Celebrated Kurdish-Kazakh academic Nadir Karim Nadirov dies at 89

Late Kurdish professor Nadir Karim Nadrov, sometimes called “Kazakhstan’s Father of Oil and Gas.” (Photo: Social Media)
Late Kurdish professor Nadir Karim Nadrov, sometimes called “Kazakhstan’s Father of Oil and Gas.” (Photo: Social Media)

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The family of prominent Kazakh-Kurdish engineer and highly-respected academic Nadir Karim Nadirov announced on Tuesday that he had died that day at age 89.

The Kurdish professor passed away in Kazakhstan's largest city of Almaty after battling an undisclosed illness, his daughter-in-law wrote in a social media post shortly after his passing.

Born in 1932 in Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan, he was one of the early engineers that discovered his nation’s oil reserves, giving him the nickname “Kazakhstan’s Father of Oil and Gas.”

He was the president of the Association of Kurds in Kazakhstan, the first vice-president of the Engineering Academy of Kazakhstan, the director of the Neft scientific center, and a presidential advisor for over a decade.

Nadirov is well-known among Kurdish circles for going public with information about mass deportations of Kurds in Kazakhstan under the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s.

From 2010 until his death, he had been Kazakhstan’s presidential advisor. 

Editing by John J. Catherine