The Kurdish war
David Adamson
George Allen & Unwin Ltd.
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Contents
Chapter
One / 13
Two / 26
Three / 42
Four / 56
Five / 69
Six / 84
Seven / 100
Eight / 113
Nine / 126
Ten / 141
Eleven / 155
Twelve / 169
Thirteen / 178
Fourteen / 193
Appendix / 208
Illustrations
1 The great cave at Cham-i-Razan / frontispiece
2 Ibrahim Ahmed / facing page / 32
Mullah Mustafa Barzani
3 On the Iraq-Persian frontier / 33
On the way out of Iraq
4 Colonel Akrawi / 96
Kurdish soldier
Mustafa Karadaghi
5 The hospital in the cave at Cham-i-Razan / 97
A mixed bag of prisoners
6 Partisans at the Democratic Party headquarters / 112
On the summit of Mount Sarband
7 Refugee children outside their cave / 113
Inside the cave
CHAPTER I
When I arrived at the Emir's diminutive flat near the Metro Dupleix I found that his wife was if and in bed. She looked very oriental, I thought, and probably very Kurdish too, as she lay back among her pillows in the bed alcove, apologizing for not being able to cook lunch and thanking me for the pink azalea in a pot that I had brought. Afterwards I recalled it as a fine-boned, delicately featured face; but I must have been misled by the shadows of the alcove, for when I met her and her husband again nearly a year later I saw that it was a robust and cheerfully handsome face. Madame Bedir Khan, I discovered, is Polish; and the Emir, who teaches at the Ecole des Langues Vivantes, usually prefers to be known as doctor. This is not to demonstrate a type of disenchantment or that I went to Kurdistan with romantic ideas and came back with plain ones: merely that the Kurds are never quite what they seem, even the adopted ones like Madame Bedir Khan. The Kurdish war is a bit like that, too. The Arabs, Turks and Persians see it as an almost unbroken series of bloodthirsty, pillaging forays by wild tribesmen, but the Kurds (and on the whole I think they are right) look on it as a long national struggle which began in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.
The Emir (the title suits him better than plain doctor) Bedir Khan's great-grandfather, the Prince of Bhotan, was the first Kurdish national leader of any consequence; and apart from being somewhat blood-boltered by the massacre of 10,000 Assyrian Christians, he emerged with honour from his defeat by the Turks in r 84.77. He and his family went into exile in the following year, the Year of Revolutions, and if there was no immediate sign that what was happening elsewhere made any impact on them, the family was later to play an important part in promoting and keeping alive the idea of Kurdish nationalism. They published a newspaper, Kurdistan, which they …
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Infectious diseases. No book may be taken into a house in which there is a person suffering from a notifiable infectious disease or which is isolated by reason of an infectious disease, and any book which has been exposed to infection must not be returned to the Library but must be given to the Sanitary Inspector for destruction.
Note
I have used pseudonyms to disguise the identities of some of the smaller fry who helped me in Istanbul, Persia and Iraq. I have also scrambled a few facts about those who helped me or talked to me about Kurdish politics on my way to Iraq, but they are very minor points and none of the essential details of what happened has been changed.
I have not given a bibliography, but I should like to acknowledge my indebtedness to two books, Mr C. J. Edmonds's Kurds, Turks and Arabs, London, 1957, and Mr William Eagleton Jr's The Kurdish Republic of 1946, London, 1963. Both are invaluable to anyone who wishes to study the history of the Kurds in the first half of this century.
The Kurdish war
David Adamson
George Allen & Unwin Ltd.
George Allen & Unwin Ltd.Ruskin
House Museum Street
The Kurdish war
David Adamson
First published in I964
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, 1956, no portion may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.
© George Allen d. Unwin Ltd, 1964
Printed in Great Britain
In 11 on 12 point Janson type
By Simson Shand Ltd.
London, Hertford and Harlow
