Foreign Rights

The US invade Iraq in March 2003. Zehira Houfani Berfas, who remains in Iraq, experiences this terrible contemporary storm of steel. She works, among other places, in the hospitals of the Iraqi capital with the Montreal section of the Iraq Peace Team (IPT). There she meets Jenan, a young girl suffering from leukemia and plans to give her a colouring book, hard to find in a country hit by an economic embargo for 13 years. Unfortunately, the war becomes imminent and the government empties the hospitals to make way for wounded soldiers. Jenan is removed to her parents’. Zehira Houfani, following a rash impulse of the heart, decides to go looking for her, even though wisdom would dictate taking shelter with the western journalists in the bunker of the Palestine Hotel.