The Kurds
Early this month, the United
States bombed Iraq in retaliation for Saddam Hussein's invasion of the Kurdish
city Irbil. Who are the Kurds, and why do they feature so often in news stories
from the Middle East?
There are between 20
million and 25 million Kurds--one of the largest ethnic groups in the world
without its own state. Almost the entire Kurdish population lives in a
mountainous area that covers eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and northwestern
Iran, as well as slivers of Syria, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The Kurds,
descendants of Indo-European nomads, call this region Kurdistan , and
have lived there at least 2,000 years.
Although the Kurds consider
themselves a nation, they share neither a common language nor a common
religion. Kurdish consists of several mutually unintelligible dialects,
linguistic relatives of Persian, the language of Iran. The vast majority of
Kurds are Sunni Muslims, but there are also Shiites, Christians, Zoroastrians,
Jews, and others.
The Kurds
have spent most of the last two millennia fighting against, or allying with,
the Arabs, the Persians, and the Turks. They joined the Muslim crusades
(Saladin, the 12 th -century Muslim hero who recaptured Jerusalem, was
a Kurd). They have ruled their own mountain kingdoms at various points in
history. More recently, they were subjects of both the Persian and Ottoman
empires.
The history of the Kurds in the 20 th
century has been one of almost constant warfare and disappointment, as they
have sought autonomy--with little success--in each of their three principal
homelands. The Kurds of what is now Turkey were promised a state after World
War I, but Kemal Atatürk annexed them. With Soviet help, Iranian Kurds founded
a state called Mahabad in 1946, but the Shah crushed it less than a year later.
Iraqi Kurds have been warring for autonomy since the 1930s. Today, separatist
movements continue in all three countries.
Iraq: Kurds number
about 4 million, approximately 15 percent of the Iraqi population. The recent
Kurdish unrest is rooted in 60 years of rebellion, betrayal, and defeat.
Between the early 1930s and 1975, Mulla Mustafa Barzani repeatedly
warred against Iraqi authorities. He and his Kurdish Democratic Party
(KDP) controlled much of northern Iraq at several points, and the Iraqi
government even granted the Kurds some autonomy in 1970. That arrangement
soured, and in 1974, Barzani again took up arms against Iraq, this time backed
by Iran, the United States, and Israel. But Iran signed a peace accord with
Iraq in 1975 and immediately abandoned the KDP. So did the United States and
Israel. Iraq smashed the Kurdish uprising. Barzani left for the United States,
where he died in 1979. The Iraqi Kurds split into factions: Barzani's son
Moussad took over the clannish, conservative KDP; Jalal Talabani
founded the urban, vaguely leftist Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
(PUK) .
The
Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s revived the Kurds. The PUK and KDP made common cause
with Iran. In 1988, Saddam Hussein savaged the Kurds. His troops razed hundreds
of Kurdish villages, massacred thousands of Kurdish fighters and civilians, and
forcibly relocated many more to southern Iraq. A poison-gas attack on
the town of Halabja killed as many as 7,000 Kurds. About 100,000 Kurdish
refugees fled to Iran and Turkey.
Three years later, after the Gulf War ,
the Kurds rose again at the urging of the United States and its partners in the
anti-Saddam alliance. But Hussein stomped them. The allies intervened only when
nearly 2 million Kurdish refugees surged toward the Turkish and Iranian
borders. The United States, France, Britain, and Turkey delivered humanitarian
aid, established a no-fly zone, and pressured Hussein to withdraw from Kurdish
territory. With Western help, the Kurds elected a Parliament in 1992.
Based in Irbil, the Parliament split evenly between the KDP and the PUK.
Democracy
didn't last. With no Iraqis to fight, the Kurds turned on each other .
Civil war broke out in 1994, and more than 2,000 Kurds were killed before the
United States brokered a peace in 1995. That peace collapsed this summer. The
PUK helped Iran conduct an incursion into northern Iraq. Barzani's KDP, in
turn, asked for Hussein's help (even though Hussein had slaughtered thousands
of Barzani's supporters during the 1980s). Hussein accepted the invitation. On
Aug. 31, 30,000 Iraqi troops and thousands of KDP fighters drove the PUK from
Irbil. This raid inspired United States cruise-missile strikes on
southern Iraq. After securing Irbil, Barzani's men quickly routed the PUK from
its other strongholds. Talabani fled to the Iran border, and the PUK is all but
defunct. Barzani insists that he's not Hussein's puppet, and that Iraqi troops
have withdrawn to the south. But Hussein's secret police have settled in; the
Kurdish Parliament has collapsed; and experts doubt that the KDP can resist
Iraqi bullying.
Turkey: Kurds constitute 20 percent of
Turkey's 60 million citizens. In his effort to build nationalism across Turkey
in the 1920s, Atatürk instituted a campaign to suppress Kurdish identity that
continues today. Teaching and broadcasting in Kurdish are banned. And as
recently as 1994, the government jailed for treason politicians who expressed
mild pro-Kurdish sentiments. This suppression has helped legitimize the
Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) , a quasi-Marxist guerrilla group that
champions Kurdish autonomy. Since 1984, Abdullah Ocalan and his army of
between 5,000 and 10,000 fighters have been waging a vicious war against Turkey
from bases in northern Iraq and Syria . More than 18,000 people have
died. The PKK has murdered Turks who teach Kurdish children, Kurds who side
with the Turks, and thousands of Turkish soldiers. The PKK has also bombed
Turkish targets in Germany. Both Germany and the United States classify the PKK
as a terrorist organization .
The Turkish army has
responded with equal brutality. It has "de-Kurdified " much of
southeastern Turkey, bulldozing as many as 2,500 Kurdish villages and forcing
thousands of Kurds to move to cities in western Turkey. And since 1995, Turkish
troops have invaded northern Iraq three times to destroy PKK bases.
Iran: The Iranian
Kurds are much quieter than those in Turkey or Iraq. Kurds constitute only 10
percent of Iran's population; their culture and language are much closer to
Iran's than they are to Turkey's or Iraq's; and Iranian governments have
permitted them limited cultural expression, though no political autonomy. In
1979, the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) joined Ayatollah
Khomeini's revolution, but he quickly snuffed any hope for Kurdish autonomy.
His tanks and fighter planes crushed a budding Kurdish resistance movement. The
Iranian government has assassinated two KDPI leaders. This summer, the
government and the PUK raided KDPI hideouts in northern Iraq. This assault, in
turn, helped reignite the PUK's war with the KDP.
