Najmuddin Faraj Ahmad

Najmadin Faraj Ahmad, better known as Mullah Krekar, is an Iraqi Kurdish Sunni Islamic scholar and militant leader. He was a commander for the Peshmerga unit belonging to the Kurdistan Islamic Movement during the 1991 Iraqi uprisings. Later, he founded Ansar al-Islam in 2001, and left for Norway in 2003, where he founded Rawti Shax. He was arrested and is currently serving a prison sentence in Italy, after having been extradited from Norway in 2020. He came to Norway as a refugee from Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991. His wife, Rukhosh Ahmad, and his four children have Norwegian citizenship, but not Krekar himself. He speaks Kurdish, Arabic, Persian, Norwegian and English. He had no relation to Jama'at Ansar al-Islam, which emerged long after Ansar al-Islam disbanded.