Waris Dirie (born 1965 in Somalia) is a supermodel. She escaped the country at the age of 13, running away from the prospect of a forced marriage with an older man. She ended up working for a relative in London, where she was discovered as a model.

In 1987 Waris played a role in the Bond movie The Living Daylights; a decade later she quit modelling to focus on her work for the UN campaign against female genital mutilation, a practice of which she herself had been a victim at the age of five.

Dirie was born into the nomadic Daarood tribe in Somalia-a life without electricity, telephones or cars. Home was a portable hut woven from grass. When she was five, her mother held her down while a local woman cut away her genitals. Afterwards, she was stitched up tightly, leaving a hole the diameter of a matchstick. "I felt not complete with myself as a woman. Some days I felt so powerless," she said. "When I think back about that, it still disturbs me. But coming back over that is still the hardest thing for me because you have to learn about yourself, you have to feel comfortable with yourself." Although Dirie survived the razor, her sister and two cousins did not. The United Nations says female genital mutilation is practised in some 30 African countries as well as parts of the Middle East and Asia. No one knows its precise origin, although it may date back to ancient Egypt. In Somalia, nine of 10 girls are circumcised. Two are likely to die by bleeding to death or through infection. Others will suffer life-long pain.

Dirie's life changed forever when she was 13. She fled to the Somali capital, Mogadishu, after her father tried to marry her to a 60-year-old man in exchange for five camels. A well-connected uncle provided an escape route to London. She stayed in Britain illegally and survived by scrubbing floors in a fast food restaurant. By chance, she was discovered by a photographer who put her face on the cover of the Pirelli calendar. From there, her career took off. "It's very sad that I had to make the choice to leave my country and at the same time I did not want to leave," she said. "Africa is different. I was young. I had nothing to worry about. I had my family, I had my animals, I had my simple life. It was beautiful." Dirie now lives in New York but still feels the contrasts between the West and her war-torn home. "Here it seems like it is chaos forever and I'm trying to sit down for a moment and there's no time for that," she laughed. "In Somalia we don't have a time so we don't care what time it is. But in the West, everything is money-money, power, sucking, sucking away. It is never enough."

Dirie's testimony is the sad story of thousands of women. By telling her story, she hopes to bring an end to the suffering caused by female circumcision. "I think about every single one of them every day and I'm trying to get there before it happens to that child," she said, wiping a tear from her eye. But the United Nations faces strong opposition because many African men and women believe in a tradition they say is part of their heritage. For Dirie, it has little to do with tradition and nothing to do with religion. "It is mainly God, power control. It's mainly men showing they are physically stronger and being cowards and controlling you by torturing you," she said. "It's been going a long time but they can't see the world has moved on and life changes and they've stuck to it. The men they don't know what it feels like-but if I cut his balls off then he knows!" Dirie waits for the day that female circumcision has been abolished. "I pray for it every night and I won't rest until I complete my mission because I'm so deeply into it," she said. "We have to get over this because no woman deserves to be sliced up like an animal."

This and more is described in her two autobiographical novels Desert Flower and Desert Dawn .