 Hello, my name is Leila Nader, and I'm an Iraqi-Canadian, and I wrote a book about my experiences when the Iraq War started. The book is called The Orange Trees of Baghdad in Search of My Lost Family, and I wrote it in direct response to the illegal invasion of Iraq by the United States and the United Kingdom and the so-called Coalition of the Willing. I wrote it to give voice to the ordinary Iraqi experience. I wanted to show North Americans especially, but the Western world in general, what it felt like to be an Iraqi, waiting for those bombs to fall, and now, since then, what happened subsequently. So the book covers the lead-up to the war and then the occupation, as well as the invasion of course. This war was obviously a catastrophe for Iraq. Now 13 years later, I don't think that anyone would disagree with that. At the time though, there were many people who thought that getting rid of a dictator by invading a country was a very good idea, and there's still people today that think that that is a method to get rid of a dictator. Sadly, we've seen from this experience that you can't solve a complicated situation like that through war, and the costs of war are always unknown at the beginning, but they're always devastating to the civilian population especially. So I wanted to give voice to just my family's experience, what ordinary Iraqis had gone through with the first Gulf War, with the terrible sanctions, and then with the second invasion. When I think of Iraq, I don't think of weapons and politicians and soldiers and war and desert. I think of my Iraqi family, my grandparents, my cousins, my great-aunt who lived there during the war, and I just want to tell you a little bit about them, just to give a bit of a human face to those people. I'm going to speak about my family, but I see their stories as a microcosm to all Iraqis, and all Iraqis have a story to tell about how their lives have been changed by this war. Mine is just one of them, but telling this story I can help to move people to act to help Iraq. My father left Iraq as a student and has never been back because of politics and because of war. His three sisters were all highly educated doctors, chemists, pharmacists, and they had to flee as well after the first Gulf War. They left their house, my grandparents' house, intact with all their belongings, and it has been waiting there for the family to return, but we never have, and we never will. When I ask my aunts how they feel about having lost their house, they say, we feel very bad about losing our house, but we feel even worse about losing our country. And that is what the cost has been to this war. Iraq is no longer a sovereign state. We can see that in the fact that the Iraqi government can't extend itself much beyond Baghdad. Baghdad is not safe in and of itself. There have been car bombs, thousands and thousands of car bombs have gone off daily since the war began, and still continue to do so. That is not a sovereign and secure country. The Iraqi army was unable to stop ISIS taking over Mosul and parts of western Iraq. The north is now Kurdistan, which is the most stable part, but then you have the south, which is also a separate region. So Iraq as a country was gone, and Iraqis as a people have fled. They've had to flee the country. They've been internally displaced, and many, many, many of them are refugees in camps with absolutely nowhere to go. We know about the Syrian refugee crisis, but the Iraqi refugee crisis is on the same scale. When I think of the trauma that it has rained down on people, innocent people, I'm deeply saddened. I want to say that this is the first time I've ever been asked to speak in the United States, and I really relish this chance to share the Iraqi voice with you, because it has been missing and was missing at the very beginning, and has continued to be missed since the war started. I'll leave it there for now, but please, if you are interested in hearing the Iraqi point of view, pick up this book and connect with those voices that need to be heard. Thank you.