KURDISTAN

Divina West

• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781637328583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book KURDISTAN covers over a century of complicated history with a focus on the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, suppression from surrounding regimes, international and civil wars, the establishment of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, and the fight against the Islamic State. Within the context of that history, this book then covers the most current status of the Kurd's at the forefront of the war against the Islamic State and their regional relationships with Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq. Within the context of their complicated history, this book then evaluates the internal and external factors on the Kurd's road to sovereignty.

The Kurds are the world's biggest ethnic group without a state. They have been subject to violent repression but have resiliently sought independence. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, they were left without a state and their population split between four newly drawn states and borders. The Kurds most recently rose to fame for the role they played in the war against the Islamic State. The Kurds were one of the United States' strongest allies in the war but were then abandoned when the US removed troops from Syria. However, the Kurds are no stranger to betrayal and proxy wars.

The topic of KURDISTAN interests with a Christian worldview as are called to bring hope, peace, and justice to the world. This may look many different ways, but Divina G. West believes we can bring hope and support to Kurdistan even if just through prayers and financial support through non-profits and local charities. She believes we are called to pursue justice and promote peace as Christians, and Divina believes Kurdistan is key to peace in the region.

Chapter 1

History

There is a saying among Kurds: “No friends but the mountains.” This refers to the oppressing state governments and dictators surrounding the region. The mountains are very important to Kurds. They have not only shaped the history, people, tradition and culture, they have also been used more practically as hideouts for Kurdish Peshmerga’s and guerrillas fighting oppressive regimes (“Land & Environment” n.d.). This saying highlights their ties to the land and the mountains, but also how they have a long history of being betrayed and left to fend for themselves. The Middle East has a complicated history full of intricate conflicts. To understand current events and create sustainable policies, a person has to understand the context and history of the region. In this chapter, I cover over one hundred years of history in chronological order to highlight the complicated and multifaced nature of the history of the Kurds. This chapter covers key points in Kurdish history including: language, ancient history, post-Ottoman Empire, the First Gulf War, the establishment of the autonomous region of Iraq, and the war against the Islamic State. This chapter highlights the themes of internal and external conflict, suppression, and betrayal. The purpose of this chapter is to build historical context on which the rest of the paper builds.

Background

The Kurds are an ethnic group and are one of the indigenous people of the Mesopotamian plains and the highlands in what are now southeastern Turkey, southwestern Armenia, northeastern Syria, northern Iraq, and northwestern Iran (BBC News 2019). They speak Kurdish, an Indo-European language, with several dialects. The Kurds are a diverse yet distinctive people and community. The majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslim, but a number of Kurds practice a variety of religions and creeds (BBC News 2019). The Kurds are the region’s fourth-largest 3 ethnic group (“The Time of the Kurds” 2017). They are also known as the world’s largest stateless people group. It is estimated that between 25 and 35 million Kurds inhabit the extensive plateau and mountainous area known as Kurdistan (BBC News 2019). The Kurdistan (“Land of the Kurds”) designation refers to an area of Kurdish settlement that roughly includes the mountain systems of the Zagros and the eastern extension of the Taurus.

Language and Culture

The Kurdish people are a diverse people. The Kurds are a heterogeneous ethnic group whose ethnic background comes from many regions including Iraqi Kurdistan, and parts of Iran, Turkey, and Syria. The Kurdish ethnic group includes many ancient ethnicities that have been absorbed into modern cultures including Iranian, Azerbaijani, Turkic and Arabic cultures. In this sense, the Kurdish culture shares commonalities with many other regional cultures. Kurdish culture celebrates diversity and exhibits tolerance (“Learn About Kurdish Culture” n.d.). The Kurds are not monolithic, however, and tribal identities and political interests often supersede a unifying national allegiance. Some Kurds, particularly those who have migrated to urban centers, such as Istanbul, Damascus, and Tehran, have integrated and assimilated, while many who remain in their ancestral lands maintain a strong sense of a distinctly Kurdish identity (“The Time of the Kurds” 2017). The development of their culture and language has been heavily affected by historic repression from surrounding states, their lack of a homeland and autonomy and their diaspora. This has resulted in diversity but also a lack of cohesion between the various groups.

The Kurds speak a language related to Farsi (“Factbox: The Kurdish Struggle for Rights and Land” 2019). Kurdish dialects are broken into three main groups: Northern Kurdish, Central Kurdish and Southern Kurdish. Northern Kurdish dialects, Kurmanji, are the most common. 4 However, Turkey banned anyone from speaking Kurmanji Kurdish from the 1920’s until 1991. It was even illegal to speak the word “Kurd.” Therefore, there are less resources for learning Kurmanji Kurdish (which is more popular in Turkey) than the other Kurdish languages. The Sorani dialect in Central Kurdish is spoken by less than one fourth of all Kurds. Sorani is the dialect with the most well-developed literary tradition in modern times because an educational system in Sorani Kurdish was allowed to develop in Iraq. In the autonomous region of Iraq, the Kurdistan Regional Government, recognizes Kurmani and Sorani, and promotes both dialects being taught in schools (“Learn About Kurdish Language” n.d.).

Historically, The Kurds have experienced years of cultural repression. In Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, there were extensive campaigns at forced assimilation. Kurds were forbidden to speak Kurdish in public and they had to change their names to local ethnic names if they wanted a job or to enroll their children in school. Their books, music and clothing were considered contraband and they had to hide them in their homes. If authorities searched their homes and found anything Kurdish, they could be imprisoned, and many were. In recent years, both Iran and Turkey have relaxed their systemic cultural repression, and Iraqi Kurds have achieved autonomy (“Learn About Kurdish Culture” n.d.). Often referred to as the world’s biggest ethnic group without a state, the traditionally nomadic Kurds have been subject to violent repression by authoritarian rulers throughout their history and into the 20th century. This has catalyzed nationalist and militant movements to defend Kurdish rights, language, and culture and win self-rule (Pitel and Cornish 2019).

Pre-Ottoman Empire

Since ancient times, the area we now know as Kurdistan has been the home of the Kurds, a people whose ethnic origins are uncertain (“Kurdistan | History, Religion, & Facts” n.d.). 5 Despite the Kurdish people’s long history in the land, they have never had permanent land nor achieved a nation state (BBC News 2019). However, the extensive plateau and mountainous area which covers large parts of eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran and smaller parts of northern Syria and Armenia, is commonly referred to as Kurdistan. It roughly includes Zagros and eastern Taurus mountain ranges. For 600 years after the Arab conquest and their conversion to Islam, the Kurds played a recognizable part in the troubled history of western Asia. However, they operated as tribes, individuals, or turbulent groups rather than as a distinctive people with their own land. Among the Kurdish dynasties that arose during this period the most important were the Shaddādids, ruling a predominantly Armenian population in the Ānī and Ganja districts of Transcaucasia (the Marwānids of Diyarbakir (990–1096); the Ḥasanwayhids of the Kermānshāh region (c. 961–1015); and the ʿAnnazids (c. 990/91–1117), who initially ruled from Ḥulwān. Less is written of the Kurds under the Mongols and Turkmen, but they again became prominent in the wars between the Ottoman Empire and the Ṣafavid dynasty. Several Kurdish principalities developed and survived into the first half of the 19th century, notably those of Bohtān, Hakari, Bahdinan, Soran, and Baban in Turkey and of Mukri and Ardelan in Persia. But Kurdistan, though it played a considerable part in the history of western Asia, never enjoyed political unity (“Kurdistan | History, Religion, & Facts” n.d.). Furthermore, after World War One and the end of the Ottoman Empire, the victorious Western allies laid out a plan to create a Kurdish state in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres. But the pledge made by Britain, France and the US to the Kurds went unfulfilled as the allies were unable to secure borders (Danforth 2015).

Treaty of Sèvres

One hundred years ago, European powers carved up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. In Paris, the Treaty of Sèvres was planned and signed in 1920 only to quickly fall apart. 6 That treaty barely lasted a year, but the world is still being affected by it today. The Treaty of Sèvres internationalized Istanbul and the Bosphorus, while giving pieces of Anatolian territory to the Greeks, Kurds, Armenians, French, British, and Italians. Seeing how and why the first European plan for dividing up the Middle East failed, we can better understand the region’s present-day borders, as well as the contradictions of contemporary Kurdish nationalism and the political challenges facing modern Turkey (Danforth 2015).

The 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement divided the Middle East into British and French zones of influence and delineated the borders of the modern Middle East. Following World War I, the Treaty of Sèvres, signed in 1920, dissolves the Ottoman Empire and in the drawing up of new borders, proposes and included the creation of an autonomous Kurdish state. Unfortunately, within a year of signing the Treaty of Sèvres, European powers realized they were hasty in signing the treaty and did not have the level of control nor upper hand they had presumed. Determined to resist foreign occupation, Ottoman officers like Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s new leader, rejects Sèvres and reorganized the remnants of the Ottoman army. After several years of desperate fighting, they successfully drove out the foreign armies seeking to enforce the treaty’s terms. Thus, the Treaty of Lausanne, replaced the Treaty of Sèvres merely three years after the signing of Sèvres. The result was Turkey as we recognize it today, whose new borders were officially established in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. The Treaty of Lausanne, negotiated with the new Turkish government, omitted any reference to a Kurdish homeland, and the Kurds were left stateless. Kurdistan was never created because it was not drawn up in the Treaty of Lausanne as it was in the Treaty of Sèvres. The Kurds, inhabiting previously Ottoman territories, were dispersed across the newly demarcated borders of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, and repeatedly revolt against the respective authorities. The failure of the Treaty of Sèvres left 7 the Kurds with minority status in their respective countries. Over the next century, any move made by the Kurds to create independent state has been brutally quashed (BBC News 2019) (Danforth 2015) (“Factbox: The Kurdish Struggle for Rights and Land” 2019) (“The Time of the Kurds” 2017) (Pitel and Cornish 2019).

The Treaty of Sèvres has been largely forgotten in the West, but it has a potent legacy in Turkey, where it has helped fuel a form of nationalist paranoia some scholars have called the “Sèvres syndrome” (Danforth 2015). Sèvres certainly plays a role in Turkey’s sensitivity over Kurdish separatism, as well as the belief that the Armenian genocide—widely used by European diplomats to justify their plans for Anatolia in 1920—was always an anti-Turkish conspiracy rather than a matter of historical truth. Moreover, Turkey’s foundational struggle with colonial occupation left its mark in a persistent form of anti-imperial nationalism, directed first against Britain, during the Cold War against Russia, and now, quite frequently, against the United States. Yet to the Kurds, The Treaty of Sèvres was the rightful treaty and their lost promise of a homeland. The false hope and failure of the Treaty of Sevres was the beginning of a complicated history of Kurdish nationalist groups entering into alliances with powerful nationstates only to then be abandoned when those countries’ short-term interests have been fulfilled (MacDonald 2019). As the Ottoman Empire came to an end, their hope for a state dashed, Kurdish Nationalism began (Danforth 2015) (“Factbox: The Kurdish Struggle for Rights and Land” 2019).

Post-breakup of the Ottoman Empire

The Kurd’s quest for a homeland began in the early 20th century. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and particularly with the encouragement of U.S. Pres. Woodrow Wilson—one of whose Fourteen Points stipulated that the non-Turkish nationalities of 8 the Ottoman Empire should be “assured of an absolute unmolested opportunity of autonomous development”—Kurdish nationalists looked to the eventual establishment of a Kurdistani state. (“Kurdistan | History, Religion, & Facts” n.d.). Many Kurds began to contemplate the establishment of a homeland—usually referred to as “Kurdistan.” That hope and fight are alive today, after one hundred years of conflict.

In 1923 a Turkish-centric, centralized state faced uprisings from Kurdish tribes. In reaction to these uprisings, policies repressing Kurdish rights and identity were put in place. Kurdish languages were banned and Kurds were forced to “Turkify” their names, as well as the names of towns and villages (Pitel and Cornish 2019). Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji rebelled against British rule and declared a Kurdish independent kingdom in northern Iraq. In July of 1924, the British defeat Barzanji and the short-lived kingdom of K...

Table of contents

• Abstract
• Introduction
• History
• Regional Relationships and Current Events
• The Road to Sovereignty
• Conclusion
• Work Cited
• Worldview Appendix