Our whole family was thrown out of Iraq by Saddam Hussein because of my father’s political activism, so I grew up in Iran. But we never felt like we belonged there, and we weren’t given Iranian citizenship, which meant we didn’t have many rights. So,10 years later, my parents decided to go to Syria to apply to the UN for refugee status, so that we children could have an identity and a good education. Three years later, we were accepted to resettle in Australia.
We had thought we were going to be the only Iraqi family . . .