Noushin Farnoud can still see the pieces of brain splattered across the window of a building in the just-bombed wreckage of her Tehran neighbourhood. She rubs her temples delicately as she recounts the smell, the smoke and the raw fear of being in an Iranian war zone. The 23-year-old electrical engineering masters student still shudders at the memory of herself as a 10-year-old clinging to her parents’ hands, staring at buildings that had been cleaved into sections with the ease of “someone slicing a cake” by the incessant bombing Tehran endured during the Iran-Iraq war.