Creating Space Project

Teresa Benetos was a nurse in Baghdad when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. She’s writing a memoir about her time as a hostage in Iraq.   Growing up in a traditional Irish Catholic household, it has taken many years for Teresa to realise that, as a woman, her story is of interest. After thirty years, she says, it is time to tell the story of ‘The Accidental Hostage.’   As a teenager, she battled with her father to be able to finish her Leaving Certificate at school and study to become a nurse. Against the background of an economic recession, Teresa was compelled to seek work in London, during the era of “No blacks, no dogs, no Irish.”   She left London and went to work in Belfast during the Troubles, the thirty-year armed conflict and political deadlock in Northern Ireland.   Then, in 1990, she took a job in a hospital in Baghdad. Before she returned to Iraq after some leave, she had her fortune told: She would be surrounded by uniforms and there was months of worry ahead for her parents.   On August the 2nd, 1