Mallaka Mostafa Soltani is a Kurdish writer, memoirist, and one of the first women to join the Peshmerga forces after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. In her memoir In the Shadow of Qalabard Peak, she narrates the life of a woman who has lived multiple identities at once: daughter, sister, wife, mother, and freedom fighter.
Her book offers a deeply personal and powerful account of lived experiences shaped by armed struggle, political activism, imprisonment, repression, exile, loss, and resilience. Soltani writes not only as a witness to history, but as an active participant in one of the most turbulent periods of modern Kurdish history.
Her work stands as both a literary testimony and a historical document, highlighting women’s participation in resistance movements and political struggle. In the Shadow of Qalabard Peak contributes significantly to Kurdish women’s memoir writing and post-revolutionary oral history, preserving voices that have long remained absent from official historical narratives.
