Jillian Melchior back from Iraq

Home News Jillian Melchior back from Iraq

After being captured, raped, and beaten by ISIS, 19-year-old Amshed escaped to Kurdistan with her 2-year-old son, but her husband was likely killed in a blaze of ISIS gunfire. She recounted the horrors of her torture and escape to National Review correspondent Jillian Kay Melchior `09, but when she tried to speak about the loss of her husband — the love of her life — she broke down and could not speak.
“It’s too painful,” Amshed’s friend said.
On Monday evening, Melchior shared with Hillsdale students and faculty the personal stories of Amshed and other refugees she encountered during a 10-day reporting trip in September to Kurdistan, in northern Iraq. By traveling there, Melchior sought to tell the stories of the individuals affected by ISIS and the plight of Christian refugees, as opposed to the grandiose political outlook upon which most coverage of the situation focuses.
“People tend to become statistics, not individuals,” Melchior said.
Melchior spoke to the religious persecution Christians and Yazidi Iraqis face at the hands of ISIS, and voiced her disappointment in America’s handling of the situation. She said in Kurdistan, a relatively safe part of the Iraqi area, the people were pro-American and very welcoming to her. She said many felt let down by America, and she agreed.
“It morally bothers me that a commitment was made by America, and then we abandoned them,” she said.
Melchior recounted with great passion stories of traumatized children who only speak and draw pictures of the return of ISIS to their communities, and men who cannot sleep without the sound of bombs filling their heads.
However, she spoke of moments of hope and triumph of spirit of the Iraqi people as well.
“Whenever I travel, I always buy honey for my mom, because it is supposed to taste different everywhere you go,” she said. “The honey vendor was so excited to find out I was from America. He said, ‘Say hi to Obama for me! Thank you for the airstrikes!’”
As an accomplished world traveler with a strong sense of wanderlust, Melchior has traveled to China and Ukraine, writing about religious persecution and political situations in both areas.
Before Melchior transferred to Hillsdale, she partook in a media tour through Japan and Korea for a few weeks. This whet her appetite for world politics and allowed her to focus on her passion while at Hillsdale, where she majored in politics and edited the Opinions page of the Collegian.
Her favorite courses at Hillsdale were Professor of Politics Will Morrissey’s American Foreign Policy and Comparative Politics, where she enjoyed learning about different world dictators.
“Some students go through college and take assignments as objects in an obstacle course, to get over and to get to the next step. She really came to college to learn,” Morrissey said. “For example, she would read
Aristotle’s “Politics” not as something she needed to pass a test, or just as a book that’s an interesting antiquarian text. She was reading these books assuming that they might have something to teach her that could help her understand the world now.”
After college, Melchior worked for The Wall Street Journal Asia, where she traveled to Hong Kong. After that, she wrote for Commentary New York and The Daily, the iPad publication of News Corps.
She loves learning about new cultures and places as she goes along, saying it keeps her on her toes.
“In China, I had to learn enough of the language to get by, and be creative with communication because of my limited vocabulary,” she said. “I would research something politically controversial. It required me to stay very sharp. The people there were wonderful and I still stay in touch with many of them.”
Melchior’s travels to dangerous locations have caused concern from her family members. Her father accompanied Melchior, the oldest of 10 children, from Wyoming to Ukraine.
“My parents are confident in her skills and knows that she’s safe. We didn’t tell my grandma about her trip [to Iraq] until afterwards, because it would stress her out too much,” Melchior’s brother Matt, a Hillsdale senior, said. “[My sister] doesn’t get nervous in those situations, but I probably would be. She has lived in a bad area of Detroit for an internship, and lived in West Harlem for a year. She does anything.”
While in Iraq, Jillian Melchior posted constantly on Instagram, and emailed or Facebook messaged her family members often to let them know she was safe, Matt Melchior said.
Despite having witnessed terribly unstable parts of the world, Melchior was surprised to find that Iraq was the most depressing place she has traveled.
“No one felt good about their future,” she said. “No one felt like they were on the winning side.”