When I was five years old, my family moved to Iraq. Baghdad was beautiful. My house was big, and outside we had a garden filled with the beautiful smell of jasmine flowers.

Our lives were good until Iraq started a war with Kuwait because Saddam Hussein, Iraq's leader, wanted their oil fields. To get their homeland back, Kuwait called for help from the United States, and the Gulf War began in 1990.

It only lasted a few months, but in Iraq, people suffered a lot from the bombs and from not having food, electricity or medicine for a long time after the bombing stopped.

Bombs Shook Our House

At the time of the war, I was about seven years old. The United States was bombing Iraq in the morning and night. My house used to shake every time a bomb hit the ground, and when the house shook more, that meant the bomb was closer to where I lived.

The first attack was on the electricity building and the power went down. For the rest of the year, we had no power.

Everything was scary. I used to stay home all the time, sometimes inside the garage or the garden. It felt like jail. I used to sleep when the sun set and wake up when the sun rose because we had no lights.

Sometimes I watched the sky from the garden and saw the lights. I would count how many big lights, and think about how my father said, "The big lights come from a plane when it explodes." And I was happy as a kid seeing the American planes exploding.

Mad at Saddam and the United States

I didn't agree with Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, because we had lived in Kuwait and had relatives and friends there. And I didn't like how Hussein treated my people—the Kurds—in Iraq.

There are more than 25 million Kurds and they mostly live in the mountainous parts of Turkey, Iran and Iraq. This area used to be called Kurdistan, but we lost our land before World War I. Ever since then, the Kurds have been fighting to get it back.

Hussein had made it illegal to have a Kurdish school or to teach your kids how to write and read Kurdish. That made me feel like I didn't really belong in Iraq.

But I was angrier at the United States for bombing us. I prayed to God to stop the war and the killing of innocent people.

People Were Starving

During and after the war, most countries stopped trading with Iraq, so there was very little food or medicine in the country. Most of the hospitals closed and food was so expensive. People couldn't work, so they sold their cars and things from their houses. Still, they were starving.

My father had a hard time making money to buy food. He had difficult days when he had to go out in the morning and come home late at night.

At the time, Iraq's money had no value, and when you went to buy food you had to take a big bag of money. That was dangerous because there was a great chance that somebody would rob you. Many stores took American dollars only, even though I heard that if the police caught you with dollars they'd cut off your hands.

Stolen in Front of Me

My father no longer wanted to stay in Iraq, but my mother and relatives did not want us to leave. They thought things would get better.

Life only got worse. People were dying for no reason, and brothers killed each other for food. Kids would be playing and having a little fight and then their parents would come out with guns and shoot each other.

One day I was standing next to my aunt's car making sure that no one stole the wheels, but in the time my aunt went out and came back, the two wheels on the other side were gone. I was shocked and ashamed of myself for not seeing the thief, but at the same time thankful to God that I wasn't hurt.

In those days, there were no feelings left in me. Life felt like a dark sky. It was an unforgivable time when rich people became poor and poor people became invisible.

Not Iraqi, But a Kurd

After the war, Iraq was a powerless country. The Kurds, who had been fighting Hussein over land in northern Iraq for years, were able to take back much of their land in the north.

That land is the most beautiful part of Iraq—green and mountainous. Many people go on vacation there, and it is where all kinds of food grow. If the Kurds were to get back all of their land, Iraq would lose it, so Saddam Hussein wanted to stop them.

He began killing any Kurds, whether they lived in the North, or in the city, like my family. The government killed more than 15,000 Kurds.

Because I'm Kurdish, I felt a lot of hate in school from classmates. I'd felt that Iraq was my country, but my feelings changed when the people and the Iraqi government showed their feelings. At that time, I wished that I had no feelings. I did not want to see these things. Then I felt that I am not Iraqi, but a Kurd.

Hussein made a law forcing all the Kurds to leave Baghdad and go to the South and West—to the desert. My family could have died of starvation there, so my father said we had to leave Iraq. At the time, the only place Iraqis could go was Jordan. We had to pay a lot to go to Jordan, and we had to sneak out.

We were supposed to let the Iraqi government take our house and belongings when we moved to the South, but instead, my father sold everything we had and we moved around between relatives for six months before we left.

I became homeless and wanted by the government. I felt sick with fear—moving a lot, remembering the beautiful house my family had, and being a stranger every place I went.

Countries Wouldn't Take Us In

It was a long way to Jordan, more than a day by bus along a highway surrounded by black rock. But in Jordan, it was hard to get by. We were not citizens, my father was not allowed to work, and I could not go to school. Many Kurds were going back to Iraq even though it was unsafe, because they could not afford to stay in Jordan.

My father was desperate for us to find a better place to live, so he found a friend who made fake passports and visas, and we flew to Hungary, Greece, and then Switzerland, hoping we'd either slip through customs or that those countries would take us in as refugees. But all of those countries refused to let us stay, so we had to go back to Jordan.

In the airport in Jordan, my father asked to speak to someone from the United Nations. Instead, a man said, "An Iraqi car is coming to take you." We were all thinking that we'd kill ourselves before we'd let the Iraqi government kill us.

Official UN Refugees

A while later, though, a man from the UN came to talk to us. We told him all the countries we'd gone to since we'd left Iraq the year before. "That's a good story you made up," he said. But when he called the countries we'd been to, they told him we'd been there.

After a few days, he told us the UN would take us as refugees. The UN moved us to a hotel and arranged for me to go back to school for the first time in two years. Then my family was accepted to live in the United States. We were so excited. Everybody in Jordan said to us, "You will have the best life."

Well, things haven't been perfect in the United States—there's discrimination and poverty here, too, and my family has had to work night and day to survive. But every year our lives here have gotten better.

I still don't think of the United States as my country. I think that unless Kurdistan is returned to the Kurds, I will never have a land I can truly call my own.

Reprinted with permission from Represent, Copyright 2003 by Youth Communication/New York Center, Inc. (www.youthcomm.org)