Twenty years ago, Freshta Raper, a young teacher in the Iraqi town of Halabja, hid two students who had taken part in a protest against the government in a cupboard in her classroom.

It was a decision which was to have life-changing consequences. Soldiers from Saddam Hussein's brutal regime had surrounded the school and eventually kicked down the cupboard door and hauled the youngsters off to their certain death.

Freshta, an Iraqi Kurd, was dragged through the school by her hair, receiving repeated kicks to the head which knocked her unconscious. She woke up in prison and for the next three days was tortured and sexually abused before her captors released her.

Two decades on, the horror of what happened to Freshta has not diminished. "Every single time I talk about it, it's clearly there," she says. "You are permanently scarred. You will get counselling support but you will never forget your experiences."

Freshta is one of the lucky ones — many thousands of Kurds were slaughtered on Saddam's orders over several decades and many of those who survived his oppressive dictatorship now suffer from anxiety and serious mental disorders as a result of the harsh treatment they received.

Freshta is different; now living in London and a director for learning in secondary education, she devotes the majority of her free time to trying to stop others from suffering as she did.

"I have been so strong," she acknowledges. "I will try, until the day I die, to help those people. I have been blessed by God to make sure I will go back and I will help those people."

The 42-year-old mother-of-two is on a mission to spread the message that torture is still all too common in the Middle East and elsewhere and must be wiped out; that's why she arrived in Bermuda last week to speak to Amnesty International members.

"I'm trying, not only in Bermuda, but to deliver a message of awareness to the rest of the world," she explains. "Abuse of young people takes place in the most cruel way and in the most inhumane way: kidnap, torture, beating, killing, decapitating bodies.

"It is happening every single second in the Middle East, especially in the area I come from."

Growing up as a Kurd in northern Iraq meant Freshta barely had what could be described as a childhood.

She and her family — including six sisters and two brothers — had to flee to the Iranian border 13 times in five years for fear of violence from the authorities.

"We have no memory of a childhood," she says. "We'd come back from the border and all our furniture and belongings were taken. Thirteen times is too many times for five or six years of your life."

She says Saddam Hussein managed to create a climate of fear which meant parents barely dared speak in front of their children for fear that a chance remark the youngster might make in public would put the whole family in danger of death.

"I remember the adults in the house, they had to whisper," she says. Freshta tells the story of a little boy in Baghdad whose school was visited by Saddam. The tyrant asked him if he knew who he was.

"The little boy said 'yes, my dad always spits on your picture'," she recounts. "Saddam got very purple. They took the whole entire family and executed every one of them, including the child."

Her own act of defiance against the authorities at her school in Halabja led to a three-day nightmare from which she emerged unable to speak for two days.

Her injured body was plunged into a vat of ice water before the attacks began. "It was awful. It was non-stop electrical shocks, beating, hitting "It was taking your clothes off and abusing you. If they want to break a woman, they do sexual abuse because they know the majority commit suicide."

She left the prison after being warned that if she ever spoke of her experiences, her mother and sisters would also be captured and abused. Freshta fled to the mountains and joined the ranks of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) — but her suffering was by no means over.

Several months later, in March 1988, Saddam launched a poison gas assault on Halabja — an act of genocide now viewed as the largest-scale chemical weapons attack against a civilian population in modern times.

Freshta lost 21 members of her family, the majority of her mother's relatives being among the 5,000 killed.

Not long after, she herself was severely injured in a chemical bomb attack on a village.

She stayed in a refugee camp in Iran for several years before leaving the Middle East.

Freshta is now a fluent English speaker, has a high-powered job in education helping disadvantaged and displaced children and married an Englishman seven years ago.

But she still longs for home and is adamant she'll return to Iraq with her family when it's safe. She went back there four years ago to record a BBC World documentary. "I left so many people and when I went back in 2003 many, many of them were not alive."