Sheikh Nuri Sheikh Salih was a prolific pen: a poet and newspaper man who read and wrote in five languages and spent his evenings raising his children on books and newspapers. Of all of them, the family recalls, none absorbed it like Shahab. His sister Runaki remembered a father who was educated and sober, and a brother who from a young age set his own course: study, and politics.

He completed sixth grade in Koya, boarding at the house of the Talabani family, where a friendship with the young Jalal took root. Later, at Faisal College in Baghdad, he stood out: well-read in global politics at a time when few Kurds reached that far, an edge he would spend on strategy for the rest of his life.

As a teenager he joined the Communist Party; by the fifties he was known as a Marxist leftist. He read Mao and saw the parallel plainly: the workers and farmers of China in the forties were living the condition of Kurdistan's in the sixties. But his politics were never abstract. Early in the morning he would put on old clothes, take a bucket of mud into downtown Kirkuk, and lay bricks beside the laborers, teaching them their rights as a workmate rather than a lecturer.