It is not known where they came from. Some argue that they are a mixture of many earlier tribes. Others argue that they arose in King Solomon's time as a result of the marriage of genies with 500 beautiful Jewish women. One thing is certain - their history is marked by a series of fighting, persecution and genocide.
Kurds are currently the largest nation without a state of its own, constantly striving for self-determination. Despite many perturbations in the region and the independence uprisings they undertook, they did not manage to carve out a piece of their own territory.
According to Maria Giedz in 2003, the population of the Kurdish nation ranges from 20 to 35 million. Of which almost 13 million live in Turkey, and the rest of the population is Iran (approx. 6 million), Iraq (4.5 - 5 million), Syria (over 1 million), Armenia (approx. 200 thousand) and even Afghanistan ( approx. 200 thousand). This is very aptly commented by Ed Nash, a British volunteer who has set out to fight side by side with the Kurds against the ISIS offensive. As he states in his memoirs, "Pustynny sniper", published in Polish, :
About 40 million Kurds live in four countries:Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. They also divide themselves depending on which country they live in. [...] As a community divided among so many countries, the Kurds find themselves in the classic situation of someone who finds themselves in the middle of a busy intersection:something can hit them from all sides.
Disappointed hopes
The national identity of the Kurds began to take shape at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. There were clubs uniting members of various tribes, intelligentsia and other influential people. The Kurdish press began to come out and secret organizations were established. The Kurds had great hopes for the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908. This, however, despite the declaration of respect for the rights of minorities, ultimately only influenced the development of Turkish nationalism.
Kurdish teachers from a school in Sulaymaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan in 1924 (photo:public domain)
Kurds living in the Ottoman Empire were integrated but not assimilated. During the First World War, they loyally fought on the side of Turkey, but instead of being appreciated, they were persecuted. Young Turkish revolutionaries who managed to wrest power from the hands of the Sultan focused on the national homogeneity of the country. Minorities living within Turkey have been identified as a threat. The most famous manifestation of this policy was the famous Armenian genocide, but the ethnic cleansing also affected the Kurds.
As early as 1916, they began to be forcibly relocated from their native lands to other places within Turkey. All this to distract them and weaken their political power. It is estimated that 700,000 people were expelled from homes as a result of the purges by the end of World War I, almost half of whom died.
The swept of World War I through the region left it in dire condition. The Kurds, however, hoped that during the border reshuffles after the end of the conflict, they would manage to gain their own state, which they had been working on for a long time, convincing European diplomats of the importance of the matter. Contrary to Poles making similar efforts, they failed.
According to the provisions of the Treaty of Sevres of 1920, an autonomous Kurdistan was to be created, but this never happened in practice, and the lands inhabited by Kurds remained divided among their neighbors. Another international treaty, signed in Lausanne in 1923, only confirmed this.
British gentlemen and war gases?
When France and Britain shared control of the region after the end of the war, an uprising broke out in Iraq, under London's sovereignty. In 1920, Sunnis and Shiites joined the fight. It took 100,000 British and Indian troops to put down this rebellion, but that was not enough. The fights drained the capital of the metropolis. Finally Winston Churchill found a solution to stop the outflow of money.
In March 1920, he proposed an air strike with the help of the nascent RAF. As the British began bombing the villages of the rebellious tribes, the uprising quickly collapsed. England is also accused of using chemical weapons against the rebels during the conflict. As Krzysztof Mroziewicz comments:
Kurds remember 1920 because it was the English, not Saddam, who used poisonous gases in Iraq for the first time , anyway, losing 20,000 dead themselves.
Kurdish soldiers. Photograph dated between 1876 and 1925 (photo:public domain)
Maria Roman Sławiński reminds that the Kurds - especially the Iraqi - with no hope of independence, fought for the recognition of their national rights, distinctiveness and autonomy. For this purpose, they took up arms in 1919, 1922-1925, 1927, 1928, 1930-1931 and 1935-1936. Each time the British brutally suppressed their outbursts.
The Syrian Kurds, although they live on the territory of Syria, are not its citizens. Not because they came from other countries, but because the government took their citizenship. In 1962, a directive was issued which stripped tens of thousands of Kurdish families' citizenship and all rights derived therefrom.
Syrian Kurds were divided into two groups. "Foreigners from Hasaka Province" received red ID cards. These documents allowed them to leave Syria, but they could not return there. In turn, "unregistered" officially do not exist. They do not have any documents and are not registered anywhere. They can obtain an identity card from the mayor or a certificate of residence, but only with the consent of the political police. At the moment, about a quarter of a million people fall into both categories. Without any nationality, they do not have basic rights - social, political, cultural, economic, or education, let alone property rights.
Kurds not geese?
In 1973, Syrian Kurds were deprived of the vast tracts of land they had farmed for generations. A strip of fertile fields 10-15 kilometers wide and 375 kilometers long has been "earned". Syria expelled tens of thousands of Kurds and replaced them with Arab families brought from Aleppo and Raqqa. Kurdish workers and students may only be kicked out or transferred from government institutions based on their ethnic origin. Kurdish is not an official language in Syria and its use is prohibited. Moreover, the prohibition was enforced with the help of torture or restriction of liberty.
Kurdish refugees on the Iraqi-Turkish border in 1991 (photo:public domain)
The Kurdish language was also banned in Turkey. In the 1970s, the European Court of Human Rights convicted Turkey of thousands of human rights violations. Among them were executions of Kurdish civilians, torture, forced displacement, systematic destruction of villages, murders and "disappearances" of Kurdish journalists.
The example of Leyla Zana, who was the first Kurdish woman to enter the Turkish parliament in 1994, is particularly glaring. During the swearing-in ceremony, she uttered a sentence in Kurdish: I am swearing this oath to the brotherhood of Turks and Kurds.
In March of the same year, Parliament voted to strip her and five other members of the pro-Kurdish party immunity from their immunity. Four of them, including Zana, were sentenced by the Supreme Court to 15 years in prison. Politicians can talk about happiness anyway. The death squads operating in Turkey between 1993 and 1994 are accused of causing the disappearance of several thousand Kurdish activists, teachers, human rights activists and journalists. When Turkey started applying for admission to the EU, Europe forced Ankara to soften its policy towards Kurds, which resulted, among other things, in the dismissal of Leyla Zan.
Such a problem was not faced by the ruling Ba'ath party in Iraq. A few months after the seizure of power in July 1968, Iraqi-Kurdish fighting broke out, culminating in the creation of an autonomous Kurdistan Region in 1970. This agreement was fragile, however, and in 1975 Iraq decided to end the "Kurdish problem". The authorities razed up to 1,400 Kurdish villages to the ground and relocated the Kurds to temporary camps. According to various accounts, the displacement affected from 100,000 to as much as 600,000 people. In 1983, 8,000 men from one of the clans were led out of these camps and murdered. The worst was yet to come.
Final solution to the Kurdish question
In the last year of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), Saddam Hussein, who ruled in Baghdad, decided to crack down on the Kurds once and for all. From February 23, 1988 to September, the Iraqi military conducted Operation al-Anfal, i.e. the brutal and bloody pacification of Kurdistan. On March 16, the Iraqi air force dropped war gases on the Kurdish city of Halabja, occupied the day before by Iranian forces. A mixture of sarin, tabun, and mustard gas was used, as a result of which about 5,000 people died in terrible torment, and thousands more were mutilated for life. The order was given by the infamous "Chemical Ali" aka Ali Hasan al-Majid, privately Saddam's cousin.
Shoes found during the exhumation of the graves of the victims of the Iraqi genocide in the Kurds (photo:Adam Jones, Ph.D., license CCA SA 3.0 U)
This was just the beginning of a horrible series. Iraqi government forces destroyed Kurdish settlements according to a fixed pattern - first released combat gases that killed most of the inhabitants, survivors were transported from concentration camps, houses were completely plundered, and then everything was demolished and razed to the ground. Iraqis carried out mass executions. Tens of thousands of Kurdish men and boys were taken to execution sites and shot. Kurdish women were sold into slavery to brothels and private homes throughout the Middle East.
In the last phase of the operation, the Iraqi-Iranian border belt was "cleared" of Kurds to a depth of thirty kilometers. About 300,000 people were thrown out of their homes, some of whom were killed immediately. Various estimates have killed between 50,000 and 200,000 people. The Kurds themselves speak of 182,000 victims. In September 1988, Saddam Hussein announced an amnesty for the Kurds. It is worth emphasizing that although both the United States and Europe knew about the genocide of Kurds and the use of chemical weapons against them, Iraq was not condemned internationally for these crimes.
In the last century, the Kurds experienced a real horror. It is hardly surprising, then, that when they were attacked by the Islamic State, they were prepared to defend themselves. As they began to achieve their first successes, new hope appeared in them. Maybe this time they will succeed and fight for their own country? As Ed Nash commented in "Desert Sniper" :
[…] currently Kurds are persecuted in all countries of which they are nationals. The scale of this persecution varies according to the whims of the regimes, but it is always aimed at their sense of national identity. Ultimately, Syria and Iraq are dominated by Arabs, Iran by Persians, and Turkey is still a separate ethnic group. Neither country wants to lose part of its territory to the people they all think are basically primitive peasants.
Information sources:
- Belica B., Geopolitical determinants of the possibility of Kurdish autonomy, Elements of geopolitics and geoeconomics in research on international problems , ed. of science. M. Hudzikowski, Częstochowa 2014.
- Bryjka F., Kurds - Western intermediaries in the war against the "Islamic State" [in:] The military and war in psychological, social and cultural contexts , K. Skurjat, I. Ciosek (ed.), Publishing House of the Military University of Land Forces 2018.
- Conflict, Democratization, and the Kurds in the Middle East. Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria , eds. Romano D., Gurses M., Palgrave Macmillan 2014.
- Eppel M., A people without a state. The Kurds from the Rise of Islam to the Dawn of Nationalism , University of Texas Press 2016.
- Mroziewicz K., Power, impotence and violence, "Branta" Publishing House 2005.
- Nash E., Desert Sniper. How ordinary Angol went to war with ISIS , Rebis 2019 Publishing House.
- Pochyły P., Sources of Kurdish national identity , "Przegląd Narodnościowy-Review of Nationalities", No. 2/2013.
- Reisinezhad A., The Shah of Iran, the Iraqi Kurds, and the Lebanese Shia , Palgrave Macmillan 2019.
- Schmidinger T., Rojava. Revolution, War, and the Future of Syria's Kurds , Pluto Press 2018.
- Yadirgi V., The Political Economy of the Kurds of Turkey From the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic , Cambridge University Press 2017.