Article by Nadia Murad in the New York Times

Such a dignified young woman.  I am amazed by her strength and her perseverance.

It’s an absolute shame that in 2017 the U.S. took in the lowest number of refugees since 2002 - just 29,000.  I have read there is a small population of Yazidis who have been resettled in our country but a number of them got held up during the Trump Travel Ban last year.  There isn’t much news coming out now on the state of our refugee program.

In Germany, we've got a large number of Yazidis. I just checked Wikipedia, concerning to this article there are 200,000 to 800,000 Yazidis worldwide, 100,000 of them live in Germany - Hazim's mother and Nadia Murad are amongst them. 

For years we had a restaurant in my hometown which was run by Yezidis. They live very close in their community, and many of their kids try to escape, rebel against the strict rules. So the daughter of the family who ran this restaurant, wanted to live outside their religion, and the teachers and police helped her to leave her family when she turned 18. After less than a week she was back, she wasn't able to live outside their community.

My impression is that they ars hard-working peole, fixed in their culture and religion which they try to preserve. And if you compare their fate to the fate of the jews, there was a genozide which led to a diaspora.

I'm as strucked by their strength as you are, Donna. To know that most of your friends will have been kilked (although they hope that they are still alive), knowing that they will never be able to return to their hometown since everything was destroyed and you wouldn't want to live on mass-graves... that's just beyond my imagination.