My First Post

An Introduction

Fellow readers, I plan to share my life journey here as I believe in the power of a story. Let me first introduce myself.

Born in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, I came of age under the shadow of Saddam Hussein’s regime. My early life was shaped by Kurdish nationalism, resistance, survival, and a deep commitment to freedom—values that eventually led me to collaborate with anti-regime CIA operations in Northern Iraq from 1993 to 1996. When my life came under threat, I fled to Turkey and immigrated legally through UNHCR to the United States in 1997, aided by quiet hands and official channels.

In America, I rebuilt from scratch—earning a second engineering degree, becoming a U.S. citizen, and serving for over a decade in various counterterrorism roles, including missions in Baghdad, Berlin, Riyadh, Bahrain, and Kuwait. I worked as a dual-certified language analyst and later as an intelligence analyst, handling high-level terrorism cases with various US-government federal agencies.

Today, I serve as a diplomat for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the leading Kurdish parties in Iraqi Kurdistan and at the same time run a think tank. I interact regularly with U.S. and European diplomats, bridging worlds that once seemed impossibly far apart.

This Substack is my space to write—regularly and candidly—about my life, my experiences, and the lessons I’ve carried across borders, battlefields, and bureaucracies. I write as a patriot, a father, a survivor, and a believer in the power of story to inspire courage and hope.