Amal Clooney has been out of the spotlight since welcoming twins in June, but she briefly stepped back into the public eye for a rare TV interview where she opened up about welcoming a Yazidi refugee from Iraq, Hazim Avdal, into her and George's home in the U.S.
"I've had the privilege of representing a number of Yazidis who have been the victims of genocide perpetrated by ISIS over the past couple of years, that's how I met Hazim," the human rights attorney says in a Skype interview with David Letterman. The clip appears in the TV host's new Netflix show, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, which features George in a new episode.
"And when I met him, I remember being so struck by his courage but also just his amazing spirit and how he spoke about, even after everything he lost, he spoke about his desire for justice, not revenge," Amal continued.
The Clooneys were in New York with George's parents when Avdal told them his future aspirations. "He spoke about his dream about one day studying in the U.S. and I knew we all had the same thought, which was, 'Well, maybe there's something we can do to help with that.'"
Avdal is now a student at the University of Chicago and lives in the Clooneys' Augusta, Kentucky home. But the road there wasn't easy. "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,'" George Clooney told The Hollywood Reporter in September.
"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,'" he added.
The Clooneys' refugee aid extends outside their home. In a Hollywood Reporter profile from September, the actor revealed he and his wife are pledging $20 million to their own Clooney Foundation for Justice to benefit refugee housing and education and to create a "trial watch" to provide legal protections.
Avdal isn't the only new addition to the Clooneys' home; the couple also welcomed their first children, twins Ella and Alexander, in June. George gushes over Amal's mothering skills in the clip from Letterman's show:
"She is sort of this remarkable human being and now mother, which is something, I suppose, you would assume she would be wonderful at as well, but when you see it in person, it makes you feel incredibly proud but also incredibly small."
