Davan Yahya Khalil is a journalist and an author.
Brought up in Kurdistan during the period when the Kurds were being persecuted by the Iraqi government, he spent much of his childhood in an internment camp for Kurdish members of the Barzani tribe, and saw older men and boys from that tribe massacred as part of Saddam Hussein’s genocidal policies.
Eventually, he was able to escape, fleeing first to Iran in 1993 and then to the UK, where he currently lives with his family. He is a member of the British Association of Journalists, and is the founder of the news site The New Mail as well as being a regular contributor to news stories relating to Kurdistan.
He has written several books to date, which have covered everything from his personal experiences and the history of Kurdistan’s struggle for independence to its current situation and the likely outcomes of its struggle for autonomy. His previous books include The Idea of Kurdistan and Kurdistan: Genocide and Rebirth, which was an international book awards finalist in 2015.