Mustafa Barzani

Mullah Mustafa Barzani (1903–1979), the greatest Kurdish military leader of the twentieth century and the founder of the modern Kurdish national movement in Iraq. Born in the village of Barzan in northern Iraq to a Naqshbandi Sufi religious family, he took part in the Sheikh Said revolt of 1925 and the Barzan uprising of 1932, and was imprisoned and exiled several times. He accompanied Qazi Muhammad to the Republic of Mahabad in 1946 and became the supreme military commander of the Kurdish army. After the fall of the Republic he led an epic march of 500 of his men across the mountains to the Soviet Union, where he lived in exile for ten years. He returned to Iraq in 1958 after the revolution of Abd al-Karim Qasim and launched the September Revolt of 1961, which lasted fourteen years. He accepted an autonomy agreement with Baghdad in 1970, but it collapsed in 1975 with the Algiers Agreement between Iraq and Iran which cut off Iranian support for the Kurds. He died in the United States in 1979; his body was returned to Kurdistan in 1992 and buried at Barzan. He is today considered the 'father-founder' of the Kurdish movement in Iraq, and his son Masoud Barzani served as president of the Kurdistan Region from 2005 to 2017.