A global reflection on America’s founding ideals from leading voices living outside the United States in just 250 words.
Human rights activist and recipient of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize, Nadia Murad is a leading advocate for survivors of genocide and sexual violence. Her memoir, The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State, is a harrowing account of the genocide against the Yazidi ethnoreligious minority in Iraq and Murad’s imprisonment by the so-called Islamic State group, or ISIS. Murad is the president and chairwoman of Nadia’s Initiative, which actively works to persuade governments and international organizations to support the sustainable redevelopment of the Yazidi homeland, as well as survivors of sexual violence globally.
I came to understand America long before I became an American.
As a young girl in a small village in Iraq, I remember the first time I saw American soldiers. I did not understand politics or war, but I understood what people around me hoped that America meant something different. Even then, I felt that America was more than a country. It was an idea.
Years later, I came to understand how complex that idea could be. The promise many believed would come to Iraq did not reach communities like mine. Instead, our lives grew more uncertain, more dangerous. That distance – between what America represents and what people experience – stayed with me.
After enduring genocide, losing my family and my home, and being taken into captivity by ISIS, I encountered America again.
After I escaped and began sharing my story, I met individuals who listened, who believed me, and who used their voices to amplify mine. In those moments, I recognized the America I had imagined as a child, one grounded in compassion, justice, and the defense of human dignity.
Today, as a new American, I carry both memory and hope. I have seen the gap between this country’s promise and its reality. I have also seen ordinary people work to close that gap. That, to me, is what America truly is, not a nation without contradiction, but one with the courage to confront it.
America remains an idea. And ideas are only as powerful as the people willing to stand up for them.
