Kurds' fight for a nation long, fntile
The Sun ( 1837-1 985); Aug 26, 1979; PruQuest Histuricut Newspupers: Baltimere Sue, The (1t37-198e
pg. A2
Kurds' light
for a nation
long, futile
From their mountain strongnotos.
Kurdish tribesmen have been fighting In-
truders for more than 2,000 years.
Their warrior qualities were recorded
by Xenophon, - whose army of Greeks
(ought Its way through Kurdlstan in 400
B.C. Yet their fight for a country of their
own came close to rea lization only once,
and briefly, after World War!.
An ethnically distinct páople with their
own language and culture, the Kurds have
fought the Persians, the Mongols, the
Turks, the Crusaders, the Arabs and the
British. Against the Crusaders, one of the
most famous Kurds, Saladin, left his mark
on history. -
Like the Persians, the Kurt are an
Indo-European people rather than Arabic,
They are related to the Persians, but the
Kurt are distinct, with aquiline features.
They are often tall, fairsklnned and blue-
eyed.
The misfortune of the Kurt was that
as their stronger neighbors caned out
territories with political boundaries, Kur
distan, the land of the Kurds, was cut up
too. Large pieces with sizable populations
fell to 1raq ; and Turkey, and there
are Kurdish SritiS in Syria and Soviet
Armenia as well. 8a éd on a 1965 census,
the total number of Kinds was put at
seven million, but current estimates n an
as high as twice that.
For centuries, political divisions re-
mained unimportant as the Kurds, a
largely nomadic people, moved about
freely with their herds, raised crops In ir-
rigated valleys and fended off intruders.
But with the closing of frontiers in recent
decades, the Kurt rebelled, notably
against the Iraqis and Iranians ,
Having struggled for autonomy first
agalust the SSk Turks and then the (it-
toman Empire, the Kurds were•proinlsed
their freedom in World War I , They rent-
finned their demands at the Paris peace
conference in 1919.
The Treaty of Sevres in 1921 finally
provided for the creation of an autono-
inous Kurdlsb state But two years later,
that accord was superseded by the Treaty
of Lausanne. And by then the world once
again chose to forget the question of the
Kurt and their nationalism.
Alter that, the Kurt rose against the
Turks in 1920 and again, in 1930. Both
times they were militarily suppressed, as
they were later In and Iraq.
Fighting against e troops of
began in 1941, when the Kurds took a
tage of the no-man's land between the
Soviet and British forces then occupying
and proclaimed a . “Free Kurdish
State” in the mountains of northwest l
That uprishig, however, was no match for
artillery and motorized infantry and was
short-lived. The Iraqi Army put down
Kurdish uprisings in the 1960's and again
in 1975.
New York Times News $ervive
Reproduced with permission of the uupydght owner. Further repruductius prohibited wdhout perwissice.
