page_title: Sniper Wolf
section_title: Metal Gear Solid
hierarchical_section_title: Sniper Wolf / Appearances / Metal Gear Solid
caption_attribution_description: H&amp;K PSG-1
context_page_description: Sniper Wolf Kurdish: Gurê Sniper‎ is a fictional character from Konami's Metal Gear series. Created by Hideo Kojima and designed by Yoji Shinkawa, she appears in the 1998 stealth game Metal Gear Solid as one of the game bosses opposing the protagonist Solid Snake and his ally Meryl Silverburgh.
  The character is a ruthless and skilled sniper belonging to the renegade U.S. military special operations group FOXHOUND. "Sniper Wolf" is a nom de guerre pseudonym and her real name is undisclosed. She is of Iraqi Kurdish origin and her backstory is connected to the series' chief protagonist/antagonist character Big Boss, who had rescued her in Iraq when she was a child. Sniper Wolf is widely regarded as one of the most popular and memorable characters in this game as well as in the entire Metal Gear series, as well as one of the top female antagonists in all video gaming.
context_section_description: In Metal Gear Solid, Sniper Wolf is a member of FOXHOUND and an elite sniper capable of going without food and staying still for up to a week. She typically forms an emotional connection with her targets before killing them with her favoured weapon, the Heckler & Koch PSG1, and uses mercury-tipped hollow-point bullets to poison her victims. She is also addicted to the drug diazepam.
  Born in present-day Iraqi Kurdistan around 1983 during the Iran–Iraq War, she witnessed the death of her family and thousands of others from a chemical attack by Saddam Hussein's government troops against the rebellious Kurds when she was five years old. She was captured by Saddam's forces and taken as an orphan by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, who brainwashed her and brought a famed Gurkha sniper to train her to be a child combatant for the government. Three years later, during the 1991 uprisings in Iraq, she fled to a Kurdish refugee camp. There, the legendary U.S. Army Special Forces veteran Big Boss noticed her extraordinary abilities and brought her with him to the United States, where she received counselling and deprogramming to remove her Iraqi brainwashing, leaving only her fighting abilities with her. Extremely grateful, she thought of Big Boss as a modern Saladin and followed him in whatever he did, until his mutiny and later death at the hands of FOXHOUND operative Solid Snake (as depicted in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake). She was then found by Solid Snake's brother Liquid Snake, who convinced her to join a FOXHOUND splinter cell under his command.
  In the alternate year 2005, during the Shadow Moses Island incident (Metal Gear Solid), Sniper Wolf goes rogue along with the rest of Liquid Snake's group when they take hostages and blackmail the U.S. government with a hijacked walking tank armed with nuclear weapons, demanding the corpse of Big Boss to be handed over to them. She cares for the huskies that Liquid intended to kill, as she enjoys their company, and is impressed with the hostage scientist Hal "Otacon" Emmerich giving his scarce food supply to the dogs. When Solid Snake (further referred to as Snake) infiltrates the island, Sniper Wolf wounds Snake's companion Meryl Silverburgh to lure him into a trap, capturing him so he could be tortured by another FOXHOUND member, Revolver Ocelot. Eventually, Snake defeats her in sniper duel in a snowy field by shooting her in the lung. After hearing Sniper Wolf's story of her life, and at her request to be at last "set free", Snake kills her over objections by Otacon, who professes his love for her. Solid Snake also uses her handkerchief to avoid attacks by her wolves by masking his scent with hers. Sniper Wolf's ghost can be seen if the player uses the in-game photo camera on her body.
caption: Diagram of the H&K PSG1 rifle
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