Love in a Torn Land

• Main Author: Sasson, Jean (Author)
• Format: Manuscript Book
• Language: English
• Published: London Transworld Publishers Ltd 2007
• Edition: Biography : English
• Subjects: Women, Kurdish > Biography > Iraq; Kurds > Biography > Iraq; Iran-Iraq War; Anfal Campaign; Ethnic relations
• Online Access: Click Here to View Status and Holdings.
• Item Description: 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. Includes index.
• Physical Description: 432 pages illustrations 18 cm
• ISBN: 9780553818147

Bestselling author Jean Sasson tells the dramatic true story of a young woman caught up in Saddam Hussein's genocide of the Kurdish people of Iraq.One morning Joanna, a young bride living in the Kurdish mountains of Iraq, was surprised to see dead birds drop silently out of the clear sky. They were followed by sinister canisters falling to the ground, bringing fear and death.It was 1987, and Saddam Hussein had ordered his cousin 'Chemical Ali' to bombard Joanna's village, Bergalou, with chemical weapons. Temporarily blinded in the attack, Joanna was rescued by her husband, a Kurdish freedom fighter. After being caught in another bombardment and left for dead in the rubble, they managed to flee over the mountains in a harrowing escape.Now living in the UK and working for British Airways, Joanna has told the story of her eventful life to Jean Sasson, the bestselling chronicler of oppressed women's lives in the Princess trilogy and Mayada. Love in a Torn Land is published while the world watches the trial of the notorious 'Chemical Ali', Saddam Hussein's most bloodthirsty henchman, for crimes including the genocide of the Kurdish people.