Tara Shahid was one of the last children to speak out against the war in Iraq, and has been the face of the U.S.-British alliance for two decades and now of the post-9/11 United States. She was kidnapped in Iraq in 2004 for her diary. In recent years, she has been an advocate for the war’s victims, including victims of torture and war crimes.

In 2012, Ms. Shahid’s husband, Samiullah Khan, had his own brush with terror. He was tortured by U.S. soldiers in Iraq as part of “Operation Iraqi Freedom” after his capture by the Americans and accused of trying to defect in 2004 to al-Qaeda. His son was one of 11 civilians executed by the Iraqi government after he was arrested on national security charges.

Ms. Shahid’s latest memoir, “I Am Abu Khaled,” is an account of torture as a young British girl, including being made to drink gallons of water in a cell. One of her torturers is the former torturer herself, Abu Zubaida, who is in prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Ms. Shahid, a former journalist, is also a human-rights advocate. As head of the International Campaign to Ban Torture, Ms. Shahid helped push for the passage of the United Nations Convention against Torture and other measures in 2004. She is the author of two books: “No Easy Day,” published by Simon & Schuster in 2009 and “Gone to Bed,” published by New York University Press in 2010.

Ms. Shahid’s mother, Maryam Shahid, and her grandmother, Farda Khan, are also former warlords in the Baluchistan region.

Curtis Swerdlow, former Foreign Correspondent and correspondent for Fox News Channel, had written on Wednesday that he had learned that Ms. Shahid was in a hospital in Islamabad where she was being treated for her wounds, including a tear in her nose, and had been “taken out in her wheelchair.”

Her voice was also noticeably softer and she smiled more often from behind metal-plated eyeglasses.

Ms. Shahid’s mother, meanwhile, spoke to CNN in her living room, her eyes visibly red with grief.

“I cried and cried and cried,” said Farda Khan, her husband in the background. “So many people who sacrificed so much