1. Zainab Salbi is an Iraqi American women's rights activist, writer, television show host, and podcaster.
24 Facts About Zainab Salbi
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Zainab Salbi is the co-founder of Daughters for Earth, a fund and a movement of Daughters rising up worldwide with climate solutions to protect and restore Mother Earth.
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In September 2023, Zainab Salbi was honored with the Time100 Impact Award.
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Zainab Salbi is a Muslim woman born in 1969 in Baghdad, Iraq who grew up with her younger brother.
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Zainab Salbi's mother was a biology teacher while her father was an airline pilot.
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When Zainab Salbi was 11, her father became the personal pilot for Saddam Hussein, who then regularly visited the family at their home while he was president of Iraq.
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In 1990, at the age of 20, Zainab Salbi was sent to the United States for an arranged marriage after her mother became concerned about the attention she received from Hussein.
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Zainab Salbi left the marriage after her husband became abusive but could not return to Iraq due to the start of the first Gulf War.
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Zainab Salbi moved to Washington, DC, worked as a translator, and married Palestinian-American lawyer Amjad Atallah.
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Zainab Salbi has a 2001 master's degree in development studies from the London School of Economics.
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Zainab Salbi began serving as president, initially with a focus on supporting women in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia expanding to Iraq in 2003.
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Zainab Salbi led the organization until her resignation in 2011, during which time its humanitarian and development efforts helped 315,000 women and distributed over $108 million in direct aid and micro-credit loans.
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Zainab Salbi contributed the 2003 report Winning the Peace Conference Report: Women's Role in Post-Conflict Iraq published by Women Waging Peace and the Woodrow Wilson Center.
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Zainab Salbi later testified before the United States Congress about the contents of the report.
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In 2015, Zainab Salbi launched the TLC Arabia talk show The Calling, with Oprah Winfrey appearing on the first show.
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Zainab Salbi is the author of the 2005 memoir Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam that documents her childhood, her family's proximity to Saddam Hussein, her arranged marriage, escape from Iraq to the United States, marital abuse, and the start of her humanitarian career.
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Zainab Salbi is the author of the 2006 nonfiction book The Other Side of War, which documents the stories of women who have lived through conflict and inequality and succeeded in community leadership and business.
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Zainab Salbi is the author of the 2018 self-help book Freedom Is an Inside Job.
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In February 2022, Zainab Salbi co-founded Daughters for Earth and was honored with Time100 Impact Award in September 2023.
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Zainab Salbi was identified as an influential Arab woman by Arabian Business, and one of the 100 Global Thinkers in the World by Foreign Policy.
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Zainab Salbi was selected as a jury member of The Hilton Humanitarian Prize in 2020 and 2021.
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Zainab Salbi was honored with the Time100 Impact Award in 2023.
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Zainab Salbi has honorary doctorates from the University of York, George Mason University and Glasgow University.
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Zainab Salbi received the Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Award in 2019 for her writing and television work to advance awareness of issues affecting women.