The Great War for Kurdistan
On the history, politics, and future of the persistent little nation that wasn’t.
Throw a handful of darts at a map of the Middle East, and you’re bound to hit Kurdistan. One cannot understand Turkish domestic politics, Syrian battlefield formations, or our wars in Iraq without Kurdistan. And yet, Kurdistan is not formally listed on any map. It has no borders, no central authority, no foreign trade, and no standing army. To understand it, we must ask the same question that the Treaty of Sèvres asked, a question repeated by Josef Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: to whom do the Kurds belong?
The Origins of a Non-Nation
It’s difficult to say exactly when the Kurdish language emerged, since the earliest available Kurdish texts date to 1600 CE. We do, however, know this: it is an Indo-European language spoken by an ethnic group which stretches from Eastern Turkey, through Syria, Iraq, Armenia and Azerbaijan, to Western Iran. These lands constitute the transnational region called Kurdistan.
Around the time of those early Kurdish texts, Kurdish regions served as a buffer between the Ottoman and Safavid empires. This would not be its last time as a zone of separation between warring states. As the Ottomans centralized, their rule over the region transitioned from hands-off to increasingly interventionist. By 1900, Kurdish lands were almost entirely Ottoman-dominated: they were the unloyal subjects of a sickly empire on the brink of implosion.
The first World War brought Anatolia to its knees. The Young Turks, hoping to avoid a siege and occupation of Istanbul, struck a deal with Europe called the Treaty of Sèvres. The Sèvres allowed Atatürk and the Young Turks to continue their rule, albeit in a much smaller nation (the fledgling Turkey) and carved up the rest of the Ottoman territory among themselves. France claimed Lebanon and Syria; Britain claimed mandates over Cyprus, Palestine, and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). With the Ottomans deposed and new states rising to the power, the stage was set for the Kurdish nation to come to fruition.
The first attempt was Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji’s Kingdom of Kurdistan, which exercised power in northern British Mandate territory from 1921 to 1924. The King’s forces exercised their newfound control over Mesopotamia and put Kurdistan down by force. In the next attempt, Kurds bravely struck at Anatolia by digging into eastern Turkey and forming independent local authorities and militias. This three-year Republic of Ararat lasted from 1927 to 1930, when it was put down by the Turks. The final attempt at Kurdish sovereignty was a Soviet matter. In 1946, Stalin’s government funneled weapons and money to the Republic of Mahabad, a breakaway Kurdish city in northern Iran. Stalin mobilized the Kurds as a pawn against the increasingly pro-Western Shah (see my post “Four Hundred Seconds to Tel Aviv”); though small embers of revolutionary sentiment burned for thirty years, Kurdistan would not mobilize until 1978.
Providing Comfort and Subsidizing Revolution
Inspired by the propulsive growth of the Iranian revolution, a group of political science students at Turkey’s Ankara University founded the mercurial Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan. The PKK is an incredibly interesting case study in Middle Eastern militant groups: it has been alternately militant, Marxist, independentist, libertarian, liberal-democratic, and even ecological, but never Islamist. Their covert war against the Turkish government began with strikes at military bases and outposts on the border between Syria and Turkey. The civil war in Lebanon gave the PKK various Beirut redoubts, and access to a steady stream of increasingly powerful armaments and ammunition. As Turkey came under the control of a new military government, the PKK retreated to northern Iraq, where they became embroiled in the Iran-Iraq war. Their partner, the KDP (an Iraq-based wing of the Kurdistan movement) provided support to Iranian armored columns pushing into Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s response was the collective punishment of Iraq’s entire Kurdish population. His brutal Anfal campaign killed over one hundred thousand people; his army shelled Halabja with American-supplied nerve agents, enveloping at least fifteen thousand civilians in deathly clouds of gas. Humanitarian organizations looked on in horror, unable to intervene. Privately, the White House began to wonder if their material support of Saddam’s war had been a mistake. Intervention plans were drawn up, and then discarded: at the time, Ba’athist Iraq had the fourth-largest army on Earth. It would take a miscalculation of massive proportions, either by Iraq or by America, to push the two powers into conflict. And then someone miscalculated.
That someone was Hussein. In August of 1990, seeking fast capital to recoup Iraq’s many lenders, Hussein invaded Kuwait. Early 1991’s Operation Desert Storm was paired with verbal American support for a Kurdish uprising. The PKK and KDP rose up against Hussein’s garrisons in the north, but the support they had been promised never came. The rebellion was completely crushed. As Saddam’s troops limped backwards out of Kuwait, they targeted Kurdish families for summary execution wherever they could be found.
Applying long-term punishment became the West’s official Iraq policies. The relatively well-known diplomatic sanctions on Iraq were not the only punishment applied. America also enforced a no-fly zone over the Kurdish sections of the country, dropping pallets of supplies to Kurdish refugees under Operation Provide Comfort. Slowly, an autonomous Kurdish state began to emerge; its protection was a key aim of Clinton’s Operation Desert Strike and the long-running Operation Southern Watch. The Coalition in support of the Kurds fractured after 9/11. The Kurds were on their own.
A Kurdish Future, Maybe?
Since then, the PKK and its Syrian wing (the SDF) have been running a combined marathon-and-poker-game across the Middle East. The PKK has struck at Turkish defense companies and their offices, while the SDF waged a large-scale war against both Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, and the Turkey-backed SNA. With fire support by American forces, Kurdish fighters encircled ISIS’s two strongholds (Raqqa and Mosul) and obliterated the organization’s Levantine presence.
With the Syrian Civil War settled into an uneasy peace, the Kurdish autonomous region holding firm in Iraq, and the PKK supposedly dissolved in Turkey, the Kurds are in uncharted territory. The verdict on if America will choose to back an independent Kurdish nation sits somewhere between “probably not” and “anyone’s guess.” The great war for Kurdistan, a war which never formally began, is over. But, somehow, the question which sparked the war has not yet been answered: to whom do the Kurds belong?