Zahir Mahmoud was born in 1956 in the city of #Sulaymaniyah#, South Kurdistan.
Since 1976 due to his severe burns, he has been living as a refugee in Amsterdam. He is currently married to a Dutch woman named Martha, with whom he still lives in Amsterdam to this day.
After his arrival, the difficult conditions of his life and the pain of his burns gave him a difficult life. He has undergone various surgeries due to the pain and torture of his unhealed wounds.
In 1968, like every ordinary person and child, he was in school. The Ba'ath regime's men attacked him because of his older brother, who was a Peshmerga of the Iraqi Communist Party (central leadership wing). At the age of 11, he was shot in the leg by the Iraqi forces.
This action ruined his life and he went into hiding. After that, he joined the Peshmerga struggle as a neglected child and joined the ranks of the Kurdistan Revolutionary Army and participated in the struggle of the Great September Revolution.
He was seriously injured in the Great September Revolution by a phosphorus bomb that was given to the Iraqi regime by the communist Soviet Union. As he says, this tragedy summed up his whole life as just a person wounded in the war.
He did not speak any European languages at the time but was taken to Britain by the Americans and his life was saved in a hospital in London.
He was admitted to London's University College Hospital, where dozens of newspapers and television channels visited him and took many pictures of him. This injury has often been used by the United States and the international community for political purposes.
They used it as a political game and (political advertisement) against the then socialist bloc (Soviet) how he was wounded as a Kurdish Peshmerga due to weapons supplied by the Soviets.[1]