Kurdish Attacks on Assyrians, Turkmen. posted by Richard Seymour

It is one of the under-covered angles of the current war in Iraq, but a column in today's Guardian provides the occasion to talk a bit about it. I mentioned yesterday the fact that Kurdish peshmergas had been used by the US to attack Shia Turkmen in Tal Afar. It is totally hypocritical of Turkey to be angry at what is being done here, given its murderous policies toward the Kurds both in Turkey and in Northern Iraq. But that hardly exonerates the peshmergas and the Kurdish leadership.

It was Kurdish paramilitaries tied to Massoud Barzani's KDP that launched a wave of attacks against Assyrians before the election. Dr Odisho Malko of the Assyrian National Assembly in Iraq protests:

Since the fall of Saddam, systematic low-level ethnic cleansing has driven thousands of Assyrian Christians from their homes. Our churches have been firebombed and our women forced to wear the hijab. In northern Iraq much of this intimidation has come from the Kurdish militias. It reached a climax on election day, when ballot boxes were prevented from reaching between 200,000 and 400,000 people. On the Nineveh Plains, the last area in Iraq where our people live in sizeable numbers, six Assyrian towns, Baghdeda, Bartilla, Karemlesh, Shekhan, Ain Sifne and Bahzan were prevented from going to the polls. The western media have made much of people in the Sunni heartlands being intimidated into not voting, or refusing to vote. It does not report that the Assyrian people and other minorities wanted to vote, but were stopped from doing so.

Reluctantly, many of our people believe that Kurdish political leaders want to exclude minorities such as the Assyrians and the Turkmen. The treatment of the Turkmen has so enraged Turkey that the leader of the opposition, Bulent Ecevit, has called for action to protect them. But no one is speaking up for us. No one has reported that tens of thousands took to the streets to protest at the great vote robbery.

This was a worry long before the war began :

"They started calling us 'Kurdish Christian,'" says Odisho. "Then we should call them 'Assyrian Muslims.'"

The politics of this are straightforward enough. Since Iraq was carved out of Mesopotamia, the drive has been to make it an exclusively or overwhelmingly Arab country. When the Iraqi Kingdom was declared sovereign (even though it was a puppet government - historical repetition; first tragedy, then farce) in 1933, one of the first things the monarch did was issue an ultimatum toward Assyrians. Either they could be dispersed among the Muslim population or beat it out of the country. When many Assyrians decided to take off to Syria, the government dispatched troops. Unable to beat the armed Assyrians, the retreating troops attacked fleeing civilians, killing 3,000 of them. This was the beginning of years of repression, particularly under the Ba'athist regime, which refused to recognise such an identity (they were either Nestorians, Chaldeans or Suryan as far as the regime was concerned). Assyrian schools were closed, leading artists and singers were arrested, and many Assyrian families were deported (particularly during the Iran-Iraq war). Assyrian nationalists were detained, beaten and tortured. The Anfal campaign 0f 1988 was primarily against the Kurds, but also targeted Assyrians.

Now, the Turkmen. Scott Taylor, the US journalist who was captured by some mujahiden in Iraq then released after 5 days, has written a book precisely on this topic. In it, he reports an encounter with a British journalist who, asked about the Turkmen's fate, replied "What's a Turkman?" Taylor explained that the Turkmen were the third largest ethnic group in Iraq, approximately 2 million strong (although Juan Cole says this is a massive over-estimate, the true figure being closer to 700,000), and the majority population in Kirkuk, where some of the most ferocious battles with Kurds have taken place. The British journalist eyed him suspiciously and said "Can you prove any of what you are telling me?"

The Turkmen arrived in Iraq principally through the Ottoman conquest of Iraq in 1535, but were marginalised under Ottoman rule, then the British and finally under the Ba'athists. The 'Arabization' policies of the Ba'athist regime involved Kirkuk particularly. 300,000 Arabs were encouraged to migrate to the city, Kurds and Turkmen were not allowed to buy houses in the city, while those who insisted on retaining a non-Arab identity were deported, their farmlands confiscated and given to Arab families. The forced expulsion of Kurds and Turkmen from Kirkuk, Khaniqin, Makhmour, Sinjar, Tuz Khormatu, and other districts as part of its `Arabization' program should have, you would think, created solidarity between the two. But as soon as the Kurds gained their autonomous region in the north, there was competition. In particular, the KDP and PUK began attack members of the Iraqi Turkomen Front, while the PUK targeted the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq. Turkmen schools were required to raise the Kurdish flag, even though they did not consider themselves Kurdish. When Saddam's regime fell, there was immediate competition between the two factions as to who would control Kirkuk. Fights broke out over the control of specific properties. The Kurds announced that they intended to annexe Kirkuk into a specifically Kurdish canton, leading to strikes by the city's Turkmen which were supported by al-Sadr's militias.

Forgive me if I slip into the obvious now, but I'm just setting the scene. The Kurds see themselves as a nation, and want a state to represent their interests. They too have suffered enormously under Ba'athism in ways some of which are now widely understood. The 'Arabization' of Kurdish areas began in 1960 under the Qassim regime, but continued after the CIA-sponsored Ba'athist coup of 1963. This included armed warfare, the destruction of villages and the deportation of Kurds. The Kurds began to resist, and in the 1970s began to receive help from Iran, just as Hussein was gaining control of the Ba'ath party. They were subjected to several massacres, most notably the Anfal campaign. They, along with thousands of Shi'ites, were subjected to a massive campaign of slaughter for their part in the 1991 uprising against Saddam's rule. This uprising, encouraged by Bush, was blocked with the assistance of US troops, and we later learned that what Bush actually wanted was for the military to instigate a coup. John Major famously seethed:

"I don't recall asking the Kurds to mount this particular insurrection. We hope very much that the military in Iraq will remove Saddam Hussein." (John Major on ITN, 4 April 1991)

Brent Scowcroft admitted:

"We clearly would have preferred a coup. There's no question about that." (Interview
on ABC news 26 June 1997 quoted in Sarah Graham-Brown, Sanctioning Saddam: The Politics of Intervention in Iraq, 1999, p. 19.)

Anyway, autonomous zones in the north and south were initially enforced as a result of international pressure under Operation Provide Comfort, although the southern zone was quickly re-taken. With control over the autonomous north, the two main Kurdish parties began quickly to compete both with each other and with other groups for control. The repression of the Turkmen and communist groups mentioned above was accompanied by some appalling sell-outs. In particular, Jalal Talabani's PUK invited the Iranian military into its controlled area to fight Barzani's men. The PUK turned a blind eye to the capture and massacre of Iranian Kurds hiding there. Meanwhile, Barzani invited Saddam's military to re-enter the north and crush the PUK. Hussein, in return, was allowed to capture and kill Kurdish dissidents loyal to Talabani.

Now, both the KDP and PUK are working together, but their years of conflict have spawned an Islamist opposition which al-Zarqawi is supposed to have been associated with. At the same time, they have been engaging in attacks on Turkmen and Assyrians, as reported above, in their drive to create an autonomous Kurdish region with the possible foundations of a state in mind. This process, which has been called 'Kurdification' by its victims, is fast becoming another tragic example of the oppressed becoming oppressor.