 In 1967 he was sent by Iraq to the U.S. Army Ranger School, and in the 1980s he was promoted to head of the Iraqi Special Forces School.During the first half of the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988) al-Shahwani was a Brigadier General in charge of a Republican Guard helicopter unit.He made a name for himself by retaking Kardamand mountain in Iraqi Kurdistan from an entrenched Iranian force that numbered in the thousands in an air assault; because of this President Saddam Hussein viewed him as a potential threat and subsequently placed him under the surveillance of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in 1984.