by Gerald A. Honigman
Flag of the Kurds and Kurdistan (Photo by Unknown author – Own work , Public Domain)
For the sake of bribing Turkey’s autocratic, would-be Sultan Erdogan the Great’s taking over of all the oil rich lands of majority Kurdish northern Iraq and Syria that the Ottoman Turkish Empire lost to Great Britain’s Mandate of Mesopotamia via the League of Nations’ Mosul Decision of 1925, the Barzani led Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) has been cozying up to its Turkish tormentors at the expense of its Syrian Kurdish brothers and sisters very lives and partial autonomy.
By selling Kurdish oil in the Kirkuk to Mosul Kurdish and Assyrian region to Ankara, the KDP stalls the Turks’ real ambition to regain this region.
The Kurds had been promised independence after WWI in the historic central heartland of the Kurds’ Guti (Guti, Kurdi), Kassite, and Mede ancestors in Iraqi Kurdistan in the Kirkuk area. They lived there long before Arab invaders arrived from the Arabian Peninsula or Turks from Central Asia near China.
Kurdish independence was included in President Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points,” but a collusion of British petroleum politics and Arab nationalism nipped it in the bud… The result ?
The original Mandate of Palestine in 1920 underwent partition from 1922 onwards, with several other proposals which would have awarded Arab nationalism (Arabism) about 90% of the total area (today’s Jordan was gifted with almost 80% in 1922), but a. much larger Mandate of Mesopotamia was not permitted even partition so that some other of what was renamed Iraq’s millions of non-Arab peoples (Kurds, Assyrians, etc.) might also receive a slice of the justice pie in a region Arabs have simply claimed to be “purely Arab patrimony,” and to hell with anyone else’s claims or rights.
Ergo, the one best chance for Kurds to begin the process of acting together in unity for the sake of their 40 million TRULY stateless people was forfeited for Western access to the great oil reserves of the largely “Arab” gulf region.
The main enabling force for creating the largest empire ever—Great Britain’s Royal Navy—had recently switched from coal to oil burning ships, so London’s promises to the Kurds were tossed overboard.
The subsequent results have indeed been nothing short of tragic, with this brave people being used and abused, gassed to death en mass and otherwise slaughtered by Turks, Arabs, and Iranians…and worse yet, different factions of Kurds even joining forces with those who murdered their own people…See the following link:
The Barzanis, of the KDP, who were my best hope (I’ve done advanced doctoral studies in this area), allied their Peshmerga forces with Saddam Hussein, who gassed and otherwise massacred hundreds of thousands of other Kurds. The government offices in Erbil featured several of my own editorials on their official letterhead brochures at times, but after its awkward dalliance with Saddam Hussein, I was extremely disheartened.
The Barzanis did this largely due to their rivalry with the Talabani Family led Kurds of PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) who were supported by Iran, especially in the era of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.
The Foreword to my forever timely book is written by the President of the Kurdistan National Assembly of Syria, where the Turks are planning to take over unless international pressure is applied. And the main player here would be America, but President Trump, unfortunately, whom I’ve largely supported with my own writings, is apparently too enamored with Erdogan to care about the fate of our Kurdish allies
The Turkey of Erdogan’s Islamist party is not the nation of its predecessor. It’s no longer a force for democracy and jails or otherwise eliminates Erdogan’s opposition, and has rendered America’s important Incirlik military base useless.
The Kurds would likely welcome such a base in either/or Syrian or Iraqi Kurdistan.
America cannot abandon this important region to the Russians and Chinese who are now allying themselves to both Iran and Turkey…
Due to the unfortunate petty squabbling over maintaining individual fiefdoms, Iraqi Kurds are contributing to their combined Turk, Arab, and Iranian enemies’ efforts to prevent a unified, independent Kurdish state from ever joining the ranks of nations.
The Kurds of Syrian Kurdistan have the most promising democracy outside of Israel in all of MENA…and these courageous people, with women in key roles, have been America’s loyal allies fighting and dying against the various jihadi Islamist groups who are aided and abetted by Suitan Erdogan, ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas’s key supporter, besides Qatar and Iran.
And now the KDP, as seen in the link below, is unbelievably fighting the PKK, which simply wants the Turks to stop forcibly Turkifying its people. I state this knowing, unfortunately, that the PKK has sided with Israel’s enemies in the past, and denies the Jewish People rights to their 4,000 year old ancestral homeland.
Here a comparative analysis of the PKK and Hamas…
Lastly, while Israel has made Arabic the second national language, Turkey has outlawed the language and culture of the 23 million Kurds (of 40 million total) who predate the in the region by millennia, before Central Asian Turks forcibly conquered the Middle East and whom they have renamed “Mountain Turks” in an attempt at cultural genocide.
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