Days From the Kurdish Revolution is the title of a memoir by Shawkat Ismail Hassan. Born in Sulaimani in 1937 Hassan was among a few Kurds accepted into the police academy in Baghdad when he was twenty years old. He succeeded in his studies and was granted the rank of Second Lieutenant to serve in the Mobile Police Forces. He didn’t stay long in the police force and joined the Kurdish revolutionary movement in the early 1960s and spent many a year with the leader of the movement Mustafa Barzani.
Days From the Kurdish Movement that covers the period from 1961 to 1975 is Hassan’s story of his time with the Kurdish leader and the struggle of Iraqi Kurds for their rights in Iraq.
The book, 499 pages, is originally written in Kurdish and translated into English by Salah A. Irfan. Hassan says that over the years friends had urged him to “write a book in the reminiscences of those great old days,” that he spent in the company of the Kurdish Peshmerga.
Hassan stood out among his Peshmerga comrades very early on thanks to his professional training at the Baghdad police academy and he describes the feeling of taking that knowledge with him into the Kurdish movement as an honour and privilege.
“Arriving at the headquarters of Mullah Mustafa Barzani the legendary commander of the Kurdish successive uprisings, all over the northern Iraqi Kurdish provinces, I found myself soon engaged in the war and the difficult works of administration. Barzani was in need of helping hands to assist him in taking from his shoulders the burden of the tasks accumulated around him in all aspects of life.”
Barzani’s treatment as an experienced revolutionary leader of Hassan, a young police graduate, doubled his enthusiasm for the Kurdish cause and his own work which was increasing by the day. “Immediately I was involved in the tangles of many jobs of different nature, resulting in the increase of my relationships with people, the fact which promoted my position as well and making of me an indispensable element in the core of an environ unfamiliar and rather complicate in the beginning for me.”
Among Hassan’s many tasks and responsibilities was to become a personal secretary to Barzani “wherein I was entrusted with personal letters, private messages and confidential correspondences.”
Due to his expertise Hassan is then told to embark on an “ambitious project for the installation of a network of communications in order to connect parts of the liberated areas of Kurdistan together.” Later he is nicknamed the codebreaker by one of his comrades. He vividly remembers many days and nights when he had to warn innocent villagers to evacuate and run for cover after having decoded enemy messages and military plans.
“When the enemy’s purpose became quite clear, after I had deciphered the contents of a message, we started to alert the people living in the locations which were intended to be attacked by the hostile aircrafts or to be shelled by the artillery. The targets were usually villages at the foot of mountains or in the depth of valleys while their residents were living peacefully there, working as peasants, ploughing the fields, attending the daily farm tasks or rearing their domestic animals.”
Hassan’s tasks do not only revolve around technical or military work. More often than not he finds himself in the midst of visits by local, political and foreign dignitaries to Barzani’s headquarters where he plays the role of a translator between English, Kurdish and Arabic and thus witnesses conversations and meetings that reflect the state of affairs of his time.
Hassan’s book is a firsthand account of the early days of the Kurdish movement under Barzani and their struggle to keep up with the changes of the time and the plans of the Iraqi regime to nip that revolution in the bud. It contains great details of the daily life of the Peshmerga, many battles and the dream of a free Kurdistan that had driven so many young people like himself to the rugged and inaccessible mountains.
Many veteran Kurdish Peshmerga have penned their memoirs, but Days From the Kurdish Revolution is one of few translated into English. It contains personal photos and many valuable handwritten documents.
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