Kirdar was born in Kirkuk, Iraq, to the influential Turkmen Kirdar family who were prominent in the politics of the late Ottoman Empire and interwar Iraq. After a military coup overthrew the Iraqi monarchy in 1958, Kirdar fled Iraq to the United States to study. The much-reported story that he hid in a rolled-up carpet in the back of a truck was untrue and invented by Nigel Dempster for a story in the Daily Mail in the early 2000s. Kirdar returned to Iraq in 1960 but soon after the Baathist coup, which produced the regime of Saddam Hussein, he left the country again.