Zainab Salbi: A Refugee Woman's Reality

Zainab Salbi is the founder and president of Women for Women International, a non-profit organization that seeks to aid women survivors of war, civil strife and other conflicts. A native of Baghdad, Iraq, Salbi was first sensitized to the plight of women in war as a teenager by the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and, later, the Gulf War and its consequences during the 1990s. In 1993, at the age of only twenty-three, she decided in an epiphany to dedicate her life to working with women survivors of war and with female victims of economic and social injustice. Just two years after Women for Women International was founded, she was honored by President William J. Clinton in a White House ceremony for her organization?s humanitarian efforts in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Since that time, Salbi has continued to reach out to policymakers at the highest levels and to general audiences around the globe. Her speaking engagements include the Holocaust Museum, Stanford University, Georgetown University, the Queen Sofia Center for Violence in Spain, the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh, the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA) in Jerusalem, and the Global Peace Initiative of Women Religious and Spiritual Leaders in Geneva, Switzerland.