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Hamma Mirwaisi was exposed to the oppression of Kurds while still a youth, as his education was frequently interrupted by Iraqi government harassment. Forbidden from entering university in 1968, he had little choice but to join the peshmerga (freedom fighter) forces of Mustafa Barzani from 1968 to 1975 in their battles against the Iraqi Government forces. Although the conflict was resolved by treaty in 1975, he foresaw reprisals by Saddam Hussein's secret service against his extended family. He took his wife and two children to Iran, and in 1976 they entered the US as legal refugees, settling in Valley City, North Dakota. Mirwaisi completed BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering at the University of North Dakota. That led to a technical career, beginning in 1982 at the Sperry Corporation in Minneapolis. Sperry's merger with Unisys Corporation caused the end of his program, and he took up Ph.D. studies in Radio-Frequency (RF) Engineering at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Eventually he returned to work at Honeywell, where he completed his career, becoming the Senior RF Engineer on the Air Force Satellite Communication program. The tragedy of the Kurds intervened again in 1995. His sister and her two-year-old daughter were drowned while escaping Saddam Hussein's reprisals against the Kurds for their rebellion during the first Gulf War. He returned to Kurdish affairs in 2004, when the US Army called on him to serve as an interpreter in the second Gulf War. At the end of that assignment, he began seeking American corporate sponsors for the rebuilding of Kurdistan. However, the Barzanis, who controlled the Kurdistan Regional Government, saw the initiative as a scheme to undermine their own influence and expelled Mirwaisi from Iraq. The doors to government and corporate sponsorship of works in Kurdistan (at least those that did not include a Barzani rake-off) slammed shut. Since then, Mirwaisi has devoted his efforts to spreading the word about Kurdish history and culture through writing and speaking. After his first book, Return of the Medes, he was invited to serve for a year as an honorary member of the Kurdistan National Congress (KNK), a Kurdish parliament in exile that sits in Brussels. He is the author of many other books on Kurdish affairs The History of the Caucasian People: The Civilizations without Hatred ... https://www.amazon.com/History-Caucasian-People-Civilizations-without/dp/1543172784/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_enc
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