This is not a story about politics, or war. Instead, this is a story about what it was like to grow up as a child of immigrants who fled a country due to political instability.

Yasmeen brings in a selection of voices from the Iraqi diaspora to help even out the global narrative: from Iraqis who experienced the war first hand, to other hyphenated Iraqi Americans who experienced it from afar. She talks openly about her own experience of growing up as a first generation Iraqi-American during the 1st and 2nd gulf wars, and how much these wars shaped her experience during her formative years.

Many Iraqis are still deeply traumatized from living in the war, and many are paranoid about publicly sharing their narratives with the world, so we ask that you treat their stories kindly.

There are moments in our lives that can change the way we see the world in an instant. In this episode, Yasmeen re-lives her experience of the day everything in her life changed in a Chicago suburb at the age of 8, on the day the first gulf war began in 1991.

Yasmeen learns how to create a dual reality to cope with the discomfort of feeling misunderstood as a child of Iraqi immigrants.

Yasmeen relives her recurring nightmare and what it feels like to push against the current of her inner and outer world.

Never let another person’s opinion of you change the way you see yourself.

Yasmeen speaks with Sinan Al Mokhtar, who was born and raised in Iraq, and came of age in Iraq during the first gulf war. He shares what he and his family had to endure, including the bombing of the hospital that his mother gave birth in to his twin siblings. He later immigrated to the United States, and talks to us about his experience of becoming a hyphenated American.

What’s in a name? Can a name change your life trajectory?

Have we done everything we could to avoid war? Everything? Is there another possibility that could exist without the need to go to war?

Yasmeen starts off with a poem that she wrote that was inspired by the film she wrote and co-produced “A Star in the Desert” which follows the life of a young Iraqi boy in Baghdad on the eve of the first Gulf War, as he escapes into a fantastical reality on the search for his missing father.

For more information about the film, you can watch it here: https://www.astarinthedesert.com/

Yasmeen relives her journey in choosing a road to love and processing emotions and releasing them as a means of survival. We hear from Hamada Zahawi, an Iraqi-American and international lawyer and educator, and analyst, and again from Sinan Al-Mokhtar, an Iraqi-American medical professional who shares his reflections on growing up in Iraq and assimilating in the United States.