Title: Love in a torn land : Joanna of Kurdistan : the true story of a freedom fighter's escape from Iraqi vengeance /
Authors: Sasson, Jean P.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons,
Year: 2007
Subjects: Hussain, Joanna Al-Askari.; Women, Kurdish Iraq Biography.; Kurds Iraq Biography; Anfal Campaign, Iraq, 1986-1989.; Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988 Personal narratives, Kurdish.; Iraq Ethnic relations.
Abstract: Sasson, author of Princess: A True Story of Life behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia (1992) and Ayada: Daughter of Iraq (2003), focuses on the story of Joanna Al-Askari Hussain, a Kurdish woman living in Iraq, to tell the broader story of ethnic tensions between the Kurds, Iraqis, Turks, Iranians, and Syrians. Written in the first person, Joanna's story covers her romance with a Kurdish freedom fighter, marriage, and taking up the struggle against the Iraqis herself. She recalls times of raining dead and injured birds after a missile attack and of a desperate flight after her village was attacked by Saddam Hussein's forces in 1987. Some 200,000 of her fellow Kurds were killed in a genocide campaign. Photographs and personal recollections--a wedding without the groom, a husband who hogs the covers, the adjustments of a pampered woman to a life of privation and personal demands--offer a very human look at the struggle of the Kurds in Iraq and one woman's heroism.
Contents: 1. Little Peshmerga girl -- 2. Martyrs hill -- 3. Sprinkled by stardust -- 4. Baathist terror -- 5. Ra'ad and Hady return -- 6. Death -- 7. My mother and my father -- 8. Love in a torn land -- 9. War -- 10. The trenches --11. Ra'ad leaves us -- 12. The end of hope -- 13. Secret police -- 14. Love letters -- 15. Love and marriage -- 16. Under the Bergalou sky -- 17. Good Kurd, bad Kurd -- 18. Chemical attack -- 19. Blinded -- 20. Escape to Merge -- 21. Bombed in Merge -- 22. Climbing Kandil Mountain -- 23. Searching for Auntie Aisha -- Kosha, child of my heart -- Epilogue : freedom! -- Where are they now?