Khyar Aziouel

Khyar Aziouel
Amizar of Charnea
Incumbent
Assumed office 1 October 2023
Preceded by	Office Created
Personal details
Born	14 October 1983 Hatheria, Charnea
Spouse	Seda Souri
Children	Ilbak Souri Askiou Souri
Alma mater	Senusret Military Academy
Profession	Military leader

Khyar Aziouel is a military officer and political leader in the Republic of Charnea. He currently serves as the first Amizar of the Republic, having assumed office on the 20th of January 2024 to begin his term. Khyar is one of the key figures of the nascent Republic as one of the founders of the system of franchise earned through service which he helped established in part during his time in the Provisional Military Government and expanded at the beginning of his term as Amizar. He is an important ideological proponent of a strand of Charnean Nationalists dedicated to the integration of ethnic and religious minorities into the Charnean Nation in part through the new model of national service open to all. This nascent political movement, sometimes dubbed Aziouelists, also contains a strong anti-corruption bend, attracting members of the military old guard and civilian supporters alike united by their dissatisfaction with the open corruption of the previous AKE regime. Prior to his political career in the Republic, Khyar was a career officer in the Charnean Army serving as part of the Desert Rangers. His first combat deployment was during the September War in 2004, after which he would be reassigned to the Ranger training school in Agnannet as an instructor. He would later rise to the command of the entire Ranger school, occupying a senior position in the Ranger Corps by the time of the Muttay uprising.

Early life

Khyar was born on the 29th of September 1983 in the maternity ward of Alla military hospital outside of Azut into one of many Kel Dinik families that had been uprooted by the Ninvite War still raging across their Hatherian homeland at the time. The first years of Khyar's life were spent in the Mawla Refugee Camp in the Adjer mountains north of Azut where he was looked after by his mother Manat and his three elder sisters. His father, Mokhtar Afad, was among the earliest recruits to join the Desert Rangers and would die in the war less than a year after the birth of Khyar, his only son. Like many war widows of the Ninvite War era, Manat would face immense hardships in maintaining her children after the deaths of the adult men in the family, a struggle which was all the more severe for their second-class citizenship as Hatherian Kel Dinik. The family was among many which was expelled from Mawla after the 1987 armistice ended the Ninvite War, loosing what little support the state offered to the camp inhabitants and being cast out to fend for themselves. Upon returning to their original settlement at Huskat Unan in western Hatheria, they would find that their dwellings had been destroyed and that their fields had been overrun by the desert in their absence, which was beyond their ability to salvage. The family was taken in by a man known only as Sidi Anoub, a Coptic anchorite turned farmer who took it upon himself to shelter a number of those displaced by the war.

Sidi Anoub showed a high level of deference and respect towards Manat and Khyar's elder sisters, and eventually came to fill the role of a father-figure for the young Khyar despite his harsh disciplinarian manner. At age 6, Khyar began working intensively on Sidi Anoub's homestead, contributing to the labor-intensive task of carving out arable fields for cultivation and protecting them from the encroaching desert. Sidi Anoub assumed the responsibility of Khyar's formation, teaching him to read and write in the Tifinagh, Gharbaic and Latin scripts as well as basic mathematics. Khyar would remain fluent in the Deshrian language as well as his native Tamashek to the present day. Upon turning 16, Anoub convinced Khyar to follow in his biological father's footsteps and join the Charnean Army. While this would take him off the farm, Khyar could better provide for his family by sending a remittance of his military salary home than by staying with them and working the fields.

Military career

Field duty

Khyar Aziouel presented himself in person at the Senusret Military Academy in Azut on 5 December 1999 to volunteer for the Ranger Corps. While the Kel Dinik were generally shunned by their Ajamite cousins in the regular military ranks, they were a readily accepted demographic in the far more ethnically diverse Ranger Corps, where they were often prized operatives due to commonly being fluent in both Tamashek and Gharbaic dialects, as well as being familiar with the lay of the land in the conflict-prone Charnean Far East. During the grueling 18 month period of Ranger boot camp, Khyar was noted for exceptional physical ability which regularly put him at the top of his class in physical challenges, which made up for his mediocre marksmanship in the eyes of the supervising officers. Khyar would be fully inducted into the Ranger Corps on July 1st 2001, whereupon he was assigned to a long range reconnaissance unit to conduct long-duration missions in the eastern desert as is typical of fresh Ranger inductees. Khyar initially struggled with the transition from Ranger school to the field and was especially apprehensive towards potential combat encounters. However, after assuming initiative during a high profile anti-smuggling raid, Khyar would be advanced to a leadership role in recognition of his more personnel-oriented abilities, assigned to lead his own four man team in the field. In this capacity, Khyar would become witness to the low-level conflict in Hatheria in the months leading up to the explosion of the September War in 2004.

Although comparatively brief, the fighting during the September War took a toll on the Desert Ranger ranks who were utilized extensively in a counter-insurgent direct action role. Khyar's unit faced multiple combat encounters and suffered casualties, including one combat operation on 10 September 2004 in a suburb of Hamath that would see Khyar emerge as the lone survivor of his unit of 4. The September War was a period of deep hardship for Khyar, as it was for many in the Army and in the Ranger Corps specifically. At the outbreak of hostilities, the majority of the Ranger force was repurposed as special forces and light infantry to combat the uprising, leading to the highest casualties of any unit in the ICA falling squarely on the Rangers in the field. By the end of the war, Khyar was one of only 5 surviving members of his original graduating class of 40. As a veteran of the fighting in Hamath as well as the Battle of Mab, the last major clash of the war, Khyar had emerged as an experienced combat veteran in spite of his age and time in the service, lumped in with far more senior Rangers due to his experiences in the war. In an attempt to recover from the horrific losses of the September War, the Ranger Corps began a program of accelerated advancement for its surviving combat veterans on top of the battlefield promotions they may have already gained. A recently promoted Sergeant (Kumandi) on the eve of the conflict, Khyar would attain the rank of Adjutant-Major, the highest enlisted rank in the ICA. Many of the September War veterans like Khyar would also be pulled from field duty after the war and reassigned to training units at the Senusret Military Academy's Ranger School in the hopes that they could impart the lessons of the conflict directly to the next generation of recruits.

Senusret Academy

During his first few months at Senusret, Khyar oversaw a unit of four drill instructors in charge of the Ranger training course at the school while submitting himself for Officer Aspirant training in order to progress to the commissioned rank of Lieutenant and gain full command of one of the Senusret training platoons. He would use this, his first officer position, as a springboard to gain influence within Senusret and advance his standing. Over the next ten years, Khyar would personally oversee his own cadre of drill instructors at Senusret that would come to be known as the White Twelve under his tenure, a name derived from Aziouel's decision to implement pseudo-Sakbeist ritual practices into the induction of recruits, particularly when the class was severely divided between different ethno-religious groups. Khyar would later state that he owed his success as a training officer at Senusret to his desire to live up to the example of his own mentor, Sidi Anoub. Khyar's officer commission was a significant milestone for the Charnean Army, marking the first time a Kel Dinik had attained a commission in the ICA. After four years in this position, he was promoted to Captain and given command of A-Company, one of the two binary training companies maintained by the Rangers.

As Captain of A-Company, Khyar came to be called "the Professor" by his subordinates thanks to his habit of personally intervening in the formation of individual Rangers and commonly overseeing the training officers and the White Twelve drill instructors personally, something that was practically unheard of for a man of his rank. Khyar earned the respect of recruits in training and his own staff alike through proactive engagement, concern for the men, and his own personal acetic lifestyle. It was noted that Khyar accomplished good standing with the men while being considered by many to be a mediocre speaker in comparison with some of his more charismatic and personable colleagues. This gave Khyar significant influence within the Ranger Corps as years went by with him in a high position at Senusret, as many of those who would fill out the ranks of the Rangers through the decade of the 2010s would have known him either personally or by reputation. Due to the Ranger tradition, later applied to the rest of the Army post-Muttay, of drawing officers from the body of enlisted members rather than a separate pool, this would also give Khyar an unseen influence in other parts of the Ranger Corps outside the Academy as those he had trained went on to became officers after many years in the field.

Ranger Command

It was Khyar's considerable influence among the enlisted and the junior officers of the Ranger Corps that moved the needle in his favor to be chosen as the new commander of the Ranger Corps in the aftermath of the Seven Day Coup. The coup and especially the countercoup was of tremendous influence on the Rangers and on Khyar's career, as the rise of Martuf Lamine had the effect of denuding the Rangers of many of their most experienced senior officers as they were tapped to assume positions in the government in Agnannet as loyalists to Lamine. It would ultimately be Rezkou Goma, Lamine's second in command, who would select Khyar Aziouel to assume command of the Corps following the shake-ups of the coup. Khyar was promoted to Major in late 2013 and formally given the command of the Corps, only the second Major to receive such a large command in Charnean military history. Under his leadership, the Corps saw many changes in response to the changing geopolitical landscape surrounding Charnea.