Mustafa Barzani
Kurdish nationalist (1903–1979)
Mustafa Barzani (14 March 1903 – 1 March 1979), also known as Mullah Mustafa, was a Kurdish nationalist leader and one of the most prominent political figures in modern Kurdish politics.
In 1946, he was chosen as the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) to lead the Kurdish revolt against the Kingdom of Iraq. Barzani was the primary political and military leader of the Kurdish separatist movement until his death in March 1979. He led campaigns of armed insurgency against both the Iraqi and Iranian governments.
Early life
Mustafa Barzani was born in 1903 in Barzan, a village in southern Kurdistan. When Barzan was just a few months old, his home village was attacked by the Hamidiye Horsemen, an Ottoman army made up mostly of Kurdish tribal warriors and commanders, and he and his family were deported to Diyarbakır, where he spent a long time in prison. Following an insurrection launched by his tribe, he and his family were imprisoned, when Barzani was only three years old. His father, grandfather, and a brother were later executed by the Ottoman authorities for other insurrections.
At an early age he was sent by his older brother Sheikh Ahmed Barzani to join with about twenty men the revolt of Kurdish chiefs of Az Zibar against the British in Iraq. About a hundred fighters managed to ambush the British diplomat J.H.H. Bill and his company and the group was divided into two.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Mustafa Barzani” as kurdish nationalist (1903–1979). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q368858. VIAF identifies the subject as 5733360. The Library of Congress control number is n83050736. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1903, 1979 and 1946.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mustafa Barzani” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.