10 Facts You Need to Know About the Kurds

posted on: Oct 23, 2019

 By John Mason, Contributing Writer/Arab America

President Trump’s motive to yank U.S. troops out of the Middle East on the backs of the Kurds was a wanton action. Kurdish soldiers, part of the Syrian Democratic Forces, had carried most of the water for U.S. troops in degrading the so-called Caliphate of ISIS. Trump’s withdrawal gave Turkish president Erdogan the green light to clear the Syria-Turkey border of the U.S.-supported Kurdish troops. Erdogan has maintained that these troops were part of the YPG militia, whom he has linked to the Kurdish PKK party, assumed by both Turkey and the U.S. government to be “terrorists.”

1. The Kurds are an ancient ethnic group in the Middle East who have been and will continue to be an important political and military ally in the Middle East

Kurds continue to inhabit a large swath of an area including Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey and the Caucasus of the former Soviet Union, including, present-day Armenia. They share with Iranians a linguistic origin in the large  Indo-European family of languages. They comprise around 25-35 million people

2. In the absence of their own homeland, the Kurds have suffered from severe oppression by the leaders of at least two of the countries in which they live, namely Iraq and Turkey

Saddam Hussein is a prime example of a leader who tried to decimate the Kurds in Iraq because they vehemently opposed him. Probably as extreme in its actions against the Kurds is the Turkish government, which has ruled over them with an iron hand in an effort to maintain the semblance of a unified 

Turkey. World leaders including Great Britain’s Winston Churchill and U.S. Henry Kissinger promised the Kurds their own country, which they later reneged on. Given their population size alone, they would comprise a large country in the region.

3. Kurds represent a vibrant cultural and multi-linguistic culture that is worthy of the world respect

After Arabs, Persians, and Turks, Kurds represent the fourth largest ethnic grouping in the Middle East. The Kurdish language is made up of several dialects. In Iraq, the language has an official status, alongside Arabic. In Iran, it is recognized as a regional language. Because the Kurds are citizens of many countries, they also speak one or two additional languages. In Iraq they are bilingual in Arabic; in Iran, in Persian or Farsi; and in Turkey, in Turkish. Kurdish language, culture and their desire for their own homeland are the unifying features of their identity. They follow the Sunni branch of Islam but in Iraq, there is also a strong Christian minority. Many Kurds lean towards a more secular form of Islam. 

4. Kurds were once a powerful people who held sway in the Middle East

Kurds were part of an Islamic sweep across Asia and the Middle East. Leading this movement was the highly respected An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, a Kurd commonly known as Saladin. Saladin led the military campaign against the Crusaders in 1187, in which Muslim armies took control of Palestine and especially the holy city of Jerusalem. While the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem lasted for several centuries following that campaign, Saladin’s success resulted in eventual Muslim control of the area. That is, up until the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, when the area reverted to Israeli occupation.

5. Kurds have been oppressed by Turkish governments for a Century 

Before World War I, Ottoman Turkish rulers tried to co-opt their Kurdish minority into the Empire. They were successful, to a degree. By the time of the First World War and the decline of the Ottoman Empire, however, the Kurds attempted to gain independence, without success. More recently, in the 1990s, the Turks have driven Kurds off their land, forcing them into cities in southern Turkey so as to better control them. The Iranians have similarly repressed Kurdish attempts at self-determination.

6. Saddam brutally tried to eliminate the Kurds

Saddam Hussein speaks to a Kurdish worker in the northern part of Iraq (Photo Reuters)Both before and during the First Gulf War in the 1990s, Saddam Hussein had been on the attack against the Kurdish population of Iraq. His intent was to squash the Kurds. He saw them as an intransigent, non-Arab ethnic minority who sat on a lot of oil and whose allegiance he had difficulty commanding. Saddam had poisoned an entire community, Halabja with mustard gas, forced Kurds from their city of Kirkuk because the city rested on large oil deposits, and ravaged their productive agricultural lands in northern Iraq.

7. Earlier, the U.S. government significantly protected the Kurds

To protect the Kurds, in the early-mid 1990s the U.S. and Britain agreed to a system of aerial surveillance, known as the ‘no-fly zone’ by which the air forces of each nation would make daily scheduled flights over a certain line of latitude across which Saddam’s forces would cross at their peril. This procedure was intended to and effectively did protect the Kurds from further incursions by Saddam.

8. The Kurds of northern Iraq represent one of the more positive examples of democratic self-determination in a multi-ethnic state

Whether it’s the Kurds of Iraq, Turkey, Iran, or Syria, their prospects for a successful political future are largely dependent on the conditions of the larger states of which they are apart. Except perhaps for the Kurds in Iraq, their chances for self-determination are dim. The Kurds presently confront governments that range from quasi-democratic (Iraq) to authoritarian (Turkey), to theocratic despotism (Iran), to simply despotic (Syria). Still. If political and economic opportunities come to be equally shared in Iraq, then the Kurds might have a fighting chance to succeed as a self-directed, vibrant ethnic group. They would also then become a shining example for the rest of the Arab World.

9. If the Kurds are an example of how the U.S. treats its allies who fight  our enemies, then future allies should reconsider their options

Syrian Kurds have been highly critical of the U.S. following its desertion of them in the face of the Turkish attack. As the troops escaped northern Syria, Kurdish villagers threw apples and vegetables at their vehicles and cursed at them, calling them “betrayers” and “traitors.”  

10. The Kurds deserve a lot better

The lessons of Trump’s treatment of the Kurds perhaps remind us of an earlier time when moral and ethical values were integral to America’s alliances with foreign forces. For the moment, they have been trashed.

Reference: “The Kurds: An Important Piece of the Fabric of Arab Society,” Arab America, John Mason, June 20, 2018 (parts of the present post were derived from the earlier post)

John Mason, an anthropologist specializing in Arab culture and society, is the author of recently-published LEFT-HANDED IN AN ISLAMIC WORLD: An Anthropologist’s Journey into the Middle East, 2017, New Academia Publishing.