The statue of Ehmedê Xanî is located by an intersection in Duhok, a city which was deeply affected by the war with ISIS in Iraq.
Ehmedê Xanî was a Kurdish scholar and poet who lived in the second half of the 17th Century. The statue is made of bronze and stays high, placed on a tall plinth of stone. It is roughly real life scale and shows the poet reciting. There is a plaque in Kurdish saying roughly the following:
"The famous Kurdish poet and philosopher - Ahmed Xani"
No reference to the author of date of placement of the sculpture.
From Wikipedia:
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"Ehmedê Xanî (also Ahmad-e Khani, Kurdo-Arabic script: ??????? ????) was a Kurdish intellectual, scholar, mystic and poet who is viewed by some as the founder of Kurdish nationalism. He was born in the Hakkâri region in 1650 and died in Bayazid in 1707.
Xanî's most important work is Mem and Zin, a long romantic epic which is sometimes viewed as the Kurdish national epic. It is the most famous work of Kurdish literature among both Kurds and non-Kurds. His other important works include Nûbihara Biçûkan, a versified Arabic-Kurdish vocabulary, and Eqîdeya Îmanê, a religious poem. These works were studied in Kurdish schools from the time of Khani towards the 1930s.
Xanî admired the Kurmanji poets Melayê Cizîrî and Feqiyê Teyran. Joyce Blau called him the spiritual son of Cizîrî, Teyran and Ali Hariri.
Biography
Xanî was born in the village of Khan in the region of Hakkari (in modern-day southeastern Turkey) in 1650. He received his education in religious schools and went to study in different parts of Kurdistan. He wrote his first poem at the age of fourteen and became a clerical secretary at the princely court of Bayazid at the age of twenty. It is possible that he also visited Syria and Egypt. There are indications in his poetry that he lived for a long time in the city of Jazira (Cizre), which was the capital of the Kurdish principality of Bohtan. He completed the romantic epic Mem and Zin, his most famous work, at the age of 44.[4] He worked as a teacher in Bayazid in the last years of his life. Most scholars concur that he died in Bayazid in 1707."