Foreword
Where should one locate the beginnings of Kurdish nationalism as a modem mass movement, with well-organized political parties, explicit programs, and the mobiliza- tion of mass support transcending narrow tribal or regional boundaries? A number of dates and major events may be indicated, but there is considerable justification for con- sidering the year 1961 the major breaking point. This was the year when the Kurdish guerrilla war against Iraq's central government began, which would result in the Iraqi Kurds gaining—on paper, at least—significant cultural rights, regional autonomy, and a share in the central government. The highly visible movement in Iraqi Kurdistan of the 1960s not only strengthened the awareness of common Kurdish identity among the Kurds of Iraq, but also galvanized the Kurds in neighboring countries.
In Turkey, moreover, 1961 saw the establishment of the first legal socialist party, the Workers' Party of Turkey (WPT), which for the first time publicly placed the Kurdish question on the political agenda and within which a left-inspired Kurdish discourse de- veloped to which all later Kurdish parties and organizations in Turkey were to remain indebted. Unlike earlier Kurdish uprisings, the political and military movement led by Mulla Mustafa Barzani in Iraq and the Kurdish left of Turkey were sustained movements that did not dissipate after the first reverses, but kept growing and broadening their con- stituencies. There is a clear continuity from the 1960s to the present day.
So if 1961 is such an important breaking point, what could be the relevance of a study of Kurdish nationalism that was completed two years earlier? Wadie Jwaideh's his- tory of the emergence and development of the Kurdish nationalist movement, which is finally being published now, was originally written as a Ph.D. dissertation and submit- ted to Syracuse University in early 1960. Most of the research for the thesis had been car- ried out in the mid-1950s, although Jwaideh makes some important observations on developments in Iraq in the wake of the 1958 coup that set the stage for large-scale Kur- dish mobilization and the outbreak of guerrilla war.
The thesis was never published during Jwaideh's lifetime, owing at least in part to his own perfectionism and to the sheer size of the work. lis fame spread by word of mouth, however, and many later scholars, including myself, have recognized its impor- tance not only as a study of the earlier phases of Kurdish nationalism, but also as a framework for understanding later developments. It has acquired a reputation as a clas- sic in the field of Kurdish studies that no one seriously interested in the subject can afford to leave unread.
In 1999, a Turkish translation appeared, making it available for the first time to a large number of Kurdish readers (Kiirt Milliyetçili in Tarihi: Kökeni ve Geli imi [Istanbul: leti im Yayinlarr] ). Its contemporary significance was at once recognized by the Turkish public prosecutor, who had it banned and all copies confiscated, although many other and more overtly political books on the Kurds were left untouched. (The ban was later repealed, however, and the book was reissued.)
One thing that may have bothered the Turkish prosecutor and that may have con- tributed to the attention that the book drew from a relatively large and educated reader- ship in Turkey was that Jwaideh showed convincingly how strong and how deep the historical roots of contemporary Kurdish movements were and how old their griev- ances and demands. The various Kurdish uprisings of the nineteenth and early twenti- eth centuries were not simply isolated incidents caused by economic decline or political dissatisfaction.
In his conclusion, Jwaideh cautions the reader that, whatever the economic and so- cial causes of discontent, "it must be kept in mind that nationalism, which lies at the root of the Kurdish question, is largely political and psychological in nature?' The nationalist ferment that had corne to the surface in Iraq following the military takeover of 1958 had to be taken seriously precisely because it was rooted in a historical process of consider- able depth, of which its actors were very much aware. Although Jwaideh's study ends in 1959, the developments of the following decade appear almost inevitable to the careful reader.
Jwaideh's study stands at a turning point not just chronologically; it also represents a transition in scholarship on the Kurds not unlike that from colonial to postcolonial scholarship in other parts of the world. While in England for his research in the mid- 1950s, Jwaideh met the grand old men of the earlier phase of Kurdish studies, Vladimir Minorsky and Cecil J. Edmonds. Both had been trained as Orientalists and had become acquainted with the Kurds when serving their governments—imperial Russia in the case of Minorsky, the British administration of Iraq in that of Edmonds. Both had be- corne great friends of the Kurds (though not necessarily of Kurdish nationalists; Shaykh Mahmud of Sulaymaniya had been one of Edmonds's headaches), and both published extensively and sympathetically on them.
Minorsky's long and erudite articles on Kurdistan and Kurds in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam (E. J. Brill, 1913-36) constitute the most competent summary of Orientalist knowledge of their subject. Edmonds laid down his observations and experiences as a political officer in Iraqi Kurdistan between 1920 and 1925 in his Kurds, Turks, and Arabs (Oxford University Press, 1957), which provides painstakingly detailed notes on social and political conditions, personalities, and local practices in the districts where he served. Both authors showed a special interest in the various heterodox religious communities they had encountered while serving in Kurdistan, notably the Ahli Haqq and the Yazidis, perhaps at the expense of mainstream Islam and of the major political issues faced by the Kurds as a people.
Wadie Jwaideh's relationship with the Kurds was a different one, and so was his ap- proach to his subject. He was born in Basra in southern Iraq to an Arabic-speaking Christian family and later moved to Baghdad, where he studied at the university and ob- tained his licentiate in law in 1942. During the war years that followed, he served in the Ministry of the Interior as inspector of supply for the northern provinces. It was in this position that he traveled extensively in Iraqi Kurdistan and came to know numerous Kurdish personalities. The direct acquaintance with the land and its people must have been of great use in his later historical research, and the shrewd insight into Kurdish society and politics that is apparent throughout this book no doubt owes much to this experience.
Jwaideh identified himself strongly as an Iraqi Arab but was also aware of belonging to a religious minority. This may have contributed to his appreciation of the Kurds' po- sition as a minority in the states in which they live and of their relations with their vari- ous neighbors. Whereas earlier authors writing on Kurdish nationalism tended to analyze it from the viewpoint of the administration or the dominant groups in the state, Jwaideh made a deliberate effort to present the Kurdish viewpoint. His is one of the more sympathetic studies of the subject and one of the most judicious in its under- standing of what moves the Kurds. It was the first serious study that focused on Kurdish nationalism as a movement in its own right and not just as a reaction to the process of modernization and administrative reform.
As Jwaideh saw the situation, it is the tragedy of the Kurds and of the people among whom they live that they awakened to a sense of nationalism rather belatedly. Turks, Persians, and Arabs had preceded them, and the regimes of the states that incorporated parts of Kurdistan after World War I had embarked on programs of nation building. The Kurds had become citizens, though never fully equal, of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and any effort on their part to establish a nation-state of their own would neces- sarily bring them up against more numerous Turks, Persians, and Arabs and against the armies of modernizing states. This status gave rise to frustration and anger at perceived injustice and inequality, causing Kurdish nationalism to become, at the time of Jwaideh's writing, "increasingly radical and uncompromising." Torn between dreams and pragmatism, Kurdish politicians have had to navigate a course between the struggle for full independence and accommodation with central governments.
The radicalization that Jwaideh refers to was very noticeable in Iraq after the 1958 coup, and ordinary Kurdish people's demands were probably more radical than those then voiced by their political leaders. Even though the odds were against them, many or- dinary Kurds increasingly just wanted to be in control of their own destiny. Jwaideh, more candidly than most Kurdish politicians, describes the odds and the ambitions: "Separated by impassable mountain barriers, divided by linguistic and sectarian differ- ences, rent by narrow tribal loyalties, and split up by international frontiers, they yearn to be what other more fortunate peoples are—a nation-state."
The developments of the past forty-five years have borne out Jwaideh's assessments. Mass literacy and mass education, increased mobility, and the communications revolu- tion have drawn ever larger numbers of Kurds to the nationalist movement. Kurdish na- tionalism has become a force with which the governments of the region have to reckon not only on the domestic front, but also increasingly in the international arena. The tribal, linguistic, and religious divisions among Kurds to which Jwaideh refers have not been overcome, however; some have even spawned distinct identity movements within the larger Kurdish movement, such as those of the Yazidis, the Alevis, or the Zaza speak- ers, among whom some leaders have even claimed the status of being a separate nation.
Among the Iraqi Kurds, regional identities have remained strong, and the major po- litical parties have distinct regional bases. To a lesser extent, this was also true of Iranian Kurdistan during the brief period that overt party activity was possible there. Urbanization and the settlement of nomadic tribes have resulted in a certain degree of detribalization, but tribalism was boosted by the government policies, most systematic in Iraq and Turkey, of recruiting tribal militias to fight against the Kurdish nationalist movement.
The borders between the Iranian, Iraqi, Turkish, and Syrian parts of Kurdistan have if anything become more significant, even though crossing them may have become easier. In each of these countries, the Kurds have engaged with the state and with other po- litical forces. Distinct political cultures and socioeconomic and cultural policies have given the Kurdish movement a distinct character in each of them.
Writing on Turkey, Jwaideh notes positive developments in that in the 1950s the government appeared to be making a serious effort at rural development, also in the Kurdish region. However, he comments, "the issue that has always constituted the Kurds' major grievance in Turkey remained unresolved, for the Turkish government still refused to recognize the Kurds as a separate nationality or to allow them freedom to pursue their own cultural activities." The demands of the Kurdish movement that emerged in the 1960s, within as well as outside the WPT, were basically of two kinds: economic development and recognition of the Kurds as a distinct people with daims to cultural rights.
Repression led to radicalization of the movement, and in the 1970s self- determination and decolonization became the rallying slogans of most Kurdish associ- ations. The most radical of Turkey's Kurdish parties, the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), initially strove for a united independent Kurdistan, but once it had embarked on the guerrilla struggle in 1984, it focused exclusively on Turkey (although its activists oper- ated from Syria, Iraq, and Iran). Eager to negotiate with the Turkish government, the PKK leadership gave up its more far-fetched demands and from the early 1990s onward began speaking of solutions within the existing framework of Turkey. Since the arrest of its leader Ôcalan in 1998, the PKK has scaled down its demands even further and has been concentrating on cultural rights and political liberalization. It has become one of the strongest advocates of Turkey's accession to the European Union, perceiving that the incorporation of the Turkish nation-state in a strong supranational body is the best guarantee for Kurdish cultural rights and for its prospects of devolution and a degree of self-rule
In Syria, the Kurds are much fewer in number than in the other three countries, constituting around 10 percent of the population (as against almost 20 percent in Turkey and in Iran, which have much larger populations, and a slightly higher percent- age in Iraq), and their struggle has been for basic human rights rather than for auton- omy. One major issue has been the denial of citizenship to hundreds of thousands of Kurds whose ancestors came from what is flow Turkey and who are still treated as "aliens." Otherwise, the Syrian Kurds have seen their role often as one of supporting the struggles in Iraq and Turkey.
Although the Iranian Kurds are numerous, it has always been most difficult to find reliable information on what went on among them, and they have been seriously un- derstudied compared to the Iraqi and Turkish Kurds. Readers can usefully supplement Jwaideh's chapters on Iran with a study of the political economy of the region, including some notes on political developments of the 1950s, by the well-known intellectual and politician Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou (Kurdistan and the Kurds [Prague: Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 1965] ), and with William Eagleton's study of the Mahabad Re- public (The Kurdish Republic of 1946 [Oxford University Press, 1963] ). During the 1960s and 1970s, politically active Iranian Kurds provided various forms of support to their Iraqi brethren, although the latter's increasing dependence on the Iranian government also caused dismay, especially after Iraqi Kurds assisted in the suppression of a minor uprising by young dissident Iranian Kurds in 1968. Relations between the Barzanis and most Iranian Kurds have remained tense ever since.
During the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79, there emerged a surprisingly broad- based movement for Kurdish regional autonomy, and for several years large parts of Iranian Kurdistan were de facto autonomous, as the Kurdistan Democratic Party and a number of smaller parties and movements took over local administration. By 1983, however, the Islamic Republic had succeeded (with some help from the Barzanis again) in reasserting complete control over the territory and expelling the last groups of Kur- dish nationalist politicians and guerrillas to Iraqi Kurdistan. Since then Kurdish nation- alist activism in Iran has necessarily been covert, but Kurdish cultural activities have flourished. Overt political involvement has overwhelmingly taken place within the larger opposition movement for democratization of Iran and been less focused on spe- cific Kurdish demands.
The most spectacular developments have taken place in Iraqi Kurdistan. The agree- ment on autonomy reached in 1970 was not the end of the Kurdish struggle, but ushered in new problems, such as mass deportations from oil-rich Kirkuk and other regions the government wished to keep outside the autonomous region. Barzani Kurds received American and Israeli support as Iraq drew doser to the Soviet Union, turning Kurdistan briefly into one of the "hot" battlefields of the Cold War—until Iran and Iraq reached a seulement (1975) and the Kurds were no longer needed as proxies.
In the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), the Iraqi Kurdish parties cooperated to some de- gree with Iran and brought large areas under its control, for which they suffered terrible retaliation from the Iraqi government. Toward the end of the war, a series of attacks with chemical arms sowed death and terror; thousands of villages were destroyed and their inhabitants taken away; more than one hundred thousand men of all ages disappeared, most or all probably ending up in mass graves in the southern desert. This genocide re- ceived some international attention only after Saddam Hussein had lost his position as the West's favorite ally against resurgent Islam.
In the wake of the U.S.-led war to expel Hussein from occupied Kuwait in 1991, the Kurds, like the Shi`ites in southern Iraq, massively rose up in rebellion. Unlike the latter, the Kurds were saved from harsh retaliation by an international intervention; a safe haven was created in the northernmost part of the country. Since then, a part of Iraqi Kurdistan has been a de facto independent self-governing entity, economically better off than the rest of Iraq. Cultural politics have created entirely new facts on the ground: ed- ucation at all levels is in Kurdish. The Iraqi Kurdish leaders have gained an unprece- dented degree of international recognition, making them major players in all efforts to build a new Iraq. With more than a decade of experience in administering their own re- gion and with a large and well-trained military force, they are in a stronger position than ever before to take upon themselves an important role in Iraq and in the wider region.
Wadie Jwaideh's words on the importance of understanding the Kurds, made in the context of the situation following the 1958 coup in Iraq, apply equally well to the pres- ent situation: "Their behavior is one of the important factors in the future stability and security not only of the Kurdish-inhabited countries, but of the entire Middle East. Thus, it is important to know the Kurds and to understand their aims, their political orientation, and the course they are likely to pursue."
In attempting to make sense of the mess that is Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion be- ginning in 2003, much can be learned by looking at the two earlier periods of dramatic upheaval: the British occupation in and after World War I, which led to the creation of the Kingdom of Iraq, and the revolutionary years following the military coup that overthrew the pro-British monarchy. Major problems remained unresolved, both in the creation of the Kingdom of Iraq and in the establishment of the republic. Questions concerning the relation of the Kurds with this self-defined Arab state, their cultural and national rights, and the nature of their representation were central to these unre- solved problems. Jwaideh's sensitive treatment of these issues gives his study great contemporary relevance.
Martin van Bruinessen
Utrecht, December 2004
Preface
The Kurds, a gifted and vigorous people, have played an important role in Middle East- ern history. They have produced men of outstanding qualities as soldiers, statesmen, ad- ministrators, and scholars, and have enriched the life and culture of the Islamic countries of the Middle East. Next to the Arabs, the Turks, and the Persians, they consti- tute the most numerous ethnic group in western Asia. A bellicose and still largely un- tamed people, they have often been compared to the seventeenth-century clans of Scotland. Despite their pride of race as individuals, they have until comparatively recent times been content as a people to play a subsidiary role among their more numerous and better organized neighbors.
As a nation, the Kurds have been to the Arabs, the Turks, and the Persians what the Scots have been to the English. Although they have contributed such great soldiers and statesmen as Sala al-Din (Saladin), who ruled a great Islamic empire; Mulla Idris Bidlisi, who was one of the chief advisors to Sultan Selim the Grim; and Karim Khan Zend, who ruled Persia for twenty years, they have never established a great empire of their own. The empire of the Medes, one of the reputed ancestors of the Kurdish people, was the only great national state that may be said to have been established by the Kurds.
The Kurds awakened to a sense of nationhood rather belatedly, and in this lies their tragedy and that of the people among whom they live. They seek to wrest what they re- gard as their divided homeland from the Turks, the Arabs, and the Persians—a difficult and dangerous undertaking. The Kurdish environment, which has molded the Kurds' character as individuals, has also shaped their destiny as a people. Separated by impass- able mountain barriers, divided by linguistic and sectarian differences, rent by narrow tribal loyalties, and split up by international frontiers, they yearn to be what other more fortunate peoples are—a nation-state.
Today the Kurds occupy an extremely important region in the heart of the Middle East. They constitute the most important single national minority in that area, forming a substantial proportion of the populations of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Despite the failure of numerous Kurdish rebellions in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, Kurdish nationalism continues to be a source of deep concern to the governments of these countries. Aroused by the success of surrounding nationalisms—Turkish, Persian, and Arab—and goaded into desperation by its own failures, Kurdish nationalism has become increas- ingly radical and uncompromising. For these reasons, the Kurds have corne to play an increasingly significant role in Middle Eastern affairs. Their behavior is one of the im- portant factors in the future stability and security not only of the Kurdish-inhabited countries, but of the entire Middle East. Thus, it is important to know the Kurds and to understand their aims, their political orientation, and the course they are likely to pursue.
The purpose of this study was to answer the following questions:
1. Is there a Kurdish nationality with a highly developed national consciousness and distinctive characteristics shared by the memb ers of this nationality?
2. If so, is the Kurds' national consciousness, combined with their determination to maintain their national identity and their desire for political self-government, strong enough to say that there is a Kurdish national movement?
3. Assuming that the two preceding questions can be answered affirmatively, what is the relation of this national movement to international politics in the Middle East?
By answering these questions, this Kurdish history should prove useful as a case study to those who are interested in nationalism as a modern mass movement.
I have attempted to connect the Kurdish problem with the past policies of both the Kurdish-inhabited states and the great world powers in an effort to demonstrate that no great power interested in the Middle East can afford to ignore the Kurdish problem or to avoid the formulation of a Kurdish policy as a part of an overall Middle Eastern policy.
I also intended in this study to fill a void in literature pertaining to the Kurds by pre- senting as complete a picture of the Kurdish problem as possible. Former studies of this subject have provided many valuable insights into various aspects of the problem, but no previous attempt has been made to deal with the whole issue, including its historical development, in a detailed manner.
My interest in the Kurds dates from 1943 and 1944, when I served as inspector of supply for the five northern provinces of Iraq. These five of Iraq's fourteen provinces in- clude all of the Kurdish regions of that country. My duties required extensive travel throughout Kurdistan and brought me into contact with Kurds from all walks of life, including government officials, tribal chieftains, and religious leaders.
I gathered much of the material on which this study is based in England and France. There I was able to use the facilities of the Public Records Office, the Colonial Office, the British Museum, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and the School of Oriental and African Studies of London University; the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolen Museum Faculty Library, and the library of St. Antony's College at Oxford University; and the Bibliotheque Nationale and the École des Langues Orientales in Paris. I obtained additional information at the Library of Congress, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the New York Public Library, and the libraries of the Middle East Institute and the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.
I wish to acknowledge my special debt of gratitude to a number of distinguished scholars in the field of Kurdish studies, especially Cecil J. Edmonds, lecturer in Kurdish at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University and former adviser to the Iraq Ministry of Interior, and Vladimir Minorsky, professor emeritus at London University. Both gave generously of their valuable time for discussion on many points of Kurdish studies and made available to me materials not readily obtainable elsewhere. Similar assistance was given to me by Kamuran Bedir Khan, professor of Kurdish at the École des Langues Orientales in Paris, who, besides being a noted Kurdish scholar, is one of the foremost leaders of the Kurdish nationalist movement.
I also wish to express my indebtedness to Sir Hamilton Gibb, formerly University and Jewett Professor of Arabic at Harvard University and Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford University, who kindly arranged for me to do research at the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum Faculty Library; and to Albert Hourani of St. Antony's College, Oxford University, who arranged for me to use the facilities of the Royal Insti- tute of International Affairs and the library of St. Antony's College. My thanks are also due to Rose Elphinston, widow of the late Colonel W. G. Elphinston, for making avail- able to me some of her husband's unpublished papers, and to Colonel Cayley Bell, for- mer British political officer in northern Syria and southern Turkey, for the information he gave to me.
Finally, I wish to express my appreciation to the Ford Foundation and to the Inter- national Affairs Center and the Graduate School of Indiana University for financial assistance that enabled me to complete the research upon which this work is based.
Acknowledgments
As the widow of Wadie Jwaideh, I want to thank several individuals who have helped bring about the publication of my late husband's dissertation on Kurdish nationalism. Wadie always expected that this work, which so engrossed him and on which he labored for so many years, would be published during his lifetime. However, after he accepted a faculty position at Indiana University, he became so deeply engaged in establishing and developing the university's Near Eastern studies program and so devoted to his graduate students and their research that he somehow never completed the project of turning his dissertation into a book.
In his preface, my husband thanked several scholars in the United States and Eu- rope who had contributed in various ways to his research. Now I wish to acknowledge a few other persons who have assisted in the process of getting the work published in En- glish so long after it was originally written.
First, I want to thank Wadie's sister, Professor Albertine Jwaideh of the University of Toronto and her husband, Professor James Cox of York University, for reviewing the manuscript and providing valuable assistance with the spelling and diacritics of Arabic words and names. Also of help in this regard was Kadhim Shaaban of Bloomington, In- diana, who was a lecturer at Purdue University and a dear friend of Wadie. I also want to express my gratitude to Professor Amir Hassanpour of the University of Toronto, who was extremely generous with his time whenever I consulted him about the meaning and spelling of Kurdish names and terms. Our daughter, Dara (of Davis, California), read the manuscript many times and made a number of valuable suggestions.
Susan Meseilas, photographer and author of Kurdistan in the Shadow of History, and her assistant, Meryl Levin, were very helpful with regard to the illustrations. Susan's gen- erosity in granting us permission to use a number of her photographs greatly facilitated the task of finding suitable images. I am also indebted to Dr. Burhan Elturan of Indiana University for permission to use several photographs he had taken of Kurdish land- scapes and dwellings. The map of Kurdistan that appears at the beginning of the book was expertly prepared by cartographer Michael Hollingsworth of Indiana University.
For their conscientious production of a digital version of the manuscript, I wish to thank three competent young women in Bloomington, Indiana—Sandy Vincent for patiently supervising the conversion of the manuscript into digital form; Valerie Nikirk for carefully keyboarding a manuscript containing many unfamiliar words in Arabic, Kur- dish, Persian, and Turkish; and Elizabeth Miller Maidi for meticulously proofreading both the manuscript and the page proofs. I also wish to acknowledge the help, many years ago, of my loving and devoted mother, Almeda Reid, who spent countless days and nights sitting at her dining room table where—with Wadie's guidance—she typed the entire 900-page dissertation in five copies, using a manual typewriter and carbon paper.
I want to express my gratitude to Mr. Ahmad El-Hindi, who was a friend of my hus- band since their student days at Syracuse University, and his wife Betty for their encour- agement and their financial contribution toward the book's publication. Finally, thanks are due to the competent staff members of the Syracuse University Press who have de- voted their efforts unsparingly to bring this book to completion, especially Annie Barva, who as copyeditor worked conscientiously in its editing.
In addition to those who helped in the publication process, I want to thank Profes- sor Martin Van Bruinessen of the University of Utrecht, for kindly agreeing to write the foreword. Professor Van Bruinessen, who is one of the world's foremost authorities on Kurdistan, discovered my husband's dissertation many years ago, played a role in getting it published in Turkish, and has strongly encouraged its publication in English.
On my husband's behalf, I would like to dedicate this book to our beloved children and grandchildren: our daughter Dara Narmeen Jwaideh Pleasants, our late daughter Layl Diane Jwaideh Khan, and our three grandsons—Alexander Jwaideh-Khan, Devon Jwaideh Pleasants, and Derek Jwaideh Pleasants—who were a source of great joy and contentment to my husband in his later years.
Alice Reid Jwaideh
Bloomington, Indiana
March 2006
The Kurdish National Movement
Its origins and development
Wadie Jwaideh
With a Foreword by Martin van Bruinessen
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2006 by Syracuse University Press
Syracuse, New York 13244-5290
All Rights Reserved
First Edition 2006
06 07 08 09 10 11 6 5 4 3 2 1
Mohamad El-Hindi Books on Arab Culture and Islamic Civilization are published with the assistance of a grant from the M.E.H. Foundation.
Permission to reprint textual material from the following sources is gratefully acknowledged: Oxford University Press for excerpts from Iraq 1900 to 1950 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953) by Stephen Longrigg and from Loyalties: Mesopotamia Vol. 2 1917-1920 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1936) by A. T. Wilson; the Middle East Institute for an article by Archie Roosevelt appearing in the Middle East Journal, "The Kurdish Republic of Mahabad" 1, no. 3 (July 1947), 2247-69.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard of Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper of Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984© ™
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jwaideh, Wadie.
The Kurdish national movement : its origins and development / Wadie
Jwaideh ; with a foreword by Martin van Bruinessen.
p. cm.—(Contemporary issues in the Middle East)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8156-3093-X (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Kurds—History—Autonomy and independence movements.
2. Kurdistan—History—Autonomy and independence movements.
I. Title. II. Series.
DS59.K86J87 2006
320.5409566'7—dc22 2006001871
Manufactured in the United States of America
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