© Sarah Malian 2009
Evin Ibrahim was just 19 and heavily pregnant when she clambered onto a boat in Beirut in 1998, with her husband Farhad. Evin and her brother’s family had fled from the district of Zumar outside Mosul in northern Iraq, to escape persecution by Saddam Hussein’s regime and Peshmerga [Kurdish fighters] attempts to annex this disputed territory. ‘Saddam kept capturing our people’, says Evin, speaking of life in Zumar. ‘We had so many problems in our village – we weren’t even allowed to speak Kurdish. Evin now lives in Richmond Village on the British bases in Cyprus, with her husband and their four children.