"Hey," she said, "are you guys American?"

That's an uncomfortable question in the Middle East today, but her casual manner put me immediately at ease. She had remarkable poise and proceeded to grill me in near-perfect California slang, which she'd picked up from an expatriate girlfriend.

When I learned her age, it struck me that Mivan Majid was the Kurdish dream personified. She had never known a day under the rule of Baghdad. Suleimaniya, her hometown and the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan's eastern sector, has been under unbroken Kurdish control since 1992, the very year of her birth. She wanted to be an engineer, Mivan told me, "because they build such cool things: houses, roads, shopping centers. It's like, when you're an engineer you don't get hung up on our terrible history. You look ahead."

It's hard not to get hung up on history if you're a Kurd in Iraq. I met not a single family there that had not fled its home at some point in the past 20 years, not a single farmer who had not seen his village shelled by bombs or artillery, not a single person without a tale of chemical weapon attacks, torture, or execution under Saddam Hussein. During the infamous Anfal campaign, which peaked between February and September 1988, the Iraqi Army destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages—and killed 100,000 people.

Mivan's father joined the conversation, smiling at his daughter as she interpreted my questions and his responses. Majid Nadir was a slim, articulate man in his late 40s, with a dark, neatly trimmed mustache and penetrating hazel eyes. He had his own grim story to tell—arrest by Saddam's police in 1979 for his dissident views, followed by torture and imprisonment for a year.

The Nadirs lived just east of Suleimaniya's city center in a small stone house. It had a kitchen equipped with a wooden table and six chairs, and one bedroom shared by the two girls and their mother, Parwen. The rear of the house was occupied by a windowless living room where Mivan's five-year-old brother, Parosh, and Majid slept on a sofa and a folding cot. Majid and Parwen both worked six days a week, he as a mechanic, she as a road engineer. Fair-skinned and in her mid-40s, Parwen was a practicing Muslim, though like the majority of Kurds, she was resolutely moderate. "I'd like to go to Mecca if I can ever afford it, and make the hajj," she said. But she refused to cover her hair as many Muslim women do and shrugged when Majid described himself as indifferent to religion.

"Your own conscience is the most dependable judge of what is right or wrong, not something you hear in a mosque," he said. "If I had the money to travel, I'd use it to see Europe, or I'd go visit my brother in Hamilton, Ontario."