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In reply to the discussion: Islamic State 'retreating' in key Syria town of Kobane [View all]The Magistrate
(95,247 posts)Each problem is peculiar, and solutions must be cut to suit, not made to measure off some standard pattern.
The problem of Kurdistan is an old one, with deeper roots than many suppose. It is not just that creation of an independent Kurdistan was proposed as part of the peace settlement in the Near East after the Great War, at a time when it at least seemed possible to leave the Turkish government remaining in Istanbul ruling no more than actual Turks, when Persia was in no shape to object to anything, and neither Syria nor Iraq existed. France was going to get much of southeastern Anatolia, where an Armenian state was to be erected; Italy was to get a good slice of the Anatolian pie as well. The eruption of Bolsheviks into the Caucasus, and of Gen. Kemal's Nationalists, upset these projections badly, with some bitter and murderous, but now largely forgotten wars. France held on to all it could as Syria and Lebanon, while England held the oil in the north of Iraq and Persia, and for the first few years of it fought a further covert war with the Turks, who aided Kurdish rebellion there with not just weapons but formed troops.
But even beyond this is the fact that their neighbors mostly detest them. Some of it is the standard low regard mountaineers and people of the lowlands feel for one another, but for much of the Ottoman period, the Kurds served as enforcers for Istanbul, providing reliable troops to suppress disorder among Arabs. They also carried out a great proportion of the killing in the various waves of massacre directed against Armenians, including the genocidal episode during the Great War. Few were sorry to see them left standing when the tune came to an end in the game of musical borders around 1922, and since then, they have been of some use to virtually all the countries who hold parts of their native range, as a means of causing trouble for some neighbor who also holds part of the Kurdish territory.
The Turkish effort to make Turks out of them, rooted in the whole reform and modernization effort of Ataturk ( nee Kemal ), is something separate. Turks never were a very large portion of the Ottoman empire, and absorption of the Kurds in eastern Anatolia, or failing that, their effective subjugation, was considered necessary to give Turkey sufficient heft to stand as a notable power in the region and the world. Since the Turks, in the Cold War period, were solidly anti-Communist and ruled from the right, Kurdish resistance inevitable took on a leftist tinge, which is most of why the chief political faction of Turkish Kurds, the PKK, is regarded officially by the U.S. as a 'terrorist' organization, a thing which is quite inconvenient at present for U.S. policy options....