Abdullah's father moved to Tehran when the Republic of Mahabad failed. Abdullah Mohtadi soon got his bachelor's degree in business from the University of Tehran.[3] As a teenager, Mohtadi was very interested in poetry, but after a while, he turned to politics and in a short time he became one of the political figures of Iran, especially in Kurdistan. In the late 1960s, a revolutionary movement was launched in Iranian Kurdistan by some of the political activists of the time like Suleiman Moini, Ismail Sharifzadeh, Mala Aware and Mohtadi's family which was closely associated with the movement, especially his older brother, Salahadin.