Laizer denounces the former as “a cynical exercise in realpolitik”; as for the latter, “briefly both safe and a haven, it soon became neither.”The Iraqi Kurds had no choice but to head for Turkey. In her recent book, Martyrs, Traitors and Patriots (Zed Books, pounds 12.95), Laizer describes their tortuous journey: “It was like passing through some apocalyptic valley of death… The Iraqis were moving in to crush the Western-inspired Kurdish uprising against Saddam. For four days and nights the sound of shelling boomed in the distance, a little closer each day. As the shelling began to hit the town, Sheri joined the inhabitants as they fled for their lives “The noise of the shelling was terrifying You hear it overhead and have no idea where it will land. She was in Iraq in Dohuk, an hour from the border, in April 1991, just after the Gulf War.

But for Sheri it was as if she had reached the end of a quest. “Whatever it was I was looking for, what had been revealed to me here, in the struggle between the Turks and the Kurds, was the darkest region of man’s primeval barbarity – and the greatest nobility.” Kurdistan and its struggles would be her life’s work.The decade that followed has been the most satisfying of Sheri’s life Yet there are scenes that she would rather forget. Now the PKK have enormous support amongst Kurds, despite the danger for sympathisers, who can expect to be treated with the same brutality as members.”Kurdish liberation is not a popular cause in the West The intractability of the problem wearies people. The PKK [the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party] didn’t really get going until 1990. But you picked up on the fear, on how downtrodden Kurdish people were You could even see it in the way they walked. This took her to Turkey, where she met Kurdish people for the first time. She was shocked to discover that under Turkish law all forms of expression that are deemed “separatist”, whether cultural or political, are illegal.

Simply speaking publicly in favour of Kurdish independence can result in torture and imprisonment.Before leaving Turkey, Laizer travelled to Turkish Kurdistan, which borders on Iraq, Syria and Iran. “It wasn’t as bad then as it is now because there was hardly any resistance. She saw the films of Yilmaz Guney, the banned Kurdish filmmaker: harrowing accounts of the world’s 30 million dispossessed Kurds. Shortly afterwards, a job came up researching a TV series on Middle Eastern culture.

She ventured with some success into poetry and photography; was briefly married (“to an extremely good-looking and spoilt man” is all she will say now); and, following a concert in New York, formed an intense (but platonic) friendship with Peter Gabriel.Finally, in 1981, she arrived in London; but the hoped-for sense of belonging failed to materialise. Unable to make a living from poetry and photography, she took a job as an advertising copywriter but quit after 18 months: “It was so empty.”Still searching for meaning and belonging, but also prompted by a crisis in her friendship with Gabriel, she resumed her travels. This time, she headed for Iraq, hoping to study Sumerian literature. “It’s the alternative to the Graeco-Roman tradition – another explanation for where it all began. But it was the time of the Iran/Iraq war and I couldn’t get to Sumer [now southern Iraq], so I stayed in Egypt for a while, somewhere near the Valley of the Kings.” She remained in the area for three years, writing an obscure – and still unpublished – book called Ziggurats (“an evocation of life in 2300 BC”). The daughters of the wealthier people went to Europe for the summer and always had the feeling they were going back to their roots. I thought I might feel this, too.”Her course completed, she headed for England, but stopped off en route in Los Angeles, where she got a job catering on film sets and stayed for a year and a half.