The Kurds: Straddling the Map of the Middle East
by Samer Badawi
Numbering up to 35 million people, the Kurds are among the original inhabitants of Mesopotamia. Today, they can be found throughout the Middle East — in Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey (see map above). They live mostly in the mountains weaving along the borders of these countries and, though they are a distinct ethnic group, lack a nation-state of their own. Although they speak many dialects, Kurds are religiously mostly Sunni Muslims.
Unwelcome ‘Guests’
Like the other indigenous populations of the Middle East, Kurds lived under the control of the Ottoman Empire for some six centuries, maintaining their traditions while paying taxes to the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople. As World War I approached, the empire began to lose control over its territories, and the Kurds, like many Arab populations in the region, sought to position themselves for independence.
The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres was to be their ticket. That document, signed by the war’s victorious Western powers, provided for a Kurdish homeland that was to be known as “Kurdistan.” Before it could take hold, however, that provision was replaced three years later by the Treaty of Lausanne, which established the boundaries of today’s Turkey. With their hopes for a homeland diminished, the Kurds were relegated to minority status in the countries where they were concentrated. Separated from each other and lacking political influence, they were to become convenient scapegoats for the Middle East’s ills, suffering at the hands of its dictators with virtually no support from the international community.
It was not always this way. In fact, a Syrian Kurd of the 12th century, Salah ud Din al Ayubbi — known in the West as Saladin — became arguably the most famous of Middle Eastern rulers. Having risen to the helm of a Muslim empire spanning Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, he turned his sights to retaking Jerusalem, Islam’s third holiest site, which had been conquered by European Crusaders.
When the Crusaders surrendered Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187, he instructed his followers to respect the city’s Jewish and Christian inhabitants and landmarks. This policy came in stark contrast to the Crusaders’ prior treatment of Jerusalem’s indigenous Jewish and Muslim populations.
According to the British historian Karen Armstrong, Jews who had been expelled from Jerusalem by the Crusaders were able to return under Saladin. This earned the Kurd a reputation as the Jewish people’s “new Cyrus,” a reference to the Persian king who, in the Bible, is remembered as having freed the Jews from captivity in Babylon. Saladin later negotiated with England’s King Richard I to allow Muslim control of Jerusalem.
Despite their deep roots in the region, the Kurds have remained unwelcome “guests” in the Middle East. This has had tragic consequences for innocent civilians. The most widely known atrocities committed against Kurdish civilians came as part of the 1988 Anfal campaign led by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Carried out between February and September of that year, the Anfal campaign included the March 16 poison gas attack on the village of Halabja. Human Rights Watch estimates the attack killed between 3,200 and 5,000 Kurdish residents and amounted to an act of genocide.
The U.S. Role
The Anfal campaign elicited widespread condemnation. It also took place during Iraq’s ongoing war with Iran, which had started in 1980. During that war, many countries — including Saudi Arabia, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States — supported Saddam Hussein against Iran. In fact, the U.S. began selling weapons to Iraq early in the conflict. Though it called the attack on Halabja “abhorrent,” the U.S. turned a blind eye to the Hussein regime’s chemical-weapons attacks against Iranian civilians during the war.
With most of Iraq’s Kurdish population living near the Iranian border, the Iraqi dictator viewed the Kurds as a potential threat to his rule. Since his Anfal campaign, launched near the end of the war, followed years of similar attacks against Iran, Saddam had no reason to fear U.S. condemnation or reprisal.
Fewer than three years after the Halabja massacre, however, the United States would lead a bombing campaign against Iraq that would drop 88,500 tons of munitions on its army in Kuwait and Iraq. Operation Desert Storm, which also included a brief ground invasion of Kuwait to expel Iraqi troops from the country, would be followed by 13 years of sanctions against the regime of Saddam Hussein.
As part of the sanctions, the United States also enforced a no-fly zone over northern Iraq, where the country’s three predominantly Kurdish provinces would coalesce around what was to be known as the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The no-fly zone meant that Iraq’s Kurds were protected from attacks, by air and by land, from Saddam’s army.
With this newfound stability, three northern Iraqi provinces with large Kurdish populations became semi-autonomous zones, free to govern their own populations without interference from the country’s central government.
Self-Government
And govern they did. In the decade after the establishment of the no-fly zone in February 1991, the Kurds’ two main political factions forged an uneasy alliance. They held parliamentary elections in 1992 and formed the KRG. Persistent power struggles between the two factions led to the deaths of some 2,000 Kurds during a 1994 civil war. But the KRG would grow to become a potent force in northern Iraq.
The KRG launched a region-wide effort to reform the education system, issuing new textbooks that centered on Kurdish culture and history. The textbooks also documented the history of the Iraqi government’s repression of Kurdish aspirations. School curricula, which had been taught in Arabic, were converted to Kurdish, and Kurdish literature enjoyed a resurgence. Since its formation, the KRG has spent a larger percentage of its budget on education — 16% according to government figures — than the United States, Canada, Germany, or Japan.
Although the Kurds have tried to preserve the tolerant legacy of Saladin, the KRG’s educational reforms caused unease among minority populations under its control. That is because Iraq’s ethnic diversity is largely concentrated in the three Kurdish governorates. Other cultural and ethnic minorities, such as the Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Yazidis, suffered a common fate under Saddam’s regime. But they do not define themselves as Kurdish. Nor do they speak Kurdish. Finding a place in the new KRG would prove to be challenging for them. Still, their lives under the Kurdish regime were far preferable to the precariousness of living under the authoritarian grip of Saddam Hussein.
Iraq’s Kurds have also taken in millions of refugees, many of them Kurds, from neighboring countries, including Syria. According to KRG statistics, one in four residents of the region had been displaced, either from Iraqi provinces to the south or from countries bordering the Kurdish region.
What Next for the Kurds?
With nearly two decades of self-rule in Iraq, where approximately 15% of the world’s Kurds live, what prevents an independent Kurdistan? Part of the answer lies in the conflict in neighboring Syria. A nearly decade-long civil war there has claimed more than half-a-million lives and displaced up to a third of Syria’s population. Although the proportion of these displaced who are Kurdish remains unconfirmed, what is clear is that hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians have fled to KRG areas to escape the war. This, in turn, put a strain on infrastructure in the Kurdish region and gave rise to fears about encroaching extremism from groups like the Islamic State (aka ISIS), which found a foothold amid the chaos of the war.
Into this turmoil, the administration of former U.S. President Barack Obama sought to bolster Kurdish forces as they fought off the rapidly expanding Islamic State. These forces included some elements that Turkey, a U.S. ally with a sizable Kurdish population of its own, accused of trying to foment instability along the Turkish border. With little appetite among Americans to wage battle directly against Islamic State fighters, this left the Obama administration with a perplexing choice: continue arming the Kurds and risk alienating an important ally, or abandon the Kurds to fend for themselves.
Ultimately, the Obama administration deferred a decision, bequeathing the problem to incoming president Donald Trump. By December 2018, less than a year into his tenure, Trump had decided to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, effectively ending support for the Kurds. Since then, Kurdish fighters, known as peshmerga, have remained engaged on the Syrian side of the border, in an area that, under the abandoned Treaty of Sèvres, was to be part of a larger Kurdistan. That imagined entity, though, remains as elusive as ever.
Questions for Discussion
1. Describe the hardships faced by the Kurdish people as minorities within other nation-states. What affects have these hardships had on the Kurds?
2. What effect has the U.S. had on Kurdish affairs? What role should it have? Use evidence from the article in your answer.
3. In what ways could the KRG’s behavior toward refugees serve as a model for other members of the community of nations?
This article was originally published in the Spring 2020 issue of Bill of Rights in Action (BRIA), the quarterly curricular magazine of Constitutional Rights Foundation. Click here for a classroom activity on this article, plus writing and discussion questions for use with high school students. You can also subscribe to BRIA for free here.
