Zaina, thank you so much for being with me. I'm so grateful.

Oh, and I am the one who is grateful. It's an honor and an extreme pleasure to be here with you.

Thank you. Thank you. I had the pleasure of being with you on your podcast.

You asked me questions about my life, and I look forward to asking you questions about yours.

Women for Women, an organization about which I've known for quite a while,

came to my mind recently, specifically in relation to what is happening in Afghanistan,

because I think of you as someone who can give us some of the deeper story, as well as wisdom

about that story, as so many of us are holding so much pain in our hearts, really.

But I want to go back, because I think that your knowledge of Afghanistan stems from your larger

knowledge of women living in conflict and war zones, and that begins with your own story.

You yourself growing up, born and raised in Iraq, and knowing as a child, none other than Saddam Hussein.

So can you give us a little thumbnail sketch about your own path, both in Iraq, out of Iraq,

ultimately finding your way to the United States and founding women for women?

Yeah, I mean, war has been a defining part of the story of my life.

As you said, I grew up in Baghdad, Iraq, and I grew up during the Iran-Iraq war.

And in that time, three things I would say that define my life or my upbringing, one is war.

And as a child, I would notice that the news would only talk about war from men's perspective,

and that I was like a 10-years-old kid.

But the news were talking about the tanks and the planes and the soldiers and all of that.

But me as a child, I knew that the ones who are running the show in my life are all women,

my mother, the teachers, the doctors, the police, women.

Everyone was a woman in my life, and no one was talking about them in the news.

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