Sahel Rosa was originally from a Kurdish village in Iran, near the Iraq border. Her birth date is not clear but listed as either October 21 or October 23, 1985. Since it was during Iran-Iraq war, at age four she became an only survivor of an air-raid attack on her house, in which her parents and ten siblings were killed. Her village was attacked by the Iraqi army even though there was supposed to be a cease-fire in place, and the Iran-Iraq War had officially ended more than a year earlier. She survived under rubble for four days until being discovered by a volunteer nurse named Flora.