There are names in Kurdish history that transcend biography. Names that become symbols, rallying points, expressions of collective identity that mean something far beyond the individual who carried them. Mama Risha is one of those names. Born Najmadin Shukr Rauf Zangana in the village of Talaban near Chamchamal in 1957, he died at the age of 27 in a cowardly ambush organised by Kurdish collaborators working for Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime. In the four decades since his martyrdom he has become perhaps the single most beloved figure in the entire history of the Peshmerga, a man of no formal rank who occupies a place in Kurdish consciousness that no general has ever matched.
The name Mama Risha means Bearded Uncle in Kurdish. He chose it himself and the story behind the choice tells you everything you need to know about the man. He swore that he would not shave his beard until Kurdistan was free from Ba’athist control. It was a private oath made into a public statement, a daily commitment worn on his face that announced to friend and enemy alike exactly where he stood and what he was prepared to sacrifice. He was also known by another name: the Iron Man. It was earned through the ferocity, discipline and tactical brilliance of his operations against Iraqi forces in the Kirkuk area. These were not the nicknames of a man who inspired indifference.
His path to the Peshmerga was shaped by a political consciousness that formed early and ran deep. The Ba’ath regime’s campaign of destruction across Kurdistan the burning of villages, the displacement of farming communities, the systematic campaign to demographically engineer the Kurdish heartland around Kirkuk was reaching its most brutal phase. Mama Risha joined the Peshmerga forces of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan under Jalal Talabani and began the armed struggle that would define and ultimately end his short life.
What made Mama Risha extraordinary was not his rank, he held none in any conventional military sense but his effectiveness and the manner in which he led. He participated in engagements across Kirkuk, Slemani and Erbil, taking part in major confrontations with Ba’athist forces including the battles of Hamak, Zhallay Darband, Zhallay Khwelen, Betwata, Qara Hassan, Jabarim Sheikh Bzeni and the Kakibakai plane ambushes. In each of these operations he demonstrated a combination of personal courage and tactical intelligence that repeatedly embarrassed a vastly better-equipped enemy. He gave lessons, as those who fought alongside him have noted, to thousands of Iraqi officers and commanders who far outranked him in formal military terms and were utterly outclassed by him in the field.
He did not graduate from a military academy. He had no stars on his shoulders and no formal command structure beneath him in the conventional sense. What he had was the absolute trust and devotion of the men who fought alongside him, a deep and instinctive understanding of the terrain in which he operated and an unshakeable conviction in the justice of the Kurdish cause. These qualities, in the conditions of the Kurdish mountains under Ba’athist pressure, were worth more than any formal military education. The Peshmerga tradition has always understood this, that the measure of a fighter is not the institution that trained him but what he is willing to do and endure for his people.
He was killed on 25 January 1985 in an ambush in the Kirkuk Governorate. He was lured to the home of a fellow Kurd, a jash, a collaborator in the service of Saddam Hussein’s regime who had offered his friendship and hospitality as a cover for betrayal. Unsuspecting, trusting the apparent sincerity of a countryman, he entered the house and was killed by a machine gun. He was 27 years old.
The manner of his death, betrayed by a fellow Kurd acting as an instrument of the Ba’athist state, carries a significance beyond the tragedy of any individual loss. It speaks to the particular cruelty of the apparatus Saddam Hussein built in Kurdistan, one that sought not only to destroy Kurdish fighters militarily but to corrode the bonds of trust and solidarity that made Kurdish resistance possible. That apparatus failed. His martyrdom became a source of inspiration and renewed commitment for those who continued the fight after him.
Today his name endures as a living standard in Kurdish culture. To call someone a Mama Risha is among the highest compliments the Kurdish language offers a recognition of courage, integrity and selfless commitment to the national cause. Statues, murals and memorials across the Kurdistan Region bear his likeness. His story is told to children. His oath, the beard grown in defiance and kept in honour, remains one of the most powerful images in the entire iconography of Kurdish resistance.
Mama Risha had no formal education, no political title and no military rank. What he had was a cause worth dying for and the character to see it through to the end. In a Kurdish history full of leaders, commanders and politicians, he remains in many ways the purest expression of what the Peshmerga spirit actually means ordinary in origin, extraordinary in dedication, immortal in legacy.
