By the eve of World War One, the once mighty Ottoman Empire was a shell of its former self. The turning points for the Ottomans had come centuries before, first at sea in a naval engagement at the Battle of Lepanto, in 1571, and then on land as the Ottomans were turned back from the gates of Vienna in 1683.
As the Ottoman military struggled militarily, the effects were felt at home. The Ottoman system of devshirme, where young boys from conquered lands were taken, converted to Islam, and raised as the elite troops and bodyguards for the Ottoman caliphs, came to an end as the Ottomans could no longer conquer new lands. The feudal system, by which land grants were given on the promise of the land owner raising troops for empire as needed, became a credit system, crippling both the Ottoman military and economy as the unsustainable debt was passed down.
Finally, the old Ottoman manner of succession, whereby the strongest took control after a power struggle following the death of the old caliph, was replaced with a more orderly succession where regardless of strength of ability the title of Sultan was passed down hereditarily.
During this period of decline, the Ottoman Empire was chipped away at geographically. The Empire had once extended out from Istanbul into the Balkans, Western Iran and the Caucasus, to the Persian Gulf, the Hijaz and the coast of the Red Sea and across almost the entirety of the northern coast of Africa. It had been reduced to Anatolia, modern Iraq, the Levant, and the Hijaz.
It is in light of these weaknesses that the Ottomans, then known as “The Sick Man of Europe”, joined the Central Powers, aligning themselves with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire against its long-term enemy Russia, as well as the United Kingdom (U.K.) and France. The Allies viewed the Ottoman lands as a reward for the efforts and staked their claims. Russia was most interested in securing the Caucuses for the Orthodox coreligionists in Georgia and Armenia. The U.K. and France looked to the Ottoman’s Arab holdings, with the U.K. looking to protect its lucrative Indian territory against France and Russia. From these interests were born the U.K.-French agreement articulated in Sykes-Picot, and the post war Treaty of Sevres.
Sykes-Picot largely came to fruition, dividing Ottoman Arab lands between the U.K. and France, with the U.K. taking what was then referred to as Southern Syria (modern Israel and Jordan) and Iraq, and France taking modern Syria and Lebanon. The lines were drawn not for the sake of building cohesive homogeneous nation-states, but for parceling territory along U.K. and French political interests, thus creating ethnically and religiously diverse nations that struggle to remain intact despite their pluralism today. The clearest and most known examples of these nations is Lebanon, which struggled through a civil war between 1975 and 1990, and Iraq, which since the U.S. invasion in 2003 has suffered through periods of intense sectarian violence.
It is in Iraq where recent focus has been placed on the Kurds and their desire for a free sovereign homeland. The hope is not new; rather, it was still born in the rush to carve up former Ottoman lands. The outcome of the post war San Remo conference was to leave Kurdistan autonomous; however, this never came to be due to the inclusion of the Mosul province in what was to become Iraq.
The British administrator of the provinces which would become Iraq, Arnold Wilson, recognized the problems of Arab rule over the Kurds, noting the Kurds “would never accept an Arab ruler”. Early in the British administration of Iraq, the appointed Kurdish governor, Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji, declared independence before being removed by force and exiled to southern Iraq. Thus, as they are today, the Kurds were left stateless after World War One.
In the new normal of the Middle East, most of the Kurdish people were split between Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The Kurds of Iraq continued to seek independence, or at least a large degree of autonomy. A high point in Iraqi Kurdish existence was under the rule of Karim Qasim, who took power in a military coup in 1958. Qasim was “half Sunni, half Kurdish Shi’a by birth … he recognized Kurdish separateness, though not the right to separatism”.
Yet, even under Qasim’s relatively moderate rule, the Kurds sought independence after Mustafa Barzani, chose by the Kurds to negotiate with the government, failed to reach an agreeable settlement for Kurdistan. The relative calm during Qasim’s rule gave way after the Ba’athist coup in 1963, which eventually brought Saddam Hussein, who viewed the Kurds “as domestic enemies, suspecting them of disloyalty to the regime”, to power in 1979.
At times, the Kurds have used the borders between them to play the respective countries off one another, most clearly between Iran and Iraq, and have reached out to global powers for support. During the 1970s, the Iraqi Kurds gained the support of the Shah of Iran, which served the Shah’s desire of weakening Iraq. At the same time the Kurds also gained the support of the Soviet Union, from whom the Kurds were purchasing weapons.
In 1975, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger encouraged the Kurds to rebel against Iraqi rule during a period of tension between Iraq and Iran. The encouragement was not met with much support, and when Iran and Iraq were able to peacefully resolve their dispute, the Iraqis turned their military against the Kurds who appealed to Kissinger for help. Kissinger’s response was that “covert action should not be confused with missionary work”. This series of events would repeat over the next few decades.
In the next decade, the 1980s, the Kurds would find themselves in the middle of a brutal war between Iraq and Iran and would be the victims of gruesome atrocities.
Read: Fromkin, David. 1989. A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and theCreation of the Modern Middle East. New York: Henry Holt and Company; Keegan, John. 2005. The Iraq War. New York: Vintage Books; Oren, Michael. 2011. Power Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
