 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 this is—there was—I was born and raised and spent most of my life. I was four years old when the Iraq-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. Using 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 the mass graves. Sometimes 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. 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. Things had it worse, much worse. They lost their lives, they lost families, loved family members, and one of my former colleagues lost 22 members of his family in the gassing of Halabja. So many, these, while these events and these conflicts did not kill me, but they did make me committed to preventing violent conflicts. It shaped who I am today.