Chro Zand Mohammad has been to hell and back. Very little frightens this thirty-seven-year-old Kurdish refugee — the worst has already happened, and she’s made it through.

On this cold winter afternoon, Mohammad sits in the offices of Centennial College’s English for Academic Purposes program where she’s a student. She talks about what it’s like to have a nationality, but no nation. She talks about Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s campaign to “Arabize” his country by decimating Kurdish towns in northern Iraq and dropping nerve and mustard gas on their inhabitants. But most of all, she talks about what happened to her when Hussein took his revenge on her people for their 1991 uprising.

“You can’t imagine your power until you’re in trouble. Trust yourself. You’ll be able to do a lot. Now I’m not scared  even if I become homeless, I’ll always come back,” she says.

Mohammad was born and raised in Sulemani, in what is now the Kurdish self-rule area of northern Iraq. She was twenty-six with an infant son and pregnant with her second child, when Iraqi soldiers poured into Sulemani in 1991. Her husband was away in Baghdad, studying. So along with her parents and a sister, she and her son fled to the Iranian border.

Almost immediately, her son became ill. “It was cold. It was March and we didn’t have much to eat. We had no shelter, even at night. He was very sick and I was scared of losing him,” she says.

“For the first three days, they closed the border with Iran. You couldn’t buy food, no matter how much money you had,” Mohammad recalls. But then the Iranian Kurds began sneaking across the border with supplies. “They brought food from their houses and fed us. You can’t imagine how they helped us,” she says.

A Second Dangerous Journey

Her sister, a doctor, tended Mohammad’s baby and soon doctors affiliated with the United Nations came to help. When she felt it was safe to bring her son back with her to Sulemani, Mohammad made the perilous journey to her parents’ house. She knew that if her husband was able to sneak across the border from Baghdad back into the Kurdish area, that he would look for them there.

Mohammad lived in the house by herself for a week, amid the ruins of war. When her husband found her, they went together to their own house to survey the damage. “It was destroyed. Everything in the house was burned. They even burned my child’s birth certificate. There wasn’t anything to take with me. I just cried when I saw it.”

So she and her young family left Kurdistan for Baghdad, where her son was hospitalized and eventually recovered. Her second child, a daughter, was born shortly after. While she had hoped to study and eventually to work in journalism, it was one of several professions off-limits to Kurds living in Iraq. “So I was raising my children and waiting for my future while Saddam Hussein was killing us,” she says, referring to Hussein’s ongoing Arabization campaign.

Deported Back to Kurdistan

But when Hussein ordered all Kurds living in Iraq to the northern Kurdish area in 1996, Mohammad couldn’t stand to go back and live among the ruins. “Saddam Hussein killed all the beautiful things in my country. I wanted to leave because there were no more beautiful things,” she says. Mohammad and her husband and children lived in Kurdistan for a short time before fleeing to Turkey and eventually to Canada, where they were accepted as refugees.

Mohammad has lived in Canada now for five years. She’s a Canadian citizen and is happy here. But she’s still very much connected to her first home and worries every day about the fate of her family left in Kurdistan. As war between Iraq and the U.S. unfolds, so does the possibility of more bloody repression in Kurdistan.

Mohammad’s goal is to help the family and friends she left behind by publicizing their story. And so when she graduates from her college program in April, Mohammad plans to study journalism and work as a broadcaster.

“The most important thing for me is to do something for my country, to be proud of my country, to express myself as a Kurd. I wasn’t able to do that in Baghdad. Now I can raise my voice. I’ll tell the whole world what happened to Kurdistan,” she says.