Hilmi Ali Shareef was born in 1931 in Dargazen neighborhood of Sulaymaniyah, South Kurdistan. According to some other sources, they say that he was born in Halabja, and his family later moved to Sulaymaniyah from Halabja.
He completed his primary and secondary education in Sulaymaniyah and then completed his secondary education in Baquba.
He became a patriot and nationalist in the mid-1940s and in 1948, when the great Iraqi uprising broke out, he was one of the prominent leaders of the student movement.
When he was enrolled in college engineering, he was imprisoned for two years, and suspended from the university.
When the Kurdistan Democratic Party also known as (KDP) was officially licensed, Hilmi became an important member of the newspaper Khabat and served his party in this field. With the beginning of the September Revolution, he became a Peshmerga and took many party responsibilities in Garmian, Halabja and Hawraman. In the mid-1960s, he became a member of the Political Bureau of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). In 1968, he became the owner and editor of the newspaper Al-Noor.
He graduated from the College of Political Science in the mid-1970s.
This Kurdish intellectual has always been on the battlefield of the nation and has provided great services to his people in the fields of journalism, writing and culture.
Hilmi died of a sudden illness in Baghdad, capital of Iraq on the night of 05-07-1998 and was buried the next day in a solemn ceremony in Saywan Hill cemetary in the city of Sulaymaniyah, his own hometown.[1]