Preaching Christ Crucified

In 1959 I was born into a Muslim family in Kurdistan in northern Iraq. I was the fifth child of a large family. The Arab culture and the religion of Islam were the dominant influences, overshadowing the three other nations in Iraq, the largest of which are the Kurds. I began the formal study of Arabic at the age of twelve. By the time I was sixteen, I was writing poetry in Arabic, some of which was published as early as 1976.

My political activities in the Kurdish opposition against Saddam Hussein spanned most of my adult life in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, in one of his many attacks on the Kurds, forcibly moved large populations from their homes, banishing them to other parts of the country, to grab and secure his control over the Kurdish oil fields. Thus began in 1975 my active effort to free the Kurds and unite them politically.

For this, I suffered jail and torture a number of times at the hand of Saddam. My close encounters with death were seen as “luck” when armies invading Kurdistan took the lives of my fellow fighters. Numerous times God saved me from death as it came near through a judge’s decree, by the chemical bombs raining down upon the Kurds, by near-drowning, and serious wounding. However, I did not then recognize that it was the hand of God.

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