A good overview from Terry Glavin on the Kurds, their recent tragic history, and their current disenchantment with America:
The last time the Middle East was in a disarray comparable to the current bedlam was during the chaotic aftermath of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which was to establish the borders of Syria and Iraq, the Kurds were offered their own country. The promise of a sovereign and democratic Kurdistan was then broken by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which circumscribed the territorial sovereignty of Turkey.
What followed was a macabre progression of persecution, ethnic cleansing, and wars of extermination waged to recurring and varying degrees, sometimes consecutively and sometimes concurrently, by each of the four nation-states (Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey) where the Kurds ended up as captive populations. The Kurds responded by mounting protracted uprisings and insurrections, sometimes even fighting as proxies for one or the other of those same countries during their occasional wars with one another.
The greatest Kurdish misfortune at the moment, however, is to be situated at the intersection of an increasingly bloody and dystopian Arab world, the outward-reaching ruthlessness of Khomeinist Iran, and the belligerent Islamist nationalism of Recep Erdogan’s Turkey. As if to compound the Kurds’ burden of bad luck, Sunni-Shia hatreds are sending seismic shocks through fault lines that lie directly beneath their feet. Most Kurds happen to be Sunni Muslims....
Until the events of this past summer, Iraqi Kurdistan had enjoyed the longest and most fruitful period of Kurdish freedom. A Kurdish safe haven began to flower in northern Iraq in 1991, owing to the Anglo-American enforcement of a no-fly zone in the denouement of the Gulf War. Following the “shock and awe” of 2003, every hope that the administration of George W. Bush held out for Iraq was realized in full in Iraqi Kurdistan.
While the rest of Iraq has descended into fratricidal Sunni-Shiite bloodletting, the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has continued to set down deep roots, almost entirely at peace, despite Baghdad’s efforts in disruption and containment. But everything changed last June, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State (also called ISIS or ISIL) arose out of the ruins that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had made of his country and the bedlam that Baghdad’s Shiite-run death squads and Sunni suicide bombings had made of Iraq.
Worth reading in full.
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