Kamalfar is comforted after fainting amid the excitement of her family's arrival in Canada.

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VANCOUVER, British Columbia — An Iranian refugee who had been living with her two children at Moscow's international airport for nine months was free in Canada on Friday.

Zahra Kamalfar, a human-rights activist who says she was jailed in Iran for demonstrating against the government, arrived at Vancouver International Airport on Thursday after a flight from Europe.

She burst out sobbing, then fainted, after being reunited with her brother, Nader Kamalfar, whom she hadn't seen in nearly 14 years.

Kamalfar, 47, and Anna, 17, and Davood, 12, had been living in the transit lounge of Sheremetyevo International Airport since Russia denied them entry in May, said her Canadian lawyer, Negar Azmudeh.

Canada agreed last week to accept Kamalfar and her two children after she was granted refugee status by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

"I don't know how to thank the Canada government. I say thank you, thank you, thank you so much," she told CBC Television in broken English on Friday.

Kamalfar and her husband, Iman, were Dervishes, members of a branch of Sufism that believes in mystical rituals. The Shah of Iran had granted them land. In 1979, when the Islamic Revolution overthrew the Shah, the Kamalfars' politics and religion suddenly became unpopular.

Kamalfar's plight began in July 2004 when she and her husband participated in a demonstration against the Iranian government in Tehran, said Azmudeh. They were both jailed, and Kamalfar says she was beaten in prison.

The Iranian Embassy in Ottawa did not return a call seeking comment Friday.

Her chance for escape came when she was given a two-day pass to visit her family in April 2005. When she got home, Kamalfar was told that her husband had been executed. She then fled Iran with her two children with the intention of coming to Canada, where her brother lives.

She and the children fled overland to Turkey and booked a flight to Canada.

The flight took them to Moscow and then Frankfurt, where her travel papers were questioned. She was sent back to Moscow and held at a detention facility for 13 months.

Ten months ago, that facility was shut down and dozens of people claiming refugee status were immediately deported. The European Court of Human Rights put a stay on her deportation order after an appeal by a U.S. lawyer.

Unable to return to Russia, and without a country that would accept her, Kamalfar and her children were stuck in the Moscow airport.

"Aeroflot (Russia's international airline) gave her vouchers, and they got what little they could out of the food kiosks and slept on the floor," said Washington lawyer Eileen O'Connor. "They had to wash in the bathrooms. When we met them they had blankets, because the airport gets very cold in the winter."

The fate of her husband is uncertain, Davood Ghavami of the Iranian Canadian Congress, told The Toronto Star.

Kamalfar declined to discuss her ordeal in Iran.

"I don't like to remember because too much for me," she said. "We need time; maybe after that I can explain for you."

Kamalfar intends to live in the Vancouver area, already home to about 30,000 Iranians

"I want to find a job and a new life — a start for new life," she said.

The family's case is reminiscent of "The Terminal," a 2004 Tom Hanks film about a man trapped at New York's JFK Airport after a revolution in his fictional home country invalidates his passport. The movie is popularly believed to be based on the case of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian who said the papers proving his refugee status were stolen and who ended up living at the international airport in Paris from 1988 until 2006.