sunni communities themselves this time. And this is a development. So all this may sound like a difficult task, but our work tells us that it is possible. Reconciliation is possible. And by reconciliation I mean getting people back to their homes and peacefully co-exist. We are working on this in Anbar. We are working on this in Salah-e-Din. And we have lines of efforts in Mosul, around Mosul and in Nineveh. And we hope to expand that. And let me conclude by saying that I know there may be a lot of reason to say, okay, the conflicts of the Middle East are endless and there is no way to deal with them. This is a bleak picture. But from my, again, my personal experience, the work of USIP and the work of Iraqi partners, I can tell you that there is reason for hope. And the reason for hope is there are Iraqis in government and also mostly in non-government sector, in civil society that are working hard to achieve better governance and to achieve peaceful coexistence in Iraq. But they are overshadowed by the news of Daesh and by superpowers and regional actors on the ground. One of the people that I would like to celebrate with us is my friend, Rayat Khattab, who is one of the facilitators that helped us on the Spiker Massacre. It is him, people like him, many like him in Iraq and elsewhere that give me hope. Because there are people who want to find alternatives to violence. They put their life to risk. So the investment that the United States and the international community have done, have put in the Iraqi civil society has paid dividends already. The Spiker story is just one good example, one of many. The work of USIP is elsewhere and is showing us the good work of other people, whether in Libya or in Tunisia or in Myanmar, in Afghanistan, in Africa. It is possible. The role of the United States is an indispensable leading role in diplomatic, economic, developmental and military terms. If we help these people, I think we can turn things around. Things that are happening at the local level where you need to bring communities back and restore social cohesion. So it is that bottom of approach and the top down that will enable addressing these conflicts. I believe that we collectively can work on this approach and by applying strategic patience to, as we respond to these conflicts, I think peace is possible and there are practical ways to address even the most violent conflicts like Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan. Thank you so much. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for that note of optimism and for reminding us that peace is indeed possible.