Los Angeles: Just days after Angelina Jolie was photographed on a visit to northern Iraq, the "Unbroken" director has written an impassioned opinion article about her trip.
The 39-year-old is a special envoy of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and co-founder of the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative. She wrote through the columns of the New York Times after her trip to a refugee camp in Khanke in Iraq Sunday, reports usamagazine.com.
The camp was set up in December 2014 and hosts displaced Iraqis who fled after surviving kidnappings and other attacks by jihadists from the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
She describes the devastation she witnessed in refugee camps and calls for action to help the millions of displaced Syrians and Iraqis who no longer have a home.
"I have visited Iraq five times since 2007, and I have seen nothing like the suffering I'm witnessing now," she wrote in the opinion piece, published by the newspaper Tuesday.
"For many years I have visited camps, and every time I sit in a tent and hear stories. I try my best to give support. To say something that will show solidarity and give some kind of thoughtful guidance. On this trip I was speechless," she added.
As previously reported, the mother of six visited the Khanke camp for Internally Displaced People. While there, she spoke with victims of ISIS, some of whom she describes in her opinion editorial.
"What do you say to the 13-year-old girl who describes the warehouses where she and the others lived and would be pulled out, three at a time, to be raped by the men? When her brother found out, he killed himself," Jolie writes.
She continued: "How can you speak when a woman your own age looks you in the eye and tells you that her whole family was killed in front of her, and that she now lives alone in a tent and has minimal food rations?"
