Khalil Ahmed left his family before his wife gave birth to his son, Gandhi who himself is a father now. Overwhelmed with seeing his father for the first time, he described the moment he saw his father as “his second birth.”
Ahmed is 72 years of age now. He was arrested in Baghdad after the demise of the Kurdish Aylul Revolution. The Baath regime handed down death sentence to Ahmed, who was later pardoned by the Iraqi government. He left Iraq upon release from jail, going to Syria first, then to Lebanon. He eventually ended up in Sudan in 1982, settling down in a village there.
His first wife and three children live in Kirkuk now. Ahmed remarried in Sudan, and has four children with his second wife, two sons and two daughters.
He said that he became disillusioned about the prospect of seeing his family again, but continued to hang on to the hope of reuniting with his family one day. This hope compelled him to embark on the quest of finding his family despite communication difficulties in the past.
A Kurdish student, who studies for a master’s degree in Khartoum, reportedly has come across Ahmed there, and managed to find his family in Kirkuk. He then reported the story to Rudaw Media Network.
His son, Gandhi, traveled to the Sudanese capital to see the father he had never seen before. A crew from Rudaw accompanied Gandhi all the way to Khartoum in order to tell the story of a father living in diaspora for over four decades and a family in waiting in Kirkuk, longing to one day reunite with the long-disappeared Ahmed.
“My father was not there when I was born. It is my second birth now that I for the first time saw my father and my brother. I don’t know how to express my emotions,” Gandhi said while meeting his father in Khartoum.
His father was equally overwhelmed when he saw the son he had never seen before.
“Forty years of living in diaspora! Kurdistan is our homeland. My children do not now know about Kurdistan. But I hope that I along with my children could return to Kurdistan, even if it is for a day,” Ahmed told Rudaw.
He, however, has neither Iraqi nor Sudanese passport to be able to travel outside Sudan.
His request for Kurdish authorities is to “contact the Iraqi embassy (in Sudan) to issue them with passports,” so that they can travel to the Kurdistan Region.
