David A. Korn, a former Foreign Service officer, writer and consultant on Middle Eastern and African issues, wrote in 1994 a detailed essay about Kurdish revolt, Mullah Mustafa Barzani as a mythical leader and lack of international friends for Kurds at that time. This essay was translated by Kurdish writer and translator Wria Rahmani as a part of his recent book.

The writer sheds light on the personality of Mullah Mustafa Barzani. “Among the Kurds, Barzani was a figure of mythical proportions. His life had become the stuff of legend. Although called Mullah Mustafa, he was not a mullah--a religious dignitary--but a man born and bred to fight and to lead others in war” Korn explained.

About the Kurdish revolt, which Barzani was its leader, the writer said “his revolts, his feats of arms, his twelve-year exile in the Soviet Union, his glorious return, and his long championship of Kurdish rights had given Kurds everywhere--not just in Iraq but in Turkey, Iran, Syria, the Soviet Union, and abroad, in Western Europe and the United States--a sense of pride and of nationhood such as they had never before felt.”

“He had reached very high, but he had misjudged his base and then he had fallen. The movement that he had built in over four decades of struggle had collapsed, and he and those who joined him in it had lost everything” the writer said while explain the way the Kurdish revolt had failed and collapsed.