Minneapolis Star Tribune
WEST FARGO, N.D. — Portraits are mustered in the comfortable living room of Hussein Weled’s West Fargo home like a squad of impatient but determined guerrilla fighters.
The two largest are portraits of Mustafa Barzani, the legendary Kurdish leader who died in exile in Washington, D.C., in 1979. One is of Barzani’s son, Massoud, now president of the Kurdish Democratic Party, political arm of the Peshmerga — Kurdish for “those who face death.”
Another portrait is of a young man in uniform, unsmiling and fierce.
More than a quarter-century ago, that was Weled, who in the mid-1970s led a unit of 120 Peshmerga guerrillas battling the armies of Saddam Hussein for control of that part of the Kurds’ homeland that lies within northern Iraq.
At 54, Weled retains the fighting trim of his youth, and fierceness still defines his eyes when he recounts the history of his people.
But he smiled frequently last week as he watched statues of Saddam topple in Baghdad.
“I am happy to see this regime gone,” he said.
His sentiment is shared in its depth and details by a remarkable number of his neighbors in Fargo and West Fargo. Since 1991, as many as 500 Iraqi Kurds have resettled there, one of the largest such concentrations in the United States.
