Thread. All journalists who cover conflict have defining emotional moments of their careers, and I imagine many never make it into print, so I'm going to share one of mine here.
In October 2016, I was interviewing Yazidi women in Iraq who had been enslaved by ISIS for a @foreignpolicy piece in which I also interviewed two captured ISIS fighters. Link here: foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/11/wom…
One of the women, a beautiful 23-year-old mother with fierce, haunted eyes who had been sold to five separate ISIS fighters during her almost three years of slavery described how she would frequently hear U.S. coalition planes circling overhead.
“Why did America do nothing to help us?” she asked. “There were 1000 women there. They must have known about us. We would hear the planes for hours. Daesh would hide in the mountains. Every time we heard the planes, we would think we were going to be saved. But no one ever came.”
My throat threatened to close up, so I excused myself to the bathroom. I’m not a military strategist. I don’t know if it would have been possible to rescue those women and if so, why they weren’t rescued. All I knew was that as an American, I felt ashamed.
I remembered in 2012, when an 8-year-old Syrian refugee boy in Lebanon who had witnessed the annihilation of most of his immediate family looked at me with those same eyes and said "Where is America? Please, tell Obama we need help." This was just after the "red line" fiasco.
I don't expect the American government to be savior of the world, before that line of trolling begins. I would just like to feel more pride and less shame when faced with the human consequences of my country's policies.
