“LOOK into my eyes. Look into my eyes!” With these impassioned words, Freshta Raper mesmerised viewers during Question Time on BBC1 on Thusday night. As one of the Iraqi Kurdish community in Britain who believes that the war on Iraq is absolutely necessary, she confronted Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, one of the panel, whose anti-war sentiments galvanised Mrs Raper, 37, into speaking with fire and fury.

Her experiences, she told the programme, had included all the worst outrages perpetrated by President Saddam Hussein’s regime. During the Iraq-Iran War, she was imprisoned three times and was raped repeatedly by “Iraqi thugs”. She has been burnt and blistered by a chemical bomb: 21 members of her family and thousands of others were killed or buried alive in that attack on her native Halabja, which was meant to punish the Kurds for siding with Iran against Iraq. She endured a “horrific journey” to escape from her homeland in 1991.

“People have to know what I have seen,” she said. “I have been made to witness a teenage execution, and the mother of the boy was asked to pay 32p for the bullet. I have seen a mother witnessing her own child chopped in pieces and fed to dogs. In what century do we live?

“Ms Alibhai-Brown insulted me. She said she has friends among educated people in Iraq. She was judging me as an illiterate person. All my family are university graduates and I have become one of the most successful maths teachers in Brent.

“What incensed me was Alibhai-Brown’s assertion that she knew what life was like in Baghdad, and that I was using ‘emotional blackmail’ by telling what I knew. She should be grateful that as an Asian immigrant she has a British passport and not an Iraqi one.

“No human being on this Earth should have to witness what I have witnessed.”

Mrs Raper, who is now married to an English software engineer, took a circuitous route (Iran, Syria, Romania and Russia) to arrive in Britain not speaking a word of English. She is forever grateful that she was taken in by the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture. She now teaches mathematics at a boys’ technology college in northwest London and is not just respected but loved by her pupils, as I could see by the way in which they greeted her. She says that her experiences have enabled her to build up a relationship with even the most difficult teenage boys, because she never uses “terror techniques”. Her own childhood was overshadowed by constant terror.

The studio audience responded warmly to her on Thursday. Afterwards, she says, David Dimbleby and others enveloped her in a bear hug.

She describes what it was like to see the mushroom cloud of a chemical bomb. “It smelt of custard, and made you think: is someone cooking? And we went closer and closer to the bomb. Forty-five people in that village died. I was taken for treatment to the Iranian border — a long, horrible journey on the back of a horse.”

The medical foundation saw to it that she was counselled by a Kurdish man when she arrived here and helped her to deal with the Home Office, found her a solicitor and a place to live. The main thing that she remembers is a feeling of safety. “We had £50-a-week income support and we lived like kings because we no longer had to be bullied, harassed, tortured. People here don’t appreciate what they have. You have the right to question your government. Many refugees criticise this Government. Why don’t they go back to their countries and help overthrow those regimes? They would not dare.

“Every human being is against war. Iraqis are against war. But this is a war against the most dangerous monster ever created. For 30 years our people go to bed and wake up every morning to see pictures of Saddam. School textbooks have his picture on the front page. Two of my sisters and one brother are still in Iraq, hiding in the mountains in the north. Iraqi people are willing to pay the price of the war to get rid of him, so the next generation do not have to live in fear. We have sacrificed millions of people in the last 30 years in torture and genocide.”

Mrs Raper introduced me to the Kurdish mother of one of her pupils, a woman whose father was killed for opposing Saddam and whose brother has been missing for 23 years. She herself was imprisoned for three months, along with her four sisters. Her 18-year-old daughter, brought up here and reading architecture at Westminster University, acted as interpreter. She told me that her mother had been left in the mined border between Iraq and Iran, where one sister lost an eye in an explosion.

They all agreed: “Nobody likes war, nobody wants their country to be bombed. But we do want democracy and a new generation to take over. There was no difference between Sunni and Shia and Arabs and Kurds, before Saddam. If the Americans leave, Saddam will be a hero and will carry on this war . . . we just want this tyrant to leave Iraq and to stop killing his own people.”

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