Barkhad Abdi Quotes

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.

When I was a girl, civil war in Sudan forced me to flee my home town of Wau.

Iraq is in a civil war. There is no road in that country that is safe.

When the Lebanese Civil War started in 1975, I was 15. I was shipped to boarding school in England and, after that, to UCLA.

I sincerely wish that every member of Congress could visit the displaced person's camp in Germany and Austria and see just what is happening to 500,000 human beings through no fault of their own.

Leaving southern Sudan as a child was terrifying. It was 1985, and my family and I were trying to escape to Khartoum, the capital in the North, to safety.

Even a war zone looks peaceful in most places, most of the time.

Sri Lankans of every kind, overwhelmingly the poorest, have been bombed by one side or the other for decades.

I didn't know a time when there wasn't a war because I spent all my time from the age of two or three to eight in a coal cellar really.

Yes, life in Chechnya so far looks more like a life after a natural disaster.

I assure you, it would be much more pleasant for me to be an ordinary voter in peaceful Chechnya than the president of a republic at war.

The north of the Central African Republic is now a war zone, with rival armed bands burning villages, kidnapping children, robbing travelers and killing people with impunity.

Beirut turned into a war zone in a matter of hours. We were stuck at home, the roads were blocked.

Nearly a million persons formerly dwelt in Venezuela, and it is no exaggeration to say that one out of four has succumbed either to the land, sword, hunger, plague, flight, or privation, all consequences of the war

Many Palestinians have been living for decades in camps, disconnected from the environment in which they grew up, wallowing in poverty, in neglect, alienation, bitterness, and a deep, unrelenting sense of humiliation.

The people of Iraq have suffered greatly.

Although we live in a safe and stable country, Central Africa as a region has been held back by seemingly perpetual conflict - over power, resources, and who controls them.

When I was 10 years old, I fled my homeland amid the bomb blasts of civil war in Sudan.

Whenever I speak at the United Nations, UNICEF or elsewhere to raise awareness of the continual and rampant recruitment of children in wars around the world, I come to realize that I still do not fully understand how I could have possibly survived the civil war in my country, Sierra Leone.

War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.

The understanding of Syria's devastating civil war has been distorted by the immense danger and difficulty of covering it.

When you scan the globe's hot spots, every civil war and massacre, every act of terror and every clash between states has its unique local circumstances.

I can't quite remember the exact moment when I became obsessed with writing a play about the seemingly endless war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I knew that I wanted to somehow tell the stories of the Congolese women caught in the cross-fire.

The road ahead is not easy. Iraq is currently the center of the war on terror.

The United Nations Children's Fund reports that more than 18 million children worldwide have lost both parents to the ravages of AIDS, starvation, war or natural disasters.