The Kurdish History

The origins of the Kurds is a matter of scholarly dispute. In les Kurds Basile Nikitine reviewed for the layman the various opinions of linguists, and other scholars who have studied the Kurds, on the earliest inhabitants of what has come to be Kurdistan. In short theses are presented to us on the problem of the origins of the Kurds. One insists on their Iranian (Indo-European) origin and their removal in seventh century B.C. from from the region of Lake Urmyia to Bohtan. The other thesis asserts the autochthonous character of the Kurds, related to such other Asian people as the Khaldes, Georgians and Armenians, and of the language they spoke which was later replaced by an Iranian one. Withe so much yet to be learned about the early history of this part of West Asia the safest thing for the laymen to say is that from the beginning of history the mountains above Mesopotamia were inhabited by people who fough and sometimes defeated the empires of the plains, the Babylonians and the Assyrians. In any event, either by assimilating or displacing the previous inhabitants the heart of Kurdistan was settled, probably by the seventh century B.C., by Iranicised tribes. These tribes are the cultural progenitors of the modern Kurds.

About the time of the arab conquests in the seventh century the term Kurd was beginning to be applied as an ethnic description of the Iranicised tribes with their asian, Semitic and Armenian blendings. The Kurds was first applied by the Seljuk Sultan Sandjar in the twelfth century when created a large province of the name. In the fifteenth century, however, this province shrank, and in both the ottoman and Turkish empires the area called Kurdistan was only a part of the actual area in which the kurds predominated. From the fall of Nineveh in 612 B.C., when the Medes vanquished the Assyrian empire, to the battle of Chaldiran in 1514 which roughly established the patition of Kurdistan between the Turkish and Persian empires, the Kurdish tribes came under the dominion of the successive conquerors of West Asia. They knew as invaders the Selucid, Parthian, Sassanian, armenian, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Seljuk, Mongol and finally Ottoman peoples. From the worship of the sun the Kurds passed under the influence of the religions of Zoroaster, Christ, Mithras and Islam. During these millenia many Kurds rose from mere tribal leadership to establish a dynastic state which might last a century before succumbing to the attacks of an imperial power, rival Kurds or the two in alliance. Among these dynasties the best knewn is the Ayyubi, which produced the greates Kurd, Salah ud Din al Ayyubi, Saladin 1139 - 1193.

Throughout kurdish history a pattern was repeated. Countless deeds of magnificent courage and determination were done. Leaders again and again fought valiantly against imperial powers to preserve the rule of Kurds over their own people. When the foreign government was weak the Kurdish princes and chieftains rejoiced in independent action. When the empire was strong those Kurds who enjoyed its favour gladly fought those Kurds who did not. It was easier for a Kurdish prince to be vassal to a foreign overlord than give up his struggle with a rival Kurd. When the Kurds did think in terms of a political horizon beyond the tribe it was of the supranational body of Islam. In the early years of the sixteenth centurey Turkey and Persia were the major powers of the West Asia. The two empires were at war for half the time between 1514 and 1639, and had the Kurds been united they could at least have held the balance of power between the two empires. But rivalries among themselves kept the Kurds disunited. Hakim Idreis, who was Prince of Bitlis, set up for the Sultan a cordon sanitaire of autonomous Kurdish states which eventually protected the Otteman frontier all the way from Georgia to the south Zagros. The greater Kurdish princes struck money and had public prayers read in their name, a prime mark of sovereignty in Islam. The chieftains were left to rule their tribes according to their ways. The system flourished for a century and half.

Conditions were about the same in Persia. During the dynastic upheavals of the eighteenth century the Kurds showed no sense of unity even when one of their own, Kerim Khan Zand, became shah. When he died and another Kurds, Luft Ali Khan, attempted to reign, he was defeated by a northen alliance which included the Kurdish prince of Ardelan. In 1826 Sultan Mahmud II began to extend Ottoman civil administration in Kurdistan as part of his reform of a decaying empire. The Kurdish princes resisted and it was a quarter century before they were finally deprived of their principalities. The feudal lords had already been weakenedby their own excessive demands on their followers. Nevertheless, they were able to lead their followers into rebllion many time throughout the first half of the nineteeth century. In 1843 Emir Badr khan of Jazirat-ibn-Omar on the Bohtan began an attempt to gain freedom from Ottoman control. It was the first uprising which might be called nationalist in a modern sense, as Badr Khan planned to establish a Kurdish Government extending over the considerable confederation he headed. Badr fought the Ottoman army for four years. His government wa reported by American missionaries to have imposed a just rule of law and prosecuted favouritism and graft. With his allies, who included the Persian Kurds of Ardelan, he presented the Sublime Porte with a grave military problem shadowed by the larger political implication of Badr Khan's hoped-for Persian support.

Badr Khan surrendered to Osman Pash in 1847 and was sent into exile. By 1849 the Sultan had destroyed the Kurdish Government pf Bitlis founded by Hakim Idris, that of the Baban dynasty in Sulaimani and all the others dating from the Ottoman rise to empire. When the Ottoman Government was distracted by the Grimean war the Kurds rose again, once more in Hakari and this time with the Nestorians as allies. The revolt spread from Van to Baghdad. the leader, Yezdan Sher, was taken in 1855 and removed to Constandinople. The last major uprising of the nineteenth century was from 1878 to 1881 and was led by Shaikh Ubaidalla Nehri who attacked Persia with some success. Under British and Russian pressure Turkey co-operated with Persia and the Shaikh's attempt to establish a Kurdish state came to an end. Ubaidalla was exiled to Mecca where he died. In 1892 the Ottoman government opened 'tribal school'in Constandinople and Baghdad. These schools were intended to inculcate loyalty to empire in arabs abd Kurds while training them in the discipline of a modern army. The experiment did not last long. In 1878 Shaikh Ubaidalla wrote to a British vice-consul:

The Kurdish nation ia a people apart. Their religion is different and their laws and customs are distinct…. The chiefs and rulers of Kurdistan, whether Turkish or Persian subjects, and the inhabitants of Kurdistan one and all are united and agreed that matters cannot be carried on in this way with the two governments…

The European idea of political nationalism, that is, a people organised in an independent state, had reached West Asia, Shaikh Ubaidalla was a feudal lord, spiritual and temporal, and the political nationalism he talked of ran against the great political and religious traditions of Islam and the institution of the Sultan-Caliph. While respecting the rights pf peoples to be governed by their own relgious laws, Islam had from its inception thought of the State as co-extensive with the community of Islam. The institution of the Sultan-Caliph expressed this concept and Kurdish rulers were happy with it as long as they retained their princely autonomy. When the otteman government introduced Government by Turkish officials, the violating the considerable freedom of action they had long enjoyed, the more far-sighted kurdish leaders embraced political nationalism. Following the Young Turk revolution in 1908, Kurdish political clubs were established in Constantinople, Mosul, Diyarbakir and Bagdhad, all imperial centers with a leavening of intelligentsia educated in Western thought. The Kurds got such education in Constantinople, the centre of ferment in declining empire or, in the case of the young princes of the Badr Khan and Babah families, in exile in France and Switzerland. This intelligentsia, however, counted for little in the countryside, where the feudal and tribal leaders generally regarded them with hostility and suspicion as carriers of ungodly and revolutionary ideas.

The new parliament in Costantinople meant little fotr the politics of Ottoman-Kurdish relation. These continued to be conducted through diplomatic manoeuvre frequently lapsing into military action. In these circumstances the Kurdish intelligentsia could do little. What little they did in the way of political clubs and schools teaching Kurdish was carefully watched by the Government and in 1909 these were closed down. In 1910 a new society of students lawyers was formed. But even in these sophisticated circles rivlries between feudal families undermined the nationalist enterprise. The followers of Badr Khans and Abd al Qadir spied on each other and then informed the Turkish authorities. Such was the miserable infancy of Kurdish political nationalism on the eve of the war which was to wipe away the Ottoman empire. The Turkish Government presented the first World War to its empire as a holy war, a jihad. The majority of simple Kurds responded happily to the chance to make war for their Sultan-Caliph. Some Kurdish religious scholars however refused to support what they considered an improper call for a jihad. Among the intelligentsia the war was viewed as an opportunity for the nationalist cause. At the end there was indeed a great opportunity but it was to be lost.

Kurdistan lay immediately below the Ottoman empire's historical enemy to north, Roussia. Althought the Russians had at times dabbled in feeding Kurdish hopes their policy developend into backing for the Armenians at the expense of the Kurds. But they never turend their face wholly against the Kurds and from time whispered encouragements to them. As armenian nationalism had become increasingly threatening to the Sublime Porte the sultans encouraged the Kurds as the mortal expense of thousanda of armenians. When the war came, the Kurds fighting for Sultan once again found the Armenians a proper enemy. But by the end of the war the situation was profoundly changed and the Kurds and the Armenians were reconciled. Kurds sheltered Armenians from Turkish massacre in 1916. In the same year a Kurdish envoy in Tiflis unsuccessfully sought Russian aid from Grand Duke Nicholas, the Commander-in-Chief of the Turkish front. When the war began Russian forces swept into Kurdistan from Persia where they had been stationed since 1909. Massacre by Russians, Armenians, Assyrians, pestilence, famine, the slaughter of flocks and the killing hardships of migration in servere winter were the price paid by the Kurdish tribesmen for the glory of fighting the jihad for their sultan.

In 1915, the Tyoung Turks, still believing their country to be on the winning side in the war, confirmed their policy towards the subject peoples of the Ottoman empire. The Kurdish Emir Bedir-Khan tells of how, hearing of the plan to transport the Kurds to Western Anatolia and 'Turkify' them, he was instantly converted from support for the Pan-Islamic movement to Kurdish nationalism. In March 1018 the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ended the Ottomans war with Russia. By that time the Russian army was a spent force and its conquests uin Armenia and Kurdistan had been lost to the determined efforts of Mustafa Kemal combined with the collapse of Russia into revolution. The Turkish empire came to its end militarily on 31 October1918 when an armistice was sigend with the British on board H.M.S. Agamemnon in the Aegean. Mustafa Kemal's Turkish Nationalist party was in power within a year, determined to resist Allied demands. The National Pact adopted by them as policy declared those territories not occupied by the Allies on 30 October 1918 to form a whole which did not permit of division for any reason. British forces, though already occupying most of what is now Iraqi Kurdistan, took over Mosul town only on 3 November. The protesting Turks insisted, probably with some truth, that the Kurds there wished to remain in the Ottoman state.

The Kurds were still loyal to the religious authority of the caliphate and at this time the secularised étatisme of Kemal lay in the unforeseen future.the Turks made a great effort to win the confidence of the Kurds during this period. The National Pact however prefifured the later Government policy denying the very existence of the Kurdish nationality: the pact declared the areas unoccupiedon 30 October 1918 to be inhabited by an Ottoman-Muslim majority united by religionand race. Outside Turkey, Kurdish nationalists had begun, as soon as the war ended, soliciting for Kurdish statehood, sinking their differences with Armenians in order to pursue mutual interests. They based their appeal on President Wilson's Fourteen Points of January 1918, which provided for an unmolested opportunity for autonomous development for minorities within the Ottoman empire, and on two similar Anglo-French declarations later the same year. When British forces were replaced in 1919 by French in Syria and Cilicia, Mosul remained in the British sphere of influence; but frontier between french Syria an British Iraq was defined in 1922 and arbitrarily divided Kurdish-populated Jazirah.

The peace treaty signed at Sévers by the Sultan's government (still recognised by the Allisies despite the Nationalist majority in parliament) provided for an Allied commission to draft a scheme of local autonomy for the predominantly Kurdish area east of the Euphrates, south of Armenia and north of Syria and Mesopotamia. The Constantinople Government promised to execute the Commission's decisions and to allow self-government to the Kurds if within a year the majority of them wanted it and the League of Nations considered them fit for it. However, there other provisions in the treaty which would have reduced Turkey to colonies of the major European powers. Under the leadership of Mustafa Kemel the Turkish Nationalists rejected the treaty signed by the puppet Government, and the Turkish war independence began. The Turks won and forced the Allies to draw up the new peace treaty , the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which made no mention of the Kurds. Mustafa Kemel at that time might easily have thought Turkification would proceed satisfactorily. A more pressing aspect of the Kurdish problem was the Mosul question. The Treaty of Lausanne left to be settled later the Turkish frontier with Iraq which meant, in effect, how much of Kurdistan was to come under Turkish control. Eventually the league of Nations awarded the Mosul vilayet to Iraq, but as Turkey did not recognise the League's jurisdiction the matter was only finally settled by Turkey, Britain and Iraq on 5 June 1926.

The Turks were reluctant to lose the vilayet for several reasons. Among them were the oil fields of Mosul and the possible threat of nationalist incitement spreading from the Iraqi Kurds to their fellows in Turkey. The British had attempted to establish a reliable Kurdish Government in the vilayet but failed in the attempt. The Iraqi Kurds did not pose a threat to the Ankara Government; the threat came from the Kurds within the Turkish state.


Write by Derk Kinnane
in 1964