This second article, written by Michael Salomon and published in April of 1949, summarizes the history of the Kurdish people. However, the main theme – akin to Zev Sherf’s 1946 article, but presented in much more detail – is a chronicle of British foreign policy in the Persian Gulf, by which a League of Nations Mandate which would have eventually have permitted autonomy for the Kurdish and Yezidi peoples, was calculatedly abandoned in favor of British geopolitical interests.
As noted by Salomon, “Identical situations called for similar policies in Palestine and Kurdistan, where Great Britain, after having played up to the Zionists and Kurds, as well as the Arabs, finally played the Arab card at the expense of the others.” Likewise, “The guarantee of a British Mandate for twenty-five years over the territories assigned to Iraq was the sole legal protection of the Kurdish population, and that was soon to fail them. So sure was Great Britain of attaining its strategic and economic ends anyway, that it no longer seemed necessary to maintain a Mandate over Iraq.”
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The Kurds: A Submerged Nation
By Michel Salomon
Jewish Frontier
April, 1949
THE EMERGENCE OF ISRAEL has already caused sever disturbances in all the Middle East and will produce still more serious ones in the future. Particularly, the struggle of the Jews of Palestine against the Arab States will appreciably affect the Kurdish national liberation movement, especially in Iraq.
Because of their numbers and the strategic importance of Kurdistan, with its exceptional subterranean riches, the Kurds are an element of prime importance in the mosaic of peoples and ethnic groupings of the Middle East. A factious people, split for centuries among civilizations which have been unable to assimilate them in spite of close affinity, the Kurds constitute one of those formidable unsolved problems raised by the eternal “Eastern question”. It is natural for the maneuvers of English imperialism to have woven themselves deeply into Palestine and Kurdistan during and after the First World War. A glance at the Near Eastern map shows why. The richest oil resources in this part of the world are in the vicinity of Kirkuk. The main branch of the pipeline to the sea empties at Haifa. The other leads to Tripoli and Lebanon, zones outside of the British sphere of influence under the Anglo-French agreements of 1916 (Blue Zones) and 1918 (Western Zone).
Identical situations called for similar policies in Palestine and Kurdistan, where Great Britain, after having played up to the Zionists and Kurds, as well as the Arabs, finally played the Arab card at the expense of the others.
This article will deal mainly with the struggles of the Kurds in Iraq, and we shall try to show to what extent the so-called “Arab Bloc,” homogenous and girding the state of Israel on all sides, is a chimera. There exits numerous national entities in the Near East, Moslem or Christian, Maronites, Druses, Circassians, Assyrians, Kurds, etc., who are trying to cast off the tyrannical yoke of the Arab States, and who, by virtue of this fact have a natural affinity with Israel.
KURDISTAN, the veritable backbone of the Middle East, occupies an area if about 500,000 square kilometers, running through Asiatic Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and to a very small extent in Soviet Armenia and Syria. It can be compared very roughly to a right triangle with its base in the north running from Alexandretta on the Mediterranean, on the west, to Kars near the Turco-Soviet border in the east; the side of the right angle, after jutting across the Soviet frontier, crosses the western portion of Iranian Azerbaijan, rimming the left bank of the large lake of Urmia, and drops sharply to the Persian Gulf; the hypotenuse first describes a concave area up to Badra at the Iranian border, at the level of Baghdad, then a convex area shouldered by the heights of the Jebel Hamrine ending at Mosul, and from there it continues in a straight line, following essentially the Turco-Syrian border, back to the port of Alexandretta. A mountainous country, formed by high chains running northwest-southeast, Kurdistan is covered with fine forests and dug out by valleys difficult of access but famous for their fertility.
The Iraqi portion of Kurdistan, in the southwest, is the least important, at least as regards area and population, being about an eighth of the territory claimed by the Kurds and containing about 200,000 inhabitants out of the 9,000,000 who inhabit “Kurdish soil”. (1) Nevertheless it is the richest part and the one which has aroused the most outside interest, since it includes the famous oil deposits of Kirkuk and Mosul, which yielded about 4,000,000 tons in 1948 and which are expected to go to 16,000,000 tons in the very near future. There are in Iraq Kurdistan about a dozen towns, of which Suleimania the capital of Kurdish nationalism, Erbil and Kirkuk alone are of some importance.
THE KURDS are a very old nation of Aryan origin whose traces go back to remotest antiquity. Descendants of the Medes and the Achaemenides, the Kurds were devotees of Zoroastrianism and had the privileged task of guarding the temples in the Aryan empires of the East. They were converted to Islam in the 9th century. Although they have given to Islam some strong personalities and several royal dynasties – the great Saladin, conqueror of the Crusaders under Richard the Lion Heart was a Kurd – the Kurds are in the main very lukewarm Moslems. Islamism does not seem to have penetrated among them very deeply. Numerous travelers have noted this. In 1839 Vol Moltke, (2) then a young officer attached to the Turkish general staff, while accompanying a unit on a campaign of repression in Kurdistan, noted that the Kurdish landscape does not show any minarets, a detail since confirmed by many travelers. (3) The majority of Kurds are of the Sunnite rite but they include some Shiite elements. There exist, finally, almost 100,000 Yezidis, or Manichean Kurds, who still cling to the old ancestral cult. A large anti-Islamic movement has been discernable for several years among the Kurds, affecting especially the intellectuals and the youth, particularly in the lands of Arabic language such as Iraq and Syria – a defense reaction at once political, social, and cultural. The baleful influence which Islamism has never ceased to exert in Kurdish history is denounced vigorously by numerous leaders of the Kurdish national movement, among them the great poet Djeguer Khanin, who lives at present in Syria.
UNTIL the Treaty of sevres, which completed the dismemberment of “the sick man of Europe,” the Kurds of Mesopotamia suffered the fate of all the Kurds in the Ottoman Empire. Relations between Turks and Kurds were already strained at the end of the 18th century when the Kurdish principalities, until then faithful to the Empire, broke with the Sublime Porte, whose drive toward centralization was destroying the semi-independence which they had enjoyed previously. From the first Kurdish rising of Baban in 1806, to 1886, there were countless armed revolts. With the appearance of the authoritarian Young Turkish Republic conditions became much worse than under the regime of the Sultans. The Kurds were practically in a state of permanent insurrection. After the defeat of the Central Powers and their ally the Turks, the Treaty of Sevres was signed with the latter on August 10th, 1920. It was at that time considered a veritable “Kurdish Balfour Declaration”. It recognized the right of the Kurds to independence explicitly, in fact, in its articles 62, 63 and 64.
“…The Commission sitting at Constantinople and composed of three members named by the governments of Britain, France and Italy respectively, shall arrange, within six months from the effective date of this treaty, local autonomy for those regions where the Kurdish element predominates.” (Preamble to article 63.)
The clause aimed particularly at the Kurds of Mesopotamia was the following: “…If and when the said renunciation (meaning the renunciation of Turkish nationality by the Kurds) shall have taken place, no objections will be raised by the principle Allied powers against the voluntary adherence to this independent Kurd state of those Kurds inhabiting the part of Kurdistan included up to now in the Vilayet of Mosul.” (Article 64.)
These arrangements were destined to remain a dead letter. At the Treaty of Lausanne on July 23rd, 1923, the preceding articles were juggled away, and the cunning of Mustafa Kemal, conqueror of the Greeks in Asia Minor, reduced to ineffectiveness the timid provisions of the Treaty concerning the protection of minorities. Most of the Kurds were subjected anew to the policy of assimilation of the Turkish Government. Not so, however, the million of them located beyond the armistice line of Moudros. The special clause of Article 64 of the Treaty of Sevres could still hold for them. In default of attachment to the Vilayet of Mosul to the Kurdish State that had just been buried so neatly, the vilayet could nevertheless attain independence itself and thus became the first free province of Kurdistan. The country which was to become Iraq, between Palestine (there was no Transjordan then) and Iran, comprised three vilayets under the Ottoman Empire, those of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul. The first two were predominantly Arab, the last almost entirely populated by Kurds. If not for the desire of the English to control the Middle East and exploit the oil resources of Mosul, would Iraq have been born? We doubt it. In his work on Mesopotamia, Sir A. Wilson, first High Commissioner of His Majesty in Iraq, writes: “The concept of Iraq as an independent nation had hardly taken form, for the country lacked geographical, economic and racial homogeneity.” Further on, the author writes with a naivete not devoid of flavor: “The vilayets of Basra and Baghdad could hardly be expected to maintain their existence as an autonomous state without the revenues it was hoped eventually to obtain from the Vilayet of Mosul.”
Attaching the Vilayet of Mosul to the Arab portion of Iraq was an absurdity, since three-quarters of its population were non-Arab. Seven out of ten inhabitants were Kurds and the vilayet included, besides, important communities of Yezidis, Assyrians, and Jews.
AT THIS point there enfolds a particularly sordid chapter of British Middle East diplomacy. The methods were the same as those adopted elsewhere, with the Zionists. Thus England betrayed for the first time the spirit of a mandate entrusted to her, which enjoined her to lead the communities later inequitably swallowed up in the political frontiers of Iraq to their complete emancipation, and not to favor the Arabs alone.
The English entered Kirkuk in May, 1918. The named a young Kurdish notable, Sheik Mahmoud, governor of the vilayet. The Turks recaptured the city and the English did not return until the Armistice in November. In the meantime Kurdish national sentiment had grown. The Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916 and the Balfour Declaration of November 7, 1917, had strengthened hopes in Kurdish political circles. In southwest Kurdistan the nationalists gathered around Sheik Mahmoud, whose influence grew continually and who in fact exercised real authority over a large part of the country.
In 1918, the English, true to that empiricism in matters of foreign policy which in an early stage leads them to play all the cards, named Mahmoud governor of a small part of the Mosul vilayet situated north of the mountain stream of the “Grand-Zab”. Sheik Mahmoud was not content with so little. In May 1919 he descended on Suleimania in the heart of the vilayet and proclaimed himself King of Kurdistan. This did not suit the English, who sent in a unit under the command of General Frazer. The ephemeral kingdom was dissolved and Sheik Mahmoud taken prisoner. The short period from 1919 to 1923 saw the sealing of the fate of the Kurds of Mesopotamia. From the dissolution of the “kingdom” of Mahmoud to the Treaty of Lausanne, the English, although they had definitely sacrificed the Kurds to Iraq, continued to maneuver, for reasons which Sir A. Wilson expresses with his usual simplicity. “…The degree of control of southwest Kurdistan, must depend on the needs of the country – Iraq, and on imperial strategic considerations.” (4) Having obtained the League of Nations Mandate over the three former Turkish vilayets in May 1920, the English called the Emir Feisal, who had just been expelled by the French from Damascus, to the throne of Iraq, in August 1921. The violent repression of several insurrections – the RAF came into action four times from March 1923 to May 1924 – at the same time did not deter them from making specific and repeated promises of local autonomy:
“His Britannic Majesty’s Government and the Government of Iraq recognize the right of the Kurds living within the frontiers of Iraq to establish a Kurdish Government inside these frontiers.” (Declaration of the British High Commissioner, December 24, 1922.)
After the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, burying all hope of a free Kurdistan, the English, henceforth free of all obligations, let the Iraqis take over on their own. There was no longer any question of local autonomy, or even semi-autonomy. The Kurds were accorded at most, as a matter of form, some small privileges.
“The Iraqi Government has no intention of appointing Arab officials in Kurdish districts, except for technicians. Nor does it intend to oblige the inhabitants of the Kurdish districts to use the Arabic language in official communication. The rights of the inhabitants and of the civil and religious communities in the said districts will be safeguarded.” (Declaration of the Iraqi Council of Ministers, July 11, 1923.) In fact, however, these promises were never kept.
Now masters of the game, the British requested a technical commission of the League of Nations to delineate the Turco-Iraqian frontiers, asking that the line take account of “ethnic” considerations. The Commission was courageous enough to oppose the English maneuvers, proclaiming that: “If a conclusion had to be drawn from ethnic considerations, it would lead to the creation of an independent five-eighths of the population. And if such a solution were envisaged, it would be proper to add to the preceding figure the Yezidis, Kurds of the Zoroastrian religion, and the Turks, whose assimilation by the Kurdish element would be easy. In a reckoning made this way, the Kurds would constitute seven-eighths of the population.”
One cannot help noting here a striking analogy with British policy in Palestine towards the end of the Mandate there. The English solicited a commission of inquiry from the League of Nations, as they were to request the participation of the U.S. in their Commission in 1946, and as they requested the UNSCOP from the UN in 1947. Faced with conclusions by these Commissions unfavorable to them, they do not hesitate to override them. Better yet, after some clever maneuvers by the British, who had in the meanwhile made some safe alliances with in the League of Nations, the Council of this body, on the motion of the British delegate, decided on December 16, 1925, to attach the Vilayet of Mosul to Iraq. The Security Council, in pretending last October to ignore the resolution of the General Assembly at its historic session of November 29, 1947, could look back upon an illustrious precedent.
The guarantee of a British Mandate for twenty-five years over the territories assigned to Iraq was the sole legal protection of the Kurdish population, and that was soon to fail them. So sure was Great Britain of attaining its strategic and economic ends anyway, that it no longer seemed necessary to maintain a Mandate over Iraq.
The famous British Middle East expert, D. Clayton, let it be known in February 1929 that his government was ready to have Iraq admitted to the League of Nations in return for a treaty of mutual assistance – or more correctly, of permanent vassalization. The Iraqi, who could refuse their protectors nothing, signed this treaty in 1930. It is still in effect. Together with that treaty concluded with Abdullah of Transjordan on March 22, 1946 and that imposed upon Egypt in 1936, it is the “justification” for Bevin’s political intervention against Israel.
FREE of the mandate and its obligations, especially that or protecting the minorities in Iraq, Great Britain was content to exploit the natural riches of the country and concentrate troops there, leaving to the Iraqis the handling of their “internal” questions. The Kurds understood the situation very well and in their despair revolted under the leadership of Sheikh Mahmoud. “Faced with the incompetence of the Arab army and gendarmerie, the English once more assumed the burden of repression. The RAF bombarded Kurdish localities mercilessly and after eight months of sporadic risings, “order was restored to Kurdistan.” “The RAF bore the brunt of the military operations and the bombardment of villages was inevitable if the rebellion was to be crushed; nevertheless, it took eight months to obtain the surrender of Sheikh Mahmoud.” (5)
At this point, believing the Kurds crushed by British planes and defenseless, the Iraqi government in July 1931 bravely took the offensive to liquidate the “mountain bandits”. This action in broad daylight was a departure from the hypocritical policy of deceit and discrimination by decree. It took this initiative for two reasons: it had the unlimited backing of the British forces in Iraq; and it based its Kurdish policy on coordinated action with the Turks, with whom it had established contact since 1930. Once more the Arab forces were completely routed. The intervention of the RAF again saved them from catastrophe. Under their glorious wings the Iraqis threw themselves on the Kurdish provinces, razing 79 villages to the ground and deporting tens of thousands of Kurds. A final rising of the clan of the Barzani, celebrated in Kurdistan for its bravery, was crushed by the RAF. The Kurds of Iraq were not heard from again.
AT THE beginning of the Second World War, the British services in the Middle East began a feverish activity. The entire Arab world seemed won over to the Axis cause. In Rome Mussolini assumed the title of Protector of Islam. In Berlin the “Arab” section of the Abwehr was in constant contact with Arab fascist organizations in the Middle East and with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was to set up the Moslem legions there after the fall of Rashid Ali in Iraq. In Cairo, the members of the Egyptian parliament in full session went so far as to call for a German victory. The English tried to gain support from all non-Arab communities of the Middle East, the very minorities whom they had lightly sacrificed to the xenophobe imperialism of the young Arab states. The Kurds, among others, were solicited and worked on my emissaries of the Intelligence Service, who went so far as to promise them independence after the victory. Rapidly won over to the Allied cause, they abstained from taking part in the revolt of Rashid Ali in April 1941 and participated substantially in the Allied war effort. (6) As recompense, the British appointed several Kurds as functionaries in Iraqi Kurdistan, always hinting at eventually possibilities of autonomy and even of full sovereignty.
In 1943 a political chief of the Barzanis living in forced residence at Suleimania, Mulla Mustafa, distrusting the vague promises of the English, decided in complicity with Sheik Latif, son of the famous Mahmoud, to try a coup de force. The Iraqi police sent after him were caught and disarmed by Kurdish partisans. The government mobilized the army. It was routed by a few detachments of mountaineers without modern weapons. The government then tried to negotiate. The head of the government, Nun Said, of Kurdish origin, reached agreement without too much difficulty on several of the Kurdish demands, such as a fairer distribution of food to Kurdistan, the building of schools and hospitals, the appointment of autochthonous officials, etc. As we see, the demands of the victors were very modest. When the situation was completely restored and Nuri Said returned to Baghdad, the Regent annulled the engagements undertaken. Nuri Said had to resign for lack or parliamentary support. A new era of repression began.
IN THE SPRING of 1945 nearly 45,000 infantry and police, two motorized units from Egypt, and 25 pursuit and bombardment planes (the total Iraqi air force) under Major General Renton were concentrated on the approaches to Kurdistan to dislodge the 5,000 men of Mulla Mustafa, armed with rifles and machine guns, the latter captured from Iraqis in previous campaigns. The offensive was launched on August 7, 1945. The Iraqi forces were crushed. Violent combats took place at Revanduz and Dallet in the midst of the mountains, where four Iraqi battalions were annihilated. The Kurds took important military posts, and, leaving their mountains, descended on Erbil, on the road to Bagdad, which was now open to them. Panic rage seized the English who already visualized the precious oil of Mosul in Kurdish hands. The RAF attacked more savagely than ever, dropping incendiary and delayed action bombs on the near villages, destroying 55 towns, and leaving a thousand dead and 15,0000 homeless among the civilian population. The Kurds had to yield the ground that had won. The mopping up was left to the eminent specialist General Renton, former commander of the “desert rats” of Libya. London, like Pontius Pilate, could wash its hands since “General Renton was not on the active list of the British Army, but as chief of the military mission at Bagdad was carried on the budget of the Iraqi army.” (7) The incident recalls the “justifications” resorted to when it was decided to unleash General Pasha and his Transjordan Legion on Jerusalem at the end of the Palestine Mandate.
Mulla Mustafa, however, was not beaten. He retired into Iran and the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad was proclaimed, at the same time as the Republic of Azerbaijan. The two ephemeral republics did not live long, for the area was re-occupied by Iranian troops.
FROM 1945 on the position of the Kurds in Iraq became more and more precarious, as did that of the other minorities, Turcomans, Yezidi, and Jews. Iraqi Kurdistan is in a state of virtual siege. Martial law was proclaimed March 12, 1947. A government interdict still prohibits the reconstruction of towns destroyed during the last campaign of repression. About 10,000 Kurds, among them the political and intellectual elite and practically all the able men of the renowned Barzani clan, have been separated from their families and thrown into the sinister concentration camps of But el Ammara and Meyadin, where they have been joined by thousands of Jews accused of “Zionism” and incarcerated after being stripped of all their possessions.
If the Iraqi part in the Palestine hostilities has been so quantitatively and qualitatively feeble, it is the Kurds who are in large measure responsible. Efforts to raise troops among the Kurdish population have had no success. On the contrary, the Israeli victories have dangerously excited the nationalism of the Kurds. Considering the economic and political crisis with which the Iraqi government is wrestling, there is a chance that the Kurdish question will shortly reappear on the Iraqi agenda.
At the beginning of November 1948, demonstrations of a clearly insurrectional nature appeared in all Iraqi Kurdistan. The world press passed this event by almost in silence, but it seems that the term “Kurdish revolution” used by the rare journals which mentioned it (e.g. Jerusalem Journal of December 2) is not altogether unwarranted. At Suleimania a great mass demonstration took place demanding the liberation of political prisoners, the carrying out of economic promises to Kurdistan, and the cessation of the war in Palestine. The police arrested 200 demonstrators, who were released by the crowd, which invaded the prison of Suleimania. At the end of a secret session of the Iraqi parliament, the minutes of which became available in spite of the total news blackout and censorship, the ex-Premier of Iraq, Muzahem Pachachi, stated: “We should have kept the bulk of our troops in Iraq from the beginning, because of the aggravation of the situation in the Kurdish regions. Events have proved that our information was correct, for two weeks ago out Mosul garrison had to be dispatched in all haste to the Suleimania region to put down a new Kurd revolt. Our action is proceeding satisfactorily, but we cannot spare another Iraqi soldier for Palestine. Not only can we not furnish new detachments for the defense of Arab Palestine, but we have to envisage the eventuality of withdrawing the Iraqi forces already on the Palestine front. We must not forget for a single moment that we are surrounded by internal and external enemies.” (8) Independently of other factors such as the traditional rivalry between the Husseini and Hashemite dynasties in the bosom of the Arab League, it is perhaps unnecessary to seek farther than the causes outlined above by the ex-Iraq Premier for the passivity of the Iraqi Army during the Negev battles, despite the frantic SOSs of the Egyptians.
On the morrow of the war of 1914, the interests of the imperial powers were the only factors considered in the partition of the Middle East into states made up of the whole cloth and others arbitrarily enlarged, almost always at the expense of the non-Arab populations. The existence and strengthening of the State of Israel, the first truly sovereign state in the Middle East since Turkey, will lead to a reconsideration of the “Eastern Question,” and will be a factor for peace and economic and social stability in a region of the world that the egoism of the imperial states has tried to keep out of the march of progress.
(1) According to the Mijulgeha Kurdi (National Center of Kurdish Studies, located at Paris), the Kurdish population is distributed as follows:
Afghanistan 100,000
USSR 160,000
Syria 250,000
Iraq 1,200,000 (29% of the total)
Iran 3,500,000 (23% of the total)
Turkey 4,000,000 (28% of the total)
Figures partially verified by numerous specialists whose objectives are unquestionable, such as Louis Lambout: Les Kurdes et le Droit, Paris, 1947.
(2) Von Moltke: Das Land und Volk der Kurden (Augsberger Allgemeine Zeitung, 1841)
(3) A Turkish proverb says: “The Kurds are Moslems – compared to infidels.”
(4) Sir A. Wilson: Preface to Mesopotamia. Oxford, 1931.
(5) Capt. Philip Mumford. Kurds, Assyrians and Iraq. (Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, Vol. 20, January, 1933).
(6) More than a thousand Kurd parachutists and commandos served in Montgomery’s army.
(7) Palestine Post. August 31, 1945.
(8) Minutes supplied by the Mijulgeha Kurdi. (National Center of Kurdish Studies, Paris.)
Suggested Reading
Berman, Paul, “Realism and the Kurds – Bernard-Henri Lévy presents his extraordinary documentary Peshmerga at the United Nations, but civilization isn’t listening”, Tablet, November 29, 2017
Cohen, Ben, “Western Powers Must Protect Kurds, Urges Iraqi Jew Escorted to Freedom by Masoud Barzani”, Algemeiner, November 6, 2017
Kedar, Mordechai, Lt. Col. (res.), “The U.S. Betrayal of Kurdistan Is a Warning Sign for Israel”, BESA Center, November 22, 2017
Levy, Bernard-Henri, “The Kurds, Trump, and the Decline of American Power – Why the United States’ inexplicable abandonment of the Kurdish people is ‘the geopolitical equivalent of a stock-market crash’”, Tablet, October 30, 2017
Rozhbayane, Rebin, “The Assault on Kirkuk: A Firsthand Account – A frontline Kurdish peshmerga officer describes what it was like to be abandoned by the West in Iraq in October of 2017”, Tablet, May 9, 2018 (Originally appeared in La Règle du Jeu (“The Rules of The Game”), under title “La bataille de Kirkouk, au Kurdistan, racontée par l’un de ses principaux témoins”, May 3, 2018)
Warner, Rex (translator), History of The Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides, Penguin Books, New York, N.Y., 1954 (1980 edition)
Jewish Coalition for Kurdistan