More than half his volunteers were killed. His father was murdered and his brother shot by Iraqi agents outside Sulaimaniyah’s main mosque in 1986 for no other reason than his blood tie to Shoresh.

But since the fall of Saddam, the Kurds have enjoyed a calm and comparative peace that the rest of Iraq’s battle-fatigued people would envy. Nowhere is this more obvious that on the streets of Sulaimaniyah, where life is almost back to normal.

Now 48, Mr Ismail is director of the Establishment for Martyrs of the Kurdistan Revolution, a pension scheme funded by the Kurdish regional government for the families of killed peshmerga. Every day he hears stories of torture, execution and disappearance, which are all too common among northern Iraq’s 5 million Kurds. But at least the people can speak out without fear of retribution.

He has as much reason as any Kurd to hope for independence, but that is not his priority.

“Independence is still a wish for all of us,” he said, “but reality comes first. It is a time for negotiation and the creation of a new Iraq that guarantees Kurdish rights within the constitution.”

Kurdish nationalism continues to concern those trying to unite Iraq, but most Kurds remain pragmatic after the elections gave them 77 seats in the 275-member National Assembly, a powerful voice that will be enhanced if Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader, becomes president.

“We are landlocked,” Muhammad Tawfiq, a leading member of the politburo for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), said. “We have to be realistic. What we want is Iraq to remain secular and a parliamentary democracy, Kurdistan to exist in a federal set-up and for human rights to be guaranteed.”

Such reasonable tones are underlined by the experience of the Kurds in the past decade. While the rest of the country has been racked by violence and criminality, the Kurdish region has remained an oasis of comparative liberalism and peace under its own functioning administration.

Contention remains over the issue of Kirkuk, however, which sits on 40 per cent of Iraq’s oil reserves. It is regarded as Kurdish, but lies outside the borders of the three provinces controlled by the regional government. Kurds want it back, along with other disputed territories such as Khanaqin. Neighbouring countries such as Turkey, fearing that it will allow Kurds an economic platform for independence, are determined that it remains outside Kurdish control.

The Kurds have proposed that Kirkuk’s oil remains a national Iraqi asset and that in return Kurds should receive a percentage of Iraq’s overall oil revenue proportional to their population.

The Kurds say that the future of Kirkuk and Khanaqin must be decided over the summer and publicly backed by the National Assembly before the new constitution is drawn up.

“All we say to the Arab political parties is ‘give us a good constitution, give us our disputed territories and give us a good federalism and we’ll sell the idea to the Kurdish people’,” Mr Tawfiq said. “But as for Kirkuk, if we aren’t happy we’ll block the constitution.”

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