They were cooking in their respective kitchens when they happened to look across and fell in love. Sounds like a cliched idea for a Mills & Boon novel except it is the story of two love birds - Bashar and Fatima living in war torn Iraq.

"She was cooking in the kitchen. I was cooking, too, and I saw her – it was love at first sight," says Bashar, clearly elated over his recent engagement to Fatima, the oldest daughter of matriarch Karima Selman Methboub, a sturdy Iraqi widow with eight children whom the Monitor first profiled in 2002....

Unused to being rejected herself, Fatima pelted Bashar's kitchen window with potatoes, onions and tomatoes whenever she wanted to get his attention. Sometimes she enlisted young Mahmoud, who had a better throwing arm. "

Seems very romantic except the terrorists tend to bomb their neighborhood quite often and the Methboub family have had some close calls as well. Obviously, there has been tremendous repercussion on the family with the girls getting engaged at as young an age as sixteen and others like Fatima still feeling ambiguous and apprehensive about the future.