As a leader of the Kurdish national liberation movement for almost half a century, Mustafa Barzani witnessed many historical events that rocked the Middle East and had a strong impact on the fate of the Kurdish communities in the region. Barzani's life-long struggle began in 1907 when he was barely three years old, when he and his mother were incarcerated in the aftermath of a raid by the Ottoman Turkish forces. Barzani went on to spend most of his life fighting various governments partitioning Kurdistan. Barzani's son, Massoud, the president of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and currently the de facto ruler of much of Iraqi Kurdistan, has put together a valuable dossier of documents, stories, rare photos and has pieced them into a narrative in the first person with his reflections and analyses of historic events in the period 1931 to 1961.