Kurdish ambassador roles for Huddersfield pair Kamal Draey and wife Rasheda

Feb 22 2010 By Dave Himelfield

Kurdish ambassador roles for Huddersfield pair

A HUDDERSFIELD couple have become education and business ambassadors for Kurdistan.

Kamal Draey and his wife Rasheda have become key figures for bringing Kurdish students to Britain and foreign businesses to Kurdistan.

This week the couple hope to meet Huddersfield University chiefs to establish links between the university.

They met Kirklees Council leader Clr Mehboob Khan on February 15 to discuss how to attract the region’s manufacturing industries to invest in the northern Iraqi state.

A meeting with Huddersfield Chamber of Commerce is also planned for this week.

It is vital work as Kirklees’ Kurdish community is now several thousand strong, possibly as many as 10,000.

The Draeys, who have four children living in Huddersfield, spend most of the year in the Kurdistan capital Arbil but spend two months each year in their second home in Brackenhall.

Mr Draey, 46, was born in Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan, northern Iraq. He fled to London in 1981, to escape persecution under Saddam Hussein’s regime.

He read civil engineering at Queen Mary College, London University, where he met Huddersfield-born Rasheda.

After a year in Kurdistan in 2001, the couple moved to Huddersfield, where Rasheda became a teacher at Huddersfield Technical College, while Kamal took a job with the Home Office.

Working with the British Council, Kamal and Rasheda founded a link between Huddersfield Technical College and Sulaymaniyah College, bringing 10 teachers and college managers over from Kurdistan universities.

In 2006, three years after Saddam was deposed, the pair returned to Kurdistan to help its coalition government rebuild the state’s education system.