The youngest colonel in Iraq's revamped army is a slim, grizzled veteran who already has 15 years of combat experience.
Saman Talabani, 37, gained his combat experience as a Kurdish peshmerga fighter battling the forces of ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
But Talabani, who says he is a nephew of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, doesn't see himself as a Kurdish soldier, and doesn't care for the ethnic or religious identification of his soldiers.
"I am a Kurd, my soldiers are Arabs, but we are all Iraqis," he said.
Talabani was recently appointed commander of the Second Brigade, 5th Infantry Division of Iraq's newborn army.
When US-led forces toppled Saddam in 2003 the former dictator's army was dissolved.
Iraq's new government is now building a national army from the ground up, with help from the US, and Talabani said he is grateful for US support.
US officials say building the Iraqi army is key to allowing the US to draw down its 136,000 soldiers currently in the country.
Talabani belongs not to President Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) but to a rival political faction, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) headed by Massoud Barzani.
However, Talabani said he fights for Iraq, not for Kurdish independence, showing off a sticker on his office armoire that reads in Arabic: "I love Iraq."
He speaks fluent English and received an advanced degree from the Australian military academy last year.
While in Australia he said he was sometimes asked by foreign students how he could collaborate with the Americans, so he burned a CD with photos of Saddam's crimes to show them the horrors of his regime.
For Iraq, "I want a new army, like any army," he said.
"An army used to help people, to defend the country, not for invading another country," he added.
Talabani believes a small, well-trained and well-equipped army working with allies is more efficient than the enormous army Saddam recruited.
In any case "after the war against terror ends, we will need more workers, not more soldiers," he said.
Talabani's brigade of 3,000 men is known as the "Desert Lions." Its hunting grounds include the restive province of Diyala, population 1.8 million.
Diyala is located some 400km south of his native town of Arbil, one of the main cities in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region.
Iraq's army, grossly underequipped compared with the US military, is constantly targeted by insurgents.
But it takes a lot to frighten someone like Talabani, who is married and has a young son.
Since the creation of the autonomous Kurdish area in northern Iraq in 1991 Talabani has fought Saddam's army, Islamic extremist groups and even the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a leftist Kurdish underground group active in Turkey.
"We are ready to die. We all die someday, so it is better to be doing something good," he said.
"We are going to win because we do the right thing. The wrong has a very short life," he said.
"Time is on our side," he added.
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