Raza and Ararat’s conservation work is revolutionary in a place where environmental concerns have long taken a back seat to human conflict. But it’s actually an outgrowth of their distinct experiences growing up in a war zone. And now, if they can overcome immense challenges—land mines, episodic violence, government disorganization, corruption, patriarchal attitudes, minimal funding, a public largely unaware of environmental issues—Raza hopes that the leopard’s salvation could catalyze the entire country to shift direction, warming Iraqi hearts to nature and conservation, changing priorities. Ultimately, she envisions a “peace park” in the Kurdish region that straddles Iraq and Iran. And although that dream has been tempered by events this year in Iran that left one of their Persian collaborators dead and many of the rest imprisoned, Raza and Ararat aren’t quitters.

Although periodic conflict continues in some parts of Iraq, the Kurdish city of Slemani (or Sulaymaniyah, as Arab Iraqis call it), where Raza and Ararat live and work, is generally peaceful. Ararat started as a bird expert at Nature Iraq in 2007 and recruited Raza from Sulaymaniyah University in 2009. Soon after, she began the group’s mammal-conservation efforts and now leads the leopard project. When he returned from the United Kingdom, Ararat began teaching animal anatomy at Sulaymaniyah University, and in 2016, Raza invited him back to Nature Iraq to work part-time on the leopard project.

Despite the countless challenges of this type of work, Raza, pragmatic and a little bit fierce, remains undeterred. “In anything that I do, I just decide to do it before I think about the negative things,” she says. “Because along the way you meet a lot of people who just shock you for being so cooperative and helpful … And whenever I find that link, I just focus on it and I won’t let it go.” Her tremendous forward drive seems to pull others along in her wake.

Kurdistan is comparatively progressive in this region. Many women here hold jobs outside the home and wear secular clothing, rather than the hijabs and niqabs of southern Iraq. A mural along one of Slemani’s boulevards reads: “We are more powerful when we are equal.” Nevertheless, Raza’s work—which requires spending months in the field with men, going to remote villages and talking to strangers, “campaigning in areas that are not safe for anybody, let alone for a woman”—is on the cutting edge here.

“I could have never done it without my parents’ support,” she says. They were Peshmerga freedom fighters, “educated on Marx and Lenin, so their mind-set was very different than their typical society.” Her mother, a strong woman, is an inspiration, she says.

As a woman here, to prove you can do the job “you have to work harder,” she says. Initially villagers would respond to male colleagues when she asked questions. And even eight years on, some family members and friends still ask her when she will quit working and get married. She responds, “I can’t do that. Because I’m attached to it.” And she bristles at the presumption that women must marry and have children. “I tell them, ‘Stop worrying about me! I’m doing something that I love. I’m much more happy than all of you married people, so give me a break.’”

Raza owes her early introduction to nature to the Iran-Iraq War, waged primarily in Kurdistan and followed by Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds. When she was born, her parents were living in one of the main Peshmerga camps on Permagroon Mountain, northwest of Slemani. In 1987, when she was just four months old, the camp was bombarded by chemical weapons. Raza, her 1-year-old sister, and her parents were all hit.