The Kurdish Revolt: 1961-1970
Edgar O’ballance
Faber and Faber Limited
The Kurdish tribes which inhabit the sprawling mountainous sector of territory lying amid the Middle East land mass that is roughly encompassed by the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, claim that they have lived there for over 4,000 years and that they arc of Aryan stock, probably descended from the Medes, who gained classical fame in ancient chronicles for their struggles against the Persians. Sturdy, warlike and of independent character, over the centuries they have never been assimilated by successive conquerors. Perhaps the Kurd in history best known to Western readers ...
PREFACE
Perhaps the Kurds are destined always to be a race and never a nation. Less than a century ago they were still a collection of wild tribes, some migratory, some aggressive and mutually hostile, with no national cohesion and bound together only by the loose bonds of language, culture and tribal customs. Living for 4,000 years in an inland mountainous region, near where Asia joins Europe in the Middle East, they remained a turbulent people. No trace of political nationalism emerged until 1880, when Sheikh Ubeidullah tried unsuccessfully to detach a part of Persian territory to make it an autonomous Kurdish satellite of the decaying Ottoman Empire. Nationalism developed extremely slowly, so the Kurds were not ready to take full political advantage of the chaos of World War I and its after-math. The Turkish Empire was dismantled and a fresh map drawn of the Middle East that included newly emergent states, but no independent Kurdish nation was established. In the 1920s Kurdish insurrections in Turkey and Persia were put down firmly by the authorities, until Persia was able to declare that it ‘had no Kurdish Problem’, while Turkey went one better by refusing to admit that it had any Kurds at all, only ‘mountain Turks who had forgotten their native tongue’. Despite a weak regime and weak military forces, the Kurds in Iraq were also subdued, at least overtly, by 1935, but circumstances compelled the Government to leave them much to their own devices in the mountains.
The story of the nine-year Kurdish Revolt, which was confined entirely to Iraq, begins in 1943, and is largely, but not completely, the story of one man, Mullah Mustafa Barzani. Although, naturally, many other personalities were involved, he became the acknowledged leader who inspired the Revolt and dominated it throughout. He and his tribe of warring Barzanis, feared and hated by other Kurdish tribes, were the mainstay of the unfortunate Kurdish Republic of Mahabad, precariously established on Persian territory in 1946. It suddenly collapsed, after a lack-lustre existence of slightly less than one year, when Soviet occupation troops were withdrawn from Persia, allowing Persian soldiers to march against it. A fighting escape into Iraq by Mullah Mustafa and his Barzanis was followed by an epic fighting retreat across the mountains until he found refuge in the Soviet Union, where he remained for eleven years. When Kassem came to power in 1958, Mullah Mustafa was allowed to return to Iraq on the condition that he became Chairman of the United Democratic Party of Kurdistan. It was only in 1961 when he realized that Kassem was not going to grant any of the Kurdish political demands that he took to the mountains.
The pattern of the military operations in the Revolt was the old constantly repeated story: the Kurds could hold out in, or retreat farther into, the mountains in the face of attacks and pressure from conventional Government forces, but were unable to counter-attack successfully down on to the plains of Iraq, while the Iraqi army, with nearly 600 tanks, was strong on the plains but comparatively ineffectual and vulnerable when it attempted to penetrate into the mountains, which terrain, with few tracks and hardly any motorable roads, was ideal for partisan-type warfare. Repeated Government military offensives, while hurting the Kurds, were almost always abortive, and maintaining or combating them sapped the strength of both sides, causing periods of prolonged inactivity; during these they issued boastful and wildly inaccurate communiqués, prompting months of sterile negotiations when Kurds and the Iraqi Government sat down to ‘catch their breath’ and to play for time. The Revolt underlined the lesson, still barely and reluctantly accepted by many, that while causing fear, casualties, hardship and a refugee problem, air power was not a decisive factor in this type of warfare, and that protracted resistance by a determined people can be put up without any at all.
No new lessons of warfare or new techniques of strategy or tactics were discovered or developed, but old-established ones were emphasized. Achievements seemed to be negative as neither side made any substantial or territorial gain after the first stalemate. A conclusion that may disappoint romantic sympathizers with the Kurdish cause is that the prospects of an independent Kurdistan, of any size or strength, emerging in the future, are poor. Of considerable interest to the student of Communist tactics was the persistent failure of the Politburo of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan, the DPK, practically all Communist in composition, to impose its leadership on the Revolt. If it had been able to exercise its superior organizational, political and military capabilities, the course of the Revolt might have been slightly different, but Mullah Mustafa outwitted it continually.
Prosperity and material advantages, limited as they are in Iraq and the Middle East generally, are the magnet that draws individual Kurds from their mountains in ever-increasing numbers to seek jobs that give them a far higher standard of living and comfort than they would ever have in their barren and inhospitable homeland. After having tasted them, they are reluctant to return to the shackles of tribal authority and customs. Involuntary depopulation is achieving to a degree what the Iraqi armed forces could not.
The Iraqi Government did its best to conceal the Kurdish Revolt from the eyes of the world, with perhaps understandable motives. In this it was frequently successful because the Revolt coincided with and was heavily overshadowed by other momentous events in the Middle East, such as Arab rivalries, the death of Kassem, the Third Arab-Israeli War, and indeed the Vietnam War farther afield. Kurdish propaganda aimed at overseas opinion was pathetically weak. This factor, essential to a revolution, was either overlooked completely or not appreciated. Press coverage, too, of events in Kurdish territory, was hampered by the governments of Iraq, Persia and Turkey. Consequently the Kurds gained no powerful adherents in Western countries who could have agitated on world platforms in their support. Almost until the end the Kurds fought silently, and therefore alone, their aspirations and struggles unknown. They developed an introversion, an inward-looking complex that was to their great detriment.
Both sides had their strengths and weaknesses, their victories and defeats ; both lost opportunities and seized advantages. Holding no brief for either, I have related the story as an outsider, and unfolded the facts as they appear to me, and not necessarily as either the Kurds or the Iraqi Governments would like them to be shown.
The purist may occasionally raise an eyebrow at the spelling of Arab and other names. In the interests of the general reader, I have adopted accepted Western forms.
Edgar O’Ballance
Acknowledgements
This work has been compiled mainly from notes I made when touring Kurdish territory and interviewing prominent personalities, both Arab Iraqis and Kurds, and seeing something of the Iraqi armed forces and the Pesh Merga at first hand, together with my own practical researches, observations and other interviews, but I would like to record that I have read with interest, profit and pleasure the following works, and I wish to make grateful acknowledgement to the authors, editors or compilers of them.
Adamson, David, The Kurdish War, Allen & Unwin (1964).
Alfa, Hassan, The Kurds, Oxford University Press (1966).
Avery, Peter, Modern Iran, Benn (1965).
Brown, J. Gilbert, The Iraq Levies, Royal United Service Institution Publication (1932).
Dann, Uriel, Iraq under Kassem, Praeger (New York) (1969).
Ghassemlou, Abdul Rahman, Kurdistan and the Kurds, Collets (London) (1965).
Mauries, René, Le Kurdistan ou la Mort, Robert Laffont (1967).
Schmidt, Dana Adams, Journey among Brave Men, Little Brown (Boston, USA) (1964).
The Kurds
‘There the Greeks spent a happy night, with plenty to eat, talking about the struggle now past. For they had been seven days passing through the country of the Kurds, fighting all the time, and they had suffered worse things at the hands of the Kurds than all that the King of Persia, and his general, Tissaphernes, could do to them.’
Anabasis of Xenophon (400 B.c.)
The Kurdish tribes which inhabit the sprawling mountainous sector of territory lying amid the Middle East land mass that is roughly encompassed by the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, claim that they have lived there for over 4,000 years and that they arc of Aryan stock, probably descended from the Medes, who gained classical fame in ancient chronicles for their struggles against the Persians. Sturdy, warlike and of independent character, over the centuries they have never been assimilated by successive conquerors. Perhaps the Kurd in history best known to Western readers was Sala ad-Din al-Ayubi, Saladin of the Crusades, born at Takrit1 on the River Tigris in 1137, who fought against Richard Coeur de Lion and forced the Crusaders to abandon practically all Palestine except for a few coastal forts. Another fact of Western interest is that Mount Ararat (in present-day Turkey), where, according to biblical tradition, the Ark of Noah came to rest after the subsidence of the Flood, lies in Kurdish territory.
The Kurds, as a collective name, was given to these wild tribes by the conquering and evangelizing Arabs in the 7th century, who converted them forcibly to Mohammedanism, and then abruptly left them alone in their mountain fastnesses. During the 13th century the Mongols subdued adjacent areas, but hesitated to penetrate the Kurdish mountains, and it was not until the end of the following century that Amir Timur (Tamerlane) succeeded in bringing the Kurdish tribes under firm control, in his customary barbaric manner. There was never Kurdish unity or national cohesion as such; in the Middle Ages the tribes were grouped into about thirty mutually ...
1 In present-day Iraq.
