Her family were active in the Kurdish peshmerga who fought Saddam Hussein who had her uncle and brother-in-law executed. Her husband (Daro Sheikh Noori) was imprisoned for five years where he was tortured.[3] She and her husband went into exile in Sweden in 1984, returning to Iraq in 1992. Her husband was a PUK Politburo member, who died in 2004, the same year that she was offered a post in the national government.