| PREFACE
The framework of this book is the diplomatic history of the Mosul dispute between Great Britain and Turkey, enriched (in the architectural sense of the word) with an account of my own experiences as a Political Officer in the contested territory. Within this framework I have tried to paint a picture of the landscape and the society of Southern Kurdistan. It is curious to find oneself constantly referring to our good friends the Turks as 'the enemy' ; but this is the story of the last seven of the eleven years of the unnatural estrangement that interrupted the traditional relations of amity and mutual respect, never stronger than now, between our two countries.
Re-reading my typescript I am taken aback by the rather egotistical tone of parts of the narrative of my own doings. It is too late to alter that now; in any case the text as it stands, based as it is largely on diaries and other papers written at the time, will certainly convey far better than any watered-down paraphrase I could make at this late date an idea of the self-confidence and high spirits with which I think most of the young officers of the war-created 'Mespot Political' tackled their duties and perhaps to some extent made up for lack of training and experience.
I am conscious that the descriptions of the routes I have followed and of the various classes that make up the society of Southern Kurdistan are in parts very detailed ; but, if my own experience is any guide, it is precisely such detail that will give the book its greatest interest to future travellers and to students of the Middle East. I believe that in the course of a long career in Persia and Iraq, just at a time when the revolution ushered in by the invention of the small internal combustion engine and speeded up by two world wars was threatening to submerge the age-long traditions and ancient ways that had survived all the upheavals of earlier centuries, I have collected a good deal of information that is new to the European world of scholarship, and I will not conceal my hope that some of the material here offered will be found of value for research of a kind more methodical than it is in my own nature to undertake. At the same time, perhaps, I owe an apology to these experts for the introduction of certain elementary matter, such as the summary of the early history of Islam at the beginning of Chapter VI, which may appear superfluous to them but which, I feel, will make the whole book (including the more technical matter that follows in the same and later chapters) more interesting and acceptable to the general reader. I trust that I shall not be adjudged to have fallen between two stools.
In any book on the Middle East the spelling of personal and geographical names always presents a problem. The problem is particularly acute in the case of a book dealing with a region where Arabic, Persian, Kurdish and Turkish (written in Arabic script) are all recognized as official languages of the administration and are currently spoken, and where the new Turkish, written in Roman script, is a near and influential neighbour. In these circumstances I have had to be something of a law unto myself; but there is a law and I have tried to be consistent within it. The rules I have laid down for myself have had to be rather elaborate, but there are only one or two points I need make here. Where personal names are common to two or more of the languages one of them is almost sure to be Persian and I have generally chosen the spelling according to the commonly accepted rules for the transliteration of Persian. Initial ain and long vowels are not usually marked in the text but are shown in the index. Where there is a conventional spelling that can be said to have passed into the English language (such as Mecca, Mosul, Caliph or Koran) I have generally preferred to use it; but I have had too many friends whose name was Muhammad, distinctly so pronounced, to be able to bring myself, despite my respect for the Fowlers, to write Mahomet or even Mohammed.
Actual quotations in Arabic and Persian are transliterated according to a well recognized system, and those in Turkish are written in the modern Roman spelling of the Mustafa-Kemal reform. Quotations in the Kurdish language are given in the special Roman alphabet which I worked out in 1930-3 in collaboration with my learned Kurdish friend, Taufiq Wahbi Beg, Member of the Iraqi Senate, and which, in its final form, is given in the second of two articles which I contributed to the J.R.A.S. : 'Suggestions for the use of Latin Character in the Writing of Kurdish' (January 193 1), and 'Some Developments in the use of Latin Character for the Writing of Kurdish' (July 1933). Here it will be sufficient to explain that: all the consonants have approximately their English value except that x represents the guttural aspirate commonly transliterated kh, c and j have their modern Turkish values viz. English j and French j respectively, and the digraphs Ih and rh represent a velar / and a rolled r which exist in addition to ordinary / and r; of the vowels a, 0, b, e are always long, i is the neutral vowel, y is pure short i as well as the consonant, u is always short; long i and u are represented respectively by iy or yi and uw or wu.
A list of official documents and standard works to which I have had constant recourse is given in Appendix A, together with a list of abbreviations of the titles of any learned journals quoted; to all these I acknowledge my great debt. Details of books and articles by earlier travellers in my area, to some of which I have frequently referred, will be found on pages 22 to 28. Other specific acknowledgements are made in the text or in footnotes.
Many kind friends have helped to remove some of the defects from these pages ; they are of course in no way answerable for those that remain. The typescript of the whole book has been read through by Sir Reader Bullard and Professor Sidney Smith, Chapters VI, XIII, XIV and XVIII by Professor A. Guillaume, and Chapters IV, V, VI, VII, XI and XV by H. E. Saiyid Taufiq Wahbi; their comments, corrections and advice have been invaluable and I am most grateful to them. I also have to thank the Librarian of the Foreign Office for permission to consult the records relating to the Turco-Persian boundary, Air Chief Marshal Sir James Robb for help with various details concerning officers and the equipment of the Royal Air Force in the years 1919-25, Lieut.-Colonel G. E. Wheeler for checking the quotations in modern Turkish spelling, and numerous other colleagues, British and Iraqi, only some of whom are named in the body of
the book, for hospitality on my journeys and other acts of kindness.
I must make it clear that although for many years I held posts in Her Majesty's Foreign Service and under the Government of Iraq any views expressed in this book, and the responsibility for them, are mine alone.
Part I
I Introductory: the Kurds
Kurdistan in its broadest sense means the country inhabited by the Kurds as a homogeneous community. It is divided between Turkey, Iraq and Persia with small overlaps into the Soviet Union and Syria; thus its boundaries do not coincide with any international frontiers or internal administrative divisions. On the north the border follows roughly the line through Erivan, Erzurum, Erzinjan, (Erzincan), and thence in an arc through Mar'ash (Maraș) towards Aleppo; on the south-west it runs along the foothills as far as the Tigris, then just east of the river downstream, then a little north of the line of the Jabal Hamrin to a point on the Iraqi-Persian frontier near Mandali ; on the east, in Persia, the limit of the Kurds runs in a south-easterly direction from Erivan so as to include the districts of Maku, part of Khoi, Riza'iya (Urmiya), Mahabad (Sauj Bulaq), Saqqiz and Senna to Kirmanshah. The great high road from Kirmanshah to Karind and thence the straight line to Mandali is approximately the dividing line between the Kurds proper and the kindred Lakks and Lurs, who are sometimes classed as Kurds.1
The inhabitants of Kurdistan as so defined are, of course, not exclusively Kurdish. Before 19 14, for instance, there was a large population of Armenians in the part lying north of the 38th parallel of latitude, and the Nestorian Christians well known in England as the Assyrians were numerous in the Hakari province of Turkey and the adjacent Persian district of Urmiya; most, if not all, of these have disappeared from Turkish territory, but several thousands of the Assyrians are now compactly settled in the Amadiya region of Iraq. There are also ancient colonies of Turkomans in a string of towns along the highway from Baghdad to Mosul; Qara Tapa, Kifri, Tuz Khurmatu, Tauq, Kirkuk, Altun Kopru, Arbil and, beyond Mosul, Tall Afar. But taken by and large the great majority of the population is Kurdish...
1The so-called Kurdish hammals or porters who are to be seen every day in Baghdad carrying enormous weights just as they did, according to the Arabian Nights, twelve hundred years ago are not Kurds in the narrower sense but Lurs from the western part of Luristan called Pusht-i Kuh. |
