George and Amal Clooney have taken in a Yazidi refugee from Iraq.
The actor and his wife are boarding the man in a house they maintain in Augusta, Ky., Clooney revealed to The Hollywood Reporter.
“He was on this bus to Mosul, and ISIS shot the two bus drivers and said, ‘Anybody who wants to go to college, we will shoot them,'” Clooney said.
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He continued: “He survived and came to America. He got through all the checks, and once he got through those, it was like, ‘Listen, we got your back. You want to get an education? You want to move your life forward? This is something that we can do.'”
The refugee is now a student at the University of Chicago.
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As an international human rights lawyer, Amal has worked to protect Yazidi victims of ISIS for years.
In Sept. 2016, Amal and her client Nadia Murad joined forces to take ISIS to trial.
Murad, a Yazidi woman who described praying for death while being raped by her Islamic State captors, called on world leaders to step up efforts to bring the militant group to justice for genocide and other crimes.
Both women said no Islamic State militants have been tried for atrocities but British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson suggested that could change soon.
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Johnson, whose country helped organize a meeting for foreign ministers to address efforts to prosecute so-called Islamic State militants, said he and Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari would urge the UN to take the lead on “the vital gathering and the preserving of evidence” of crimes committed by the group.
Murad, who was captured by the militants in 2014, said she was repeatedly raped and prayed for death until she escaped. The 23-year-old, who was named UN special ambassador and is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, appealed to the world to “stop the extermination of my people.”
Murad said that ISIS members killed six of her brothers and her mother when they stormed her town in northern Iraq three years ago during the Yazidi genocide.
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Clooney, Murad’s legal representative, said Yazidi victims “want to appear before a judge.” She urged the UN Security Council to focus on “genocide against Yazidis.”
“ISIS has vowed to wipe them out simply because they are Yazidis,” she said and noted that “there has not been a single member of ISIS held accountable anywhere in the world for its genocide.”
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