The Kurds and Kirkuk - A Border Stor

The Kurds and Kirkuk: A Border Story in Three Parts

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October 4, 2010

Word Count: 13569/10,000

“Man stands toward his fellow men in an an almost infinite variety of relationships, and the business of

all political and social, and of most domestic, activities is so to adjust those relationships as to secure an

existence tolerable to some, at least, of the persons concerned.”

- C.A. Macartney, National States and National Minorities, New York, Russell and Russell, 1934.

“It is no exaggeration to assert that the future of Iraq hinges on finding a resolution to the problem of

Kirkuk‟s status in a way that is mutually tolerable to all parties.”

- Anderson and Stansfield, The Future of Iraq: Dictatorship, Democracy or Division? New York:

Palgrave MacMillan, 2009, p. 3.

“The large number of law suits found in ancient Nuzi permit a farily complete reconstruction of both the

court organization and the conduct of the trial, including the judgment, for the period around 1500

B.C...As in other Mesopotamian legal systems trials in Nuzi were always conducted before a bench

comprising more than one judge.”

- Herbert Liebesnyh, The Administration of Justice in Nuzi, Journal of the American Oriental

Society, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Apr. – Jun., 1943), pp. 128-144.

In 1909, Ely Bannister Soane travelled through Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in disguise. In 1902, Soane

had moved to Persia and taken a job with the British Imperial Bank in Shiraz and signed on with the

Anglo-Persian Company in Khanaqin. Later he would serve as a political officer in northern Iraq. For

now, he was a skilled adjunct of empire intending a noteworthy journey through strange, wild lands. The

resulting book, To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise, generated a review in The New York Times

accompanied by sketches of “the mountains that cut off Kurdistan from adjacent lands” and Soane as

Mirza Ghulam Hussein Shirazhi, a merchant from Persia, the persona he adopted throughout the trip (New

York Times 1913). He had already learned Persian and Kurdish and “ostensibly” converted to Islam (New

York Times, ibid). In 1918, Soane returned to the scene of his travels as amajor in the Indian Army,

assigned to the former capital of a powerful and largely autonomous Kurdish principality, Baban (1649-

1850), the first to rise against Ottoman centralization in 1808 after centuries of loose oversight, and the

last to submit to Ottoman provincial reforms in the 19th century. Their city, Sulaimaniyah, came to know

E.B. Soane better than it had known Mirza Ghulam Hussein Shirazhi. Like other Britons in the reigon

after the Mudros armistice, Soane sought to forge a country in fact to roughtly match the one created on

paper, suggested by perceptions of Ottoman neglect and various centuries of local Kurdish autonomy.

Insurrection complicated execution. In 1919, a local Kurdish sheikh named Mahmoud Barzinji rebelled

against the British occupiers. Soane wrote at the time that Barzinji‟s authority did not extend 20 minutes

by road to Halabja. Britain had nevertheless named him provincial governor and thought to build a

Kurdish autonomous region around him. Barzinji was exiled to India, ruling upon his return as the self-

proclaimed King of Kurdistan, at which point the British High Commissioner in Baghdad despatched the

RAF, in what was emerging as a cost-saving strategy to speed post-war recovery.

To Kurdistan and Mesopotamai in Disguise was published a decade earlier: it cannot predict that

Churchill, not Saddam Hussein, would praise chemical weapons for their “outstanding moral effect”

(Anderson and Stansfield 2005, p. 23); both used them on civilians in this corner of the world. In 1909,

when Soane went to Istanbul to acquire a travel permit, he had yet to be stabbed and fired upon, assumed

to be a hajji, or be detained in Kirkuk, where reports of banditry delayed his caravan to Sulaimaniyah for

weeks. Fortunately for the integrity of Soane‟s Persian persona, “the composite crowd of the Kirkuk

bazaar makes a stranger too inconspicuous for their attention” (Soane, 1914, p. 120). Today, the Kirkuk

dispute in northern Iraq/Iraqi Kurdistan remains a piece of unfinished business.

Fernand Braudel would consider Soane‟s observations part of “histoire evenementielle” – rich in context

but nothing really happens (Trevor-Roper 1972). But Soane had also entered a shatter zone. A shatter

zone is an area of randomly fissured or cracked rock that may be filled by mineral deposits, forming a

network pattern of veins which cements the fissures (Morris 1992, p. 1972). Geographers have also used

the shatter zone concept as a narrative and descriptive tool for understanding regions where local

divisions and imperial investment are thought to be high and conflict-provoking. Fairgrieve (1915)

included the Balkans, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Korea as “crush zones” (Cohen 2003, p. 43).

Hartshorne followed in 1944 with the term “shatter zone” and applied it to nations from the Baltics to the

Adriatic (Cohen, ibid). During the Cold War, and following East, (1961), Cohen defined shatterbelts as:

“strategically oriented regions that are both deeply divided internally and caught up in the competition

between Great Powers in the geostrategic realm” (Cohen, ibid). While geopolitics is open to criticism as

“mythic because it promises uncanny clarity and insight into a complex world: (Tuathail in Sloan and

Gray eds. 1999, p. 113), Hensel and Diehl found that shatterbelts experience more interstate war and

internal conflict (Hensel and Diehl 2004). The shatter zone concept was applied to Eastern Europe during

the Cold War as it was well outside the Soviet power core but also where Europe was least static. South

East Asia and the Middle East have also been proposed as shatter zone sites. Following Cohen‟s

observation that shatterbelts are fluid, Hartshorne‟s term of shatter zones might apply to unstable regions

of international concern that “may also be essential in order to facilitate necessary changes on the world

scene” (Parker 1985, p. 189). The plate tectonics that produce mountains where minorities find shelter,

such as the Zagros Mountains in Kurdistan (O‟Shea 2004, p. 27), also produce the geological conditions

of possibility for oil. The fissures, deposits and veins that appear in our geological definition of the shatter

zone appear as boundaries, oil and identity in human life. Areas that trend toward contact and diversity

such as Kirkuk may integrate disintegrating elements as competitive terrains change.

The Kurds apprear clearly defined in the historical record in 7th century Arab accounts of the Islamic

concquest of Mesopotamia and the Zagros region (O‟Shea 2004). Kurdistan first appeared as a political

name when the Turkic Seljuk prince Sandjar created a Persian province called Kurdistan, which roughly

corresponds to the Iranian component of “greater Kurdistan” claimed by Kurdish nationalists today. The

Mongol invasion devastated and depopulated Kurdistan; some tribes wound up as far away as Algeria and

Morrocco according to the travel Ibn Battutah. For those who remained, Turkoman tribes, the

Qaraqoyunlu and Akoyunlu, left their mark on Kurdish principalities under later Ottoman suzerainty.

“The structure of the emirates is reminiscent of that of the Turcoman empires, the tribes being organised

Kurds, states, and tribes into a left and a right wing, kept in balance by the ruler” (van Bruinessen in Jabar

and Dawood eds 2002, p. 167). Ottoman expansion in the 16th entury brought the Persian Safavids west

from Tabriz when Ottoman attentions in Istanbul turned elsewhere from their 100 mile-wide frontier

(Schoield 2008). But the Ottomans left their mark. “In the course of their interaction with the Ottoman

state, the courts of the Kurdish emirates became more and more like smaller models of the Ottoman

court” (van Bruinessen, ibid). Ottoman and Persian competition in this frontier region involved more than

a struggle for territory. “It was also a confessional strife, and so far as the Kurds were concerned the

Ottomans had the edge over the Persians, as most Kurds were (and still are) Sunnis. That, despite the fact

that the Kurds were ethnically and linguistically closer to the Persians” (Borovali 1987, p. 29). Kurdish

disunity has been unifying. “In the aftermath of the World War, Kurdistan was divided among four of the

modern would-be nation states succeeding these empires, becoing a peripheral and often mistrusted

region in each of them (van Bruinessen, ibid). As Newman writes, “the division of the Kurdish territories

in the aftermath of World War I...left one of hte most difficult unresolved territory-boundary-identity

issues on the face of the globe” (Newman in Flint ed. 2005, p. 332). But dealing with Kurds is something

that regional sovereigns have in common. Against a Cold War backdrop, Saddam Hussein of Iraq and the

Shah of Iran notably solved a centuries-old border dispute over the shores of the Shatt al-Arab north of

the Gulf, essentially returning each other‟s hostage Kurdish ethnonationalist movements, which resulted

in the Shah abruptly ceasing military support and “territorial depth” support to Kurdish peshmerga and

initiating the now familiar Kurdish refugee border run. “Kurdistan always was, like much of the Middle

East, an ethnic and religious mosaic, in which nomads, peasants and townspeople, speakers of various

languages and numerous dialects, adherents of Islam, Christianity and Judaism and a plethora of

syncretistic religious communities lived side by side” (van Bruinessen 1999, pp. 7-8). In its external

relations with Anatolian, Mesopotamian and Persian powers, “Kurdistan constituted a periphery to each

of these cultural-political regions, but it has also had the important cultural role of mediation between

them: (van Bruinessen, 1999, p. 1). In this regard it does not entirely matter that in Kurdish nationalist

history the first partition of Kurdistan occurred at Zohab in 1639. The British government considered

Mosul Vilayet, also known as southern Kurdistan, which Soane visited in 1909, as a “circulation region”

(Schofield 2008), but since the early 1970s, geologists have held that “fault lines may not always ben

areas of less resistant rock” (Gerrard, 13).

This paper shall focus on the unresolved resource and territorial disutes attending the Kurdistan Region of

Iraq, which has functioned as a state and promoted itself as a tourist and investment destination since the

American invasion in 2003, and which hedges on an undefined internal boundary division that in recent

years has been the subject of a virulent “political war.” The boundary is comprised of sub-boundaries

relating to “red lines” and past “green lines” that fall inside a latitude of disintegration between

Mesopotamia and southern Kurdistan involving environmental and geological change. These disputed

territories are home to Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen and diverse Christian minorities in parts of five of 18

Iraqi provinces, not including three in northernmost Iraq belonging to the constitutionally approved

Kurdistan Region. Its authorities have expanded south through security, money and administration. But

the territorial extent of the disputed territories has yet to be defined in law. This paper considers the

Krikuk dispute in historical context. Kirkuk appears in key moments in Kurdish and Iraqi self-definition.

This paper will cover the Ottoman approach to Kurdistan and Iraqi state formation under British rule. It

proceeds to the rise of Baathist Iraq and Kurdish nationalism over war and “armed peace.” It concludes

with the post-invasion era and a transitional UN intervention. The current issue before stakeholders

deciding Kirkuk‟s future status is who is a legitimate resident given such indistinction, negotiated by

disputants engaged in a contest of competing and inevitably unequal truths. For Kurds, Kirkuk is the city

that has always been beyond them, though captured several times in fifty years of civil conflict with

Baghdad. Kirkuk apears in the Turkmen argument as a symbol of power under the previous Ottoman

Empire, in contrast to their current accusations against Kurdish authorities of “war crimes” in pursuing

the Kurdish ideal. Some Arabs view Kirkuk as a multiethnic Iraqi city (Anderson and Stansfield 2009),

while nearby for Arab Iraq is the long-time Arab military residential centre of West Mosul behind a state

that thrives on Kirkuk oil. A discussion of themes will follow a short city history.

The site of modern Kirkuk was first inhabited around five thousand years ago. The Nuzi texts, found on a

site ten miles southewest of the city of Arrapha, which was Kirkuk (Lewy 1968, pp. 156-57), have told

archaelogists about the laws of property and slavery in Assyria. Sassanid rule left what would be the

oldest church outside the so-called “Holy Land” to the Christian martyrs of Persian rule (Morony 2005, p.

182). Ottoman and Persian moves to colonize or re-colonize towns along the trade routes included the

bulding and rebuilding of Kirkuk, which joined the Ottoman dominion for good in 1555 but would be

recaptured by Persians twice in the 17th century an once in the 18

th century. Under the Ottomans, Kirkuk

was the capital of the vilayet of Sharizor until 1879, after which it was annexed to the new administrative

unit of Mosul Vilayet, or province, in which Kirkuk became a “sanjak.” Its demographic profile has

changed over time. In 1838, there were no Kurds in Kirkuk city. A 1921 British estimate showed a

Kurdish majority in the province. Gertrude Bell noted that “the inhabitants of Kirkuk are largely of

Turkish blood, descendents of Turkish settlers dating from the time of the Selfjuks” (Guclu 2007). In

1920, Sheikh Mahmoud Barzinji claimed Kirkuk for his prospective Kurdish autonomous region but was

rebuffed by Britain and eventually ceded the city‟s “anti-Arab” but not necssarily “anti-British” character

to Turkmen notables (McDoawall 1996). The evolving role of Kirkuk in Iraqi life has continuted to

change it. Bituminous mortar was in use as early as 4,000 BC (Cadman 1934), p. 201) but American oil

was used locally in Soane‟s time (legend has it that Kurds would later use bitumen to protect against gast

attacks in the 1980s). The production of oil for export introduced a new relationship between Kirkuk

residents and their sovereigns. A 1957 Iraqi census showed a residual, conservative and acquiescent

Turkmen plurality in effect. But as the city became a focal point of the Iraqi petroleum industry and

national economy, it became necessary to secure it from internal and external threat. This included the

Iraqi Communist Party, an incubator of Kurdish ethno-nationalism. The Arabization of Kirkuk and the

nationalization of the Iraqi oil industry were used in the Baathist approach. The essential features of the

Kurdish response are remarkably consistent across decades. Kurdish insistence on a majority-proving

census and referendum on Kirkuk‟s status has not changed since 2003 despite Kurdish effective control in

Kirkuk or Baghdad‟s change of government. The Kirkuk issue is currently “contaminat[ing] Baghdad

politics to the point of disabling Maliki‟s government (Hiltermann 2009). But we have seen this movie

before. If the legacy of the 2003 American invasion leaves a “divided country that is left to fight over an

undefined boundary with Kurdistan while a dysfuntional Baghdad government governs in name only”

(Hiltermann 2009), so did republican Iraqi governement in the 1960s during a period defined by cyclical

Arab-Kurdish escalation, violence and “armed peace” (Chalian 1994). Since the invasion, violence has

been habitually rarer than anticipated, almost as if, as E.B. Soane wrote, “Kirkuk is thus a collection of all

the races of eastern Anatolia – Jew, Arab, Syrian, Armenian, Chaldean, Turk, Turkoman, and Kurd – and

consequently enjoys considerable freedom from fanaticisim” (Soane 1914, p. 124).

Minorsky noticed that Kurdish dialects are less dissimilar than Iranian languages spoken in the Pamirs

and concluded that Kurds might have been descended from a large, single-speaking group such as the

Medes. This claim draws support form Kurds but cannot be entirely accurate. “Kurdish has a strong

south-western Iranian element, whereas Median presumably was a north-western Iranian language. Zaza

and Gurani, two related Iranian languages spoken in the north-western and south-eastern extremes of

Kurdistan, do not belong to the north-west Iranian group, and many of the differences between the

northern („Kurmanci‟) and southern („Sorani‟) dialects of Kurdish proper are due to the profound

influence of Gurani on the latter....[I]t is remarkable that long before the age of natinoalism there already

was a sense of common identity among tribes whose cultures where „objectively‟ quite diverse (van

Bruinessen 1994, pp. 11-37). If the Kurds are a community of fate, “Kurdish nationalists could

convincingly claim a common history and a large piece of territory associated with their people, but their

opponents in the debates denied in the existence of a common economic life” (van Bruinessen, ibid).

Political division introduced a smuggling class and chances for advancement across Kurdistan. They have

usually had some variation of this instead: “One other relevant boundary should be mentioned: that

between the representatives of high Ottoman culture (military-bureaucratic officials, the higher religious

functionaries, part of the urban notables) and the various local populations. The former were a quite

distinct group, maintaining its distance from the vulgus by its use of an artificial language, Ottoman

Turkish, and an elaborate etiquette” (van Bruinessen, ibid, italics in original). The narrative material

available to Kurds about their presence in Kurdistan is rich and diverse. Political actors of the day create

future ruins with the ideological and procedural tools available to them at that time. But, “the exclusive

attachment to territory reflects in the naming and renaming of places and locations in accordance with the

historic and religious sites associated with the dominant political group: (Newman in Kahler and Walter

eds. 2006, p. 98).

Since the 16th century the names attributed to all or parts of Iraqi Kurdistan speak of import and

indistinction. It is thought by some to possess all the traits of a state except statehood (Stansfield 2007). In

the late 1990s it was best defined by “what it is not, and never has been, a recognised state” (O‟Shea,

2004, p. 2), who also notes that Kurds mistake the particularly of the frontier centuries for their own

generalized importance at the geographic “heartland” of the Middle East. Natali has described how since

1991 Iraqi Kurdistan has become a “transnational space” as a result of disintegration in the early 1990s

(Natali 2005). The Iraqi Kurdish experience is also a long-time exception to the Kurdish experience in

Syria, Turkey and Iran. It satisfed the “territorial imperative:” in 1991 (McColl 1969, p. 614). Through

folly into humanitarian intervention despite European and regional dissent the “interntional community”

helped found the Kurdistan Regional Government in an apparently neat reversal of Mosul Vilayet‟s

annexation by Iraq in 1926. The selective reintegration of Iraqi Kurdistan over Iraqi constitutional

negotiations since 2003 has involved procedural impasse over extra-constitutional questions more than

guerilla war. It occurs against a longer trend of deterritorialization highlighted by effective demographic,

administrative and military sway in the chronically underachieving oil capital of Kirkuk. Iraqi Kurdistan

stands on a “point of imbalance between public law and private fact” (Saint-Bonnet quoted in Agamben

2005, p. 1). “The demarcation, delimitation and ultimate location of boundaries are a function of power

relations. They will reflect the patterns of ethnic distribution where it serves the interest of the state(s)”

(Newman, ibid, p., 104). So who is the state here?

Barth examined how ecological factors contributed to everyday unspoken codes of ethnic boundary

vigilance. Scientists now long at “gene-environment” interactions. Here, political geology is the accretion

of such interactions and historical patterns of global contact in and around Kurdistan, or “deep

geopolitics” related more to what Spinoza called its “common notions” of freedom or lack thereof, its

“historical ground.” (quoted in Lambert 2006, p, 115), while poltical archaeology includeds enduring axes

of change in local environments and state-sponsored erosion of what van Bruinessen called “primordial

loyalties” (1992). They overlap and add up to history in both fact and perception. The fate of Iraqi Kurds

shows that geopolitics and biopolitics are not mutually exclusive. Agamben‟s reading of Foucalt, the

Holocaust and legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who coined the phrase – a phrase that Agamben has made his

own – “state of exception,” has gained attention in the West since 2001 (Hannah in Cowen and Gilbert

eds. 2006). Recent history in Iraqi Kurdistan can briefly be subject to Giorgio Agamben‟s analysis.

Agamben argues that sovereignty inevitably leads to minority citizens being subject by the state to

refugee status and genocide (Hannah, ibid, p. 59). The Kurdish experience with such phenomena in Iraq

includes the incongruity between reality and a public commitment by the British to an autonomous area

along with mentions in treaties and international rulings stating that Kurdish rights should be observed. A

recognised nation of long local tenure balanced the Sunni against the Shia in pre and early Iraq. The

Kurds ended the Iraqi foundational period with “residual rights” embedded in the Charter of the League

of Nations. The Baathist governments inherited conditions of possibility for statements in the 1960s that

Kurds had “national rights within the bounds of national unity.” The most consistent aspect of Iraq‟s

political history is after all “the political and military organization of the Sunni population into a force

capable of seizing and securing power and subordinating all other groups” (Anderson and Stansfield

2005, p. 152). Juridicial order – the contextual version that Schmitt described – in Iraq from 1968 to 2003

is illustrated by an October 2002 referendum that asked Iraqis if Saddam Hussein should remain in power

and 99.96%% voted „yes,‟ an accurate statement according to some Iraqi observers of “autopilot”

citizenship in a state of permanent revolution (Cockburn 2008) – they voted „yes‟ because they thought

Saddam would win. Saddam Hussein in this view was the “logical culmination of the pathologies

embedded in the state of Iraq since its creation in 1921” (Anderson and Stansfield 2005, p. 13). Moreover,

in Agamben‟s theory, the sovereign, though his right to do anything to anyone, thus holds together

sovereignty and “bare life”; for as Schmitt writes, no rule is applicable to chaos (Laclau in Calarco and

DeCaroli eds. 2007, p. 13). As a sovereign during the Cold War, Saddam proved no exception and

benefited from the balance of power logic of the Superpowers. As Abdulhamid II had argued, “the imam

or caliph was necessary because human society was basically anarchic: „Since the power of lust and

passion stimulates men to violence and discord, there must be a just man who will abate violence‟”

(Deringil and Lambton (1985) in Deringil 1991, p, 354). Hussein emerged as a global theat during and

after a decade of UN sanctions that ended Iraqi sovereigny, in what has been described as a unipolar

move for a unipolar moment. This occurred through a strategic use of a neo-Ottoman premise that

Mesopotaminan and Kurdistan‟s sovereigny reside in people and not territory. Disorder, now permanent,

is rooted in an old tradition of transhumance related to environmental pattern-change in lands where

Kurdistan becomes understood to now be Anatolia and Mesopotamia, amounting to a “quasi-state” inside

a “failed state” (see Jackson 1990).

Empires have often spoken of leaving Kurdistan to its devices, but imperial intervention is thought to be

common in Mesopotamian and Kurdistani history. Sir Halford Mackinder proposes a long timeline that

allows us to perceive the 2003 American invasion and other recent events in historic context. “When

historians in the remote future come to look back on the group of centuries through which we are now

passing, and see them foreshortened, as we to-day see the Egyptian dynasties, it may well be that they

will describe the last 400 yeras as the Columbian epoch, and will say that it ended soon after the year

1900” (Mackinder 1904, p. 2). Looking east, in 1904 Mackinder published the first version of his

“Geographical Pivot” theory in which Russia appears to have assumed the role that the Mongolian empire

played in its time. Northern Mesopotamia/southern Kurdistan belonged to Mackinder‟s Heartland because

it was rich in agriculture, despite its irrigation system having been destroyed seven years previous.

Mackinder considered America an eastern power. Mackinder also described the world as a closed

“organism” in which every event is potentially significant: “Every explosion of social forces, instead of

being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed

from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will

be shattered in consequence” (Mackinder, ibid). The drumbeat of a long national emergency may help

one government persuade its constituents that “lebensraum” is open space. In that case “geopolitics and

biopolitics are fused.” Likewise, the “territorial trap” (Agnew 1994) may make cultural transition zones to

appear as “grey zones” in need of best practices in counterinsurgency and nation-building, typically a

late-imperial concern. As Cooper holds (2004, pp. 110-111) globalization has blurred “the distinction

between domestic and foreign events” and thus makes intervention which used to take place only in

“unusual circumstances” more common. In this frame, a theory about imperial assertion might start to

resemble a theory about imperial self-defence: “the history of the 20th century should have taught us that

it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire”

(Project for a New American Century, 1997). Likewise: “On 1 January 1915 Lloyd George, then

Chancellor of the Exchequer, submitted a memorandum to the Committee of Imperial Defence advocating

a landing in Syria to cut off 80,000 Turkish troops menacing the Suez Canal. Although the target was

altered, the validity of his premise was accepted: „We cannot allow things to drift. We ought to look well

ahed and discuss every possible project for bringing the war to a successful conclusion‟” (Klieman 1968,

p. 238).

The Kurds were late for nationalism, and so they fought their nationalist revolution against a national

government that saw itself pursuing “liberalization from imperialist domination.” But the Iraqi Kurds

were early for humanitarian intervention when UN Resolution 688 enacted Operation Provide Comfort

and created a humanitarian space of exception in Iraqi territory in 1991. Baghdad‟s successful quest to

nationalize the Iraqi oil industry occurred as Kruds were “denationalized” (O‟Leary 2008) along with

Turkmen and other groups in Kirkuk so that Arabs could take their place in the city. But the Kurds were

“politically qualified,” to use Agamben‟s term, by Qassim‟s 1958 declaration that Iraq was comprised of

two nations. The Kurdish exception of national rights within the bounds of national unity had produced

impasse and heightened the possibility that an estimated 50,000 to 182,000 Kurds would become victims

of Anfal and that “Chemical Ali” Hassan al-Majid, Saddam‟s cousin and head of the Northern Bureau in

Kirkuk, could exclaim while sanctions began that “it couldn‟t have been more than 100,000” (Human

Rights Watch 1995, p. 14). Agamben argues that the logic that binds sovereignty, the sacred (a Roman

figure who had been stripped of everything and could be killed by anyone except by agents of the law)

and biopolitics leads: “‟(inexorably) to a state where a supreme power can annihilate a minority‟ in the

name of national unity” (Connolly in Calarco and DeCaroli eds 2007, p. 27). Agamben describes such

situations as “the camp...[which is] that place where law, fact and exception overlap” (Lemke 2005, p. 6).

Refugees International says: “Hindered by its political mandate in Iraq, and its lack of access to most of

the country, the UN has no other choice than to rely on local partners to reach out to the communities

most in need” (Younes and Rosen 2008, p. 1).

Kurds achieved ethnonationalist goals and satisfied the “territorial imperative” (McColl 1969, p. 614) as

Iranian refugee camps and a small UN-backed enclave along the Turkish border grew to include Kirkuk,

described as the “Kurdish Jerusalem” by Kurdish leader and current Iraqi President Jalal Talabani in

1992. Newman writes: “...national identity is tied in with the mythic spaces and places, through which

some territories become more important or „holy‟ than other territories....” He continues: “...[minorities]

will often focus on those territories that lie beyond the state boundary but within the identity ecumene of

the particular group” (Newman in Flint ed. 2005, p. 331). Kirkuk was named in the Kurdish Constitution

as capital (in exile) of this defacto space in 1992. The legal side of the Kirkuk dispute today shows an

ongoing connection between the state of indefinite exception that Agamben proposes and a state of

indefinite postponement of referenda in Kirkuk, such that the other disputed territories, thought to be

easier to resolve in terms of future status, are “geographical areas and social contexts where the rule of

law does not run” (Cerny 2004, p. 19). It is not difficult to see how the Kirkuk dispute and even the Iraqi

Kurdistan Government might most resemble in such moments what Agamben calls a “remnant”: “On the

one hand it is trapped in a wasteland of indistinction between fact and law; on the other it is the rogue

component that can bring to a halt the mechanism that produces it (Edkins in Calarco and DeCaroli eds.

2007, p. 86). As Elden writes, “[t]erritorial sovereignty is increasingly seen as contingent, but at the same

time, territorial preservation or inviolability is asserted even more forcefully....With Iraq this is at the very

heart of the issue of the country‟s new constitution, in that the territorial settlement is an extra-

constitutional event, and the resultant problems of federalism, resources and representation are haunting

the political process” (Elden 2007, p. 837). But Kirkuk has not therefore devolved into generalized

violence. “Calling Kirkuk a tinderbox, or a powderkeg or a flashpoint is perhaps exaggerated. It implies

that the slightest provocation will lead to protracted and deeply vicious violence of the kind that has

occurred in orther Iraqi cities” (O‟Leary 2008). As Martin van Bruinessesn has observed in his study of

“primordial loyalties,” tribes in southern Kurdistan would, when seeking to avoid incurring a blood feud,

neverthless agree to fight, the winner being the tribe which missed on purpose the most, illustrating their

power through conspicuous consumption (van Bruinessen 1992). Kedourie (1993) discusses the differnce

between ideological nationalism and constitutional politics. The ideological politician seeks to wipe the

slate clean and start again so that everyone “will live happily ever after” (Kedouri, ibid, p. Xiii). The

constitutional politician attends “to the common concerns of a particular society, to safeguard against

foreign assaults, to mediate disagreements and conflicts between various groups, through political

institutions, through legislation and the administratin of justice....” (Kedourie, ibid). In this view, it is now

a matter of constitutional politics that “[f]or the Kurdish people, the question is whether is physical

survival is compatible with Iraqi sovereignty” (Gottlibe 1993, p. 78). The Bazzazz Declaration was the

first serious autonomy offer made to the Kurds (Jawad 2008) by a post-monarchy government. The March

11 Manifesto provided the basis for Kurdish demands in 2003-2005 during the drafting of the Iraqi

Constitution. Jawad writes: “no party was really serious about implementing these agreements” (Jawad,

ibid, p. 39). Divided statelets where old tribal and Marxist feudalists own new, rival mobile networks that

roughly correspond to their territorial domain and spheres of practical loyalty are somewhat rare on the

interntional scene, but this author notes that had a “peace to end all war” (Fromkin 1989) reigned instead,

on the long enough timeline, the survival rate is nevertheless still zero. Now we approach Iraq through the

Sublime State, the nation-state and Mosul Vilayet.

Figure 1: P.E.J. Bomli, “L‟Affaire de Mossoul”, Amsterdam: H.J. Paris, 1029, solami.com/mvc

Part I: Foundations

Modern Iraq had detractors from the beginning. Integrating Kurd, Sunni and Shia appeared to Arnold

Wilson in 1919 as “the antithesis of democratic government‟” (Cockburn and Cockburn 2002, p. 63).

Wilson apparently recognised in 1918 and 1919 that an “autonomous southern Kurdistan, according to

Wilson‟s political calculations, could be ameans, in the short-run, to thwart the attempts of the Sharifian

followers to establish an Arab state by merging the three Wilayas of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul”

(Eskander 2001, p. 145). In 1920 Percy Cox returned from Mesoptamia to report that Britan should

consider a republican government and have a president elected from a list of importable kings (Cox

1920). It is worth mentioning that Saddam Hussein was not the first Sunni Arab leader of Iraq to obtain

over 95% on a plebiscite, as did Faisal from Mecca in the future Saudi Arabia, named king in Iraq. But

the three main groups in what would become Iraq “detested each other,” Wilson observed, moreover,

75% of the population of would-be Iraqi was “tribal” (Cockburn and Cockburn, ibid, p. 62-63). Southern

Kurdistan offered few exceptions. The residents of Kirkuk voted against Faisal. Elsewhere in Kurdistan,

for centuries the Ottomans ruled lightly; autonomy produced allies against the Persians. In 1806,

Sulaimaniyah residents launched the first rebellion of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, one of

centralization and a great deal of rebellion in Ottoman lands. Sulaimaniyah did not accept Ottoman

suzerainty until 1850. Despite plans for an autonomous region governed by a council of tribal sheikhs,

and what appears to have been the best solution to a bad situation, extending freedom to Kurds as a way

to satisfy British strategic interests, in 1919 the Kurds were the first to rise up against British forces, and

the first to kill a British political officer (Jawad 2008, p. 40 fn 1) in what would be called the

Mesopotamian Revolt. In 1933 King Faisal noted that the Iraqi governement is “far and away weaker than

the people (Cockburn and Cockburn, ibid, p. 66).

The Ottoman Empire had been a successful political enterprise (Emrence 2008). It was open to European

scorn by the mid-19th century, the Sick Man of Europe. The Ottoman Empire had no absolute ruler in

name for the first time in more than five hundred yeras when the pre-Kemalist Committee of Union and

Progress forced the abdication of Abd al-Hamid in 1909. Despite CUP attempts to enshrine “universal

Ottoman citizenship” in a final effort to correct the millet system, which incorporated minorities into the

empire through their representatives in their church alongside, but inferior to, the Muslim ummah, in

eastern Anatolia, the events of 1915 contributed to the reduction of Armenia‟s population to mere

thousands, north of, but overlapping with Kurdistan, the most neglected part of the empire (McDowall

1996). The main Ottoman policy objective on the eve of war was to obtain a large loan from a European

power (Aksakal 2008).

In his Seyahatname, Ottoman Kurdish diplomat and traveling historian Evliya Celebi treated the Kurds as

an ethnic category and Kurdistan as the place where they lived, if also among others. Celebi characterized

the region as “Kurdistan ve Turkmenistan ve sengistan”, which perhaps is best translated as “a land of

Kurds and Turcomans and rocks” (van Bruinessen 2000). But Celebi appears to have had a definite

geographical area of Kurdistan in mind. “It is a vast territory: from its northen extreme in Erzurum it

stretches by Van, Hakkari, Cizre, Amadiya, Mosul, Shahruzur, Harir and Ardalan to Baghdad, Darna,

Dartang and even as far as Basra: seventy day‟s journey of rocky Kurdistan” (van Bruinessen, ibid).

Celebi highlights Kurdish prominence in this area when referring to Kurdistan‟s by-then long-standing

Ottoman role on the Ottoman-Persian frontier: “‟In these vast territories live five hundred thousand

musket-bearing Shafi‟i Muslims. And there are 776 fortresses, all of them intact.‟” (Celebi quoted in van

Bruinessen, ibid). In defining their territory and function, Celebi mentions their Kurdish Sunni

heterodoxy, for the Ottomans professed the Hanafi school, the oldest of Islam‟s four schools of thought,

but highlights them as Sunni co-religionists against the Shia Persians. Amadiya, which contains present-

day Iraqi Kurdish cities of Zakho and Dohuk, appears as the most powerful Kurdish emirate in Celebi‟s

Ottoman world. There were no Ottoman officers in the province. The khan of Amadiya was only slightly

lower in rank than the appointed governor of Sharizor, which contained Kirkuk, described by Celebi as

having been legendarily founded by a Persian and later recaptured from the Umayyad dynasty by the

Persians. But he does not appear to have met the deulling Baban and Ardelan dynasties on the western

and eastern sides of the Zagros near Sulaimaniyah, highly responsible for the shifting nature of the

Ottoman-Persian boundary, near the future border between Iraq and Iran, although van Bruinessen notes

that Celebi‟s notes on southern Kurdistan are imcomplete and even include white space apparently

intended to be filled at a later date.

The practice of empowering Kurdish emirates through loose oversight goes back to the circumstances of

the Ottoman conquest of Kurdistan. The last outposts of Christian and Muslim power were captured in

Trabzon and Granada in 1461 and 1492, respectively (Houston 2007, p. 398). Under Sultan Selim Yavuz

the Ottomans conquered Egypt five years later. They conquered northern Iraq in 1514 at the Battle of

Chaldiran following an engagement against the Safavids in Azerbaijan in which 25 Kurdish princes and

their retainers participated. In Tabriz, Selim Yavuz famously assigned Idris of Bitlis to follow up with

blank firmans, that would take on the power of imperial decrees. The Kurdish Ottoman diplomat secured

theoretical Ottoman authority and, in the doing, a great degree of autonomy for the Kurds (O‟Shea 2004,

p. 80). The key phrase appears to be that Kurdish emirates were to be considered “set aside from the pen

and cut off from the foot” or exempt from taxation and military intervention (Houston, ibid, p 406).

The Ottomans succeeded an Oghuz Turkoman tribal federation called the Akoyunlu. Its expansion across

Kurdistan from land around Diyarbakir granted by Tamerlane, a Turkic hero who was branded an enemy

of Islam by Damascus before the Ottomans achieved the caliphate. Houston explains debate in the

“historiographical corpus” around the meaning of political autonomy among Kurdish rulers in 16th

century “Ottoman Kurdistan” if considered paradigmatic: “...if the Kurdish rulers have always been

fiercely independent, what of the Turkish Republic‟s claims to hegemony over the region? Or if they have

always been loyally obedient, what of Kurdish nationalism‟s claims for a separate status or state?”

(Houston, ibid, p. 411). Historically, the Ottomans could manipulate or ignore Kurdish quarrels

depending on inspectors and administrators and thereby never developed into a “unified region presenting

a threat to the central governments” (O‟Shea 2004, p. 81). This would later suit both Ottoman

integrationists and early Kurdish nationalists. The chain of suzerainty was not long, and there was a place

in the eastern Ottoman world for give-and-take or challenge, and yet we cannot say that it would be

“mostly untouched by the mechanisms of formal government, and controlled beneath the surface by a

system of patronage and understandings outside of the law” (Langewiesche 2008).

In other acts of diplomacy the Ottoman conquest of Mesopotamia in the 1530s and 1540s was formalised

at the Amasya peace of 1555, where Ottomans and Persian-Safavids established a rough estimate of their

holdings in a transition zone. From 1639 to 1913, Turkey and Persia narrowed their frontier through

bilateral treaties and finally, for seventy years as Britain and Russia hoped to rationalize their own

frontier, drew today‟s border between Iraq and Iran. “In fact, this traditional frontier had always

functioned like this, back to the times when Byzantines and ancient Persia hired the local Arab Ghassanid

and Lakhmid groups to fight out their struggles over the Mesopotamian/Zagros region” (Schofield 2006,

p. 28). After several Persian reconquests the Ottomans returned for good in 1831 and sought to

incorporate the region into an “increasingly homogenous imperial system” (Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett

2003, p. 3). The Porte‟s eventual quest to smash the independent emirates of Kurdistan and recapture their

eastern holdings from Persia and a Georgian Mamluk dynasty in Baghdad in the 19th century coincided

with attempts to standardise imperial administration and disengage from other parts of the imperium after

Tanzimat. The Ottomans devised their own supposedly pragmatic “civilizing mission” in their eastern

provinces that reversed, long overdue, centuries of supposedly pragmatic laissez faire. “Centred upon the

idea of the „politics of emergency‟” (Emrence 2008, p. 296, 304), the Ottomans attempted to

simultaneously increase direct rule while introducing more negotiation. “Accordingly, the Ottoman

frontier policy operated with two guiding principles at the beginning of the twentieth century: first, to

penetrate further into networks of trust and introduce imperial modernization, and second, to bargain with

local leders through the leverage of Islam” (Emrence, ibid, p. 305). Despite Ottoman efforts to destroy

such Kurdish emirates to which they had once acceded much autonomy, poor comunication and distance

to Istanbul nevertheless limited the Ottoman presence to cities. “The Arab tribes in the desert and riverain

areas and the Kurdish mountain-dwellers generally managed to resist the penetration of the forces of

central governmetn with a fair degree of success until the institution of the British mandate in 1920”

(Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, 2003, p. 2). From the Kurdish perspective the territory in which Kirkuk, the

disputed territories, and Iraqi Kurdistan sit today might have a stronger tradition of local rule than foreign

dominance. Moreover, “at the end of the 1918, Sulaimaniya was in a situation which differed widely from

the former grandeur of the old capital of the Baban Emirate. According to different British reports,

Ottoman troops left Sulaimaniya in ruins, and 80% per cent of the population had left the city during the

war. In such a context, it seems difficult to imagine the presence of a significant stratum of notables

which could be relied upon to istall a solid civil administration” (Tejel Gorgas 2008, p. 539, italics in

original).

Much of the demographic background for the rise of Baathism and Kurdish nationalism is provided in

Talabany‟s Arabization of the Kirkuk Region, which shows how the demographic profile of Kirkuk town

from the late Ottoman years until the IPC began exporting oil from Kirkuk changed gradually to

accommodate labour needs.

In 1921, the British estimated the population fo Kirkuk to be 75,000 Kurds, 35,000 Turks,

10,000 Arabs, 1,400 Jews and 600 Chaldeans. A Committee of the League of Nations, which

visited the Wilayet of Mosul in 1925 to determine its future, estimated tha tthe Kurds in

Kirkuk made up 63% of the population, the Turkmans 19% and the Arabs 18%. As no

census was taken in Iraq until 1947, most population figures were estimates. An official

estimate, published in 1936, gave the population figure as 180,000 (Talabany 2000, p. 107).

Arabs lived mainly in the southwest of the region of Kirkuk whilst the Kurds were mainly in the

northeast. It appears fairly incontestable that Turkmen were the dominant group in Kirkuk before the First

World War. Arnold Wilson noted that “Kirkuk had always been a stronghold for Turkish officialdom, and

pro-Turkish views here were a disturbing element for the occupation forces” (Guclu 2007, 55). Gertrude

Bell noted that “the inhabitants of Kirkuk are largely of Turkish blood, descendents of Turkish settlers

dating from the time of the Seljuks. At Talafar a large proportion of the population is Turcoman. They

claim descent from the 100,000 Turkish prisoners captured by Tamerlane and spared from death. Turkish

place names are common in the vicinity” (Guclu, ibid).

The British empire was not, paradoxically, the world‟s largest land empire and was sufficiently cautious

toward the Middle East to quickly adopt partition and concede management of most parts to rivals, as the

de Bunsen Committee‟s post-war articulation of British war aims illustrates: “the committee gave closest

attention to partition. It was the scheme most widely advocated at the time, and contrary to the de Bunsen

report, became the policy adopted and pursued shortly thereafter by the government. In considering such

a course of action, the committee provided a concise statement of what later became the perimeter of

Britain‟s Middle Eastern interests” (Klieman 1968, p. 247). The survival of the Ottoman Empire was also

being planned for, in eastern Anatolia if not the Persian Gulf. But it was believed that Mesopotamia “as

British territory would provide a granary in time of emergency” was a higher priority, according to the de

Bunsen committee, to developing “oilfields and establish[ing] Indian colonists with reference solely to

our own interests and convenience” (Klieman, ibid, p. 247). It would also drastically “put an end, once

and for all, to the German dream of a road to India from Berlin, via Vienna, Sofia, Constantinople, and

Baghdad...” (Klieman, ibid, p. 247). “The Turcoman population of Kirkuk, about to vote solidly against

Faysal in the referendum, was reported in 1921 as „solidly anti-Arab...though not anti-British‟” (Sluglett

2007, p. 79). Policy toward the Kurds began to change, such that by 1922 British proposals to destabilize

the Kurds of Turkey, well north of the occupied zone, could be described as not only impractical but

inexpedient. But the case of Kurdish statehood appeared weak by 1915; by 1922 Ataturk had also

strengthened his claim that Kurds were “non-Arab Ottoman Muslims” with victories on the Anatolian

battlefield against adjuncts of the Great Powers. Britain contended that no accurate map of the Turkish

Empire had ever existed (Questions of the Frontier between Turkey and Iraq 1925, p. 31) during the

Mosul dispute but a map composed of maps supplied to the Mosul Boundary Commission showed that

Mosul Vilayet ran from Sinjar near the present-day Syria-Iraq border in the west to north of Baghdad in

the east (see Figure 1, above). Ratification of the Brussels line was preceded by renewed Turkish activity

in the region and renewed campaigning by the Barzinji that occassioned the bombing of Sulaimaniya by

the RAF. “In the end, British public opinion would be shocked by the sight of British aeroplanes bombing

the tribesmen of the Euphrates or Kurdistan to enforce tyrannical or mistaken decrees hatched amid the

intrigues of the Baghdad coffee-shops or conceived by citizen pedants” (Thomas 2008, p. 132). Later, the

power to hatch “tyrannical or mistaken decrees” would be slowly devolved into the survival strategy of

one man from Takrit. The “spice of truth, however, does reside in the nationalist argument, that the

presence in any country of an impartial power, attempting to hold the scales even and to prevent the

violent domination of one section of the people by another, must ipso facto retard the attainment of

equilibrium (even if it be the equilibrium of chaos)” (Bidwell et all eds. 1986, p. 191). While the presence

of oil in northern Iraq had long been understood, and the Ottomans had been studying the region with an

eye toward exploiting its hydrocarbons at least since Calouste “Mr 5%” Gulbenkian compiled several

reports on behalf of the Ottoman Ministry of Mines, early geological surveys suggested, as McDowall

writes, that only a company “rich enough to face indifferent success or failure” should tackle the field

(McDowall 1996, p. 135). That began to change in 1920, when British cabinet ministers concluded that

Iraq‟s economic future depended on Mosul‟s expected reserves (McDowall 1996) as might British and

American fleets should the need arise, this when America, the world‟s largest petroleum producer, had

recently become a net petroleum importer (Atarodi 2003), Persian fields remained poorly developed and

Arabian oil had yet to be tapped.

The British approached the Middle East primed with dark suppositions about Oriental despotism (Dodge

2003). The treaty-making that made Iraq and the Kurdish issue possible were not perceived as generosity

at the time. “It was an old fashioned treaty, like that of Versailles, imposing the harsh terms of a relentless

victor. Neither treaty revealed much magnanimity or statesmanship:” (Brown 1924, p. 113). The

perception that Ottoman rule corrupted and fragmented Mesopotamian society coincided with the arrival

of a moral principle of national self-determination that bordered on an “ideological obsession” (Kedourie

1993). Southern Kurdistan leaders such as Mullah Mustafa Barzinji believed that the Powers believed in

national self-determination for Ottoman subject people. Kurdish leaders gathered around Sulaimaniya and

prepared to make it easy for the British to agree that Kurdish interests should not be forgotten. This

coincided with British perceptions that Ottoman sovereignty and inattention had exacerbated the division

of the various Ottoman people. In Mesopotamia, “a stark state and society divide is what the British

needed to see” (Dodge 2003, p. 78). They had previous spent seven decades attempting to produce a

“mappable line” with Russia between Turkey and Persia, “to set a spatial frame for their Great Game in

these parts” (Schofield 2008, p. 398). During the war, Devonshire outlined that Darwinian principles of

the Edwardian age still operated by prioritizing that foreign individuals should be protected first of all, in

a future British Mesopotamian concern. But Dobbs described how he had to prevent the Ministry of

Finance from destroying systems under which large tracts of country are leased to semi-feudal tribal

chiefs and modified rules and laws that tended to ignore tribal rights. Dobbs: “The apparent deviations

from the principles laid down for my guidance can be explained in one word „security.‟ I have constantly

brought to the notice of His Britannic Majesty‟s Government that the influential politicians of Iraq are

imbued with the ideas of the townsmen, between whom and the countrymen a great gulf is fixed.” (Dobbs

1929, pp. 2-3). Meanwhile the north reveals British thinking about the cash value of British “moral

backing.” “In the northern half of a large proportion are similarly divided from the ruling Arab clique by

racial differences, being Kurds, Turcoman or Yezidis. Thus to the natural alienation of the tribal

countryman from the townee is added the special alienation either of religion or of race. Thirdly, the

prestige and military strength of the Iraq Government are inadequate to cope with any with any grave

opposition from the tribes, without the help of the British forces and of British moral backing” (Dobbs,

ibid, p. 3). Barzinji had sided with Turkey at times. In the 1930s the championship of Kurdish interests

passed to the Barzani clan, in northern-most Iraq near the Turkish border. The Kurdistan Party of Iraq was

established in 1946 with Barzani as President-in-Exile, when his movement decamped to Iran and

established a republic under Soviet oversight. In 1944, Britain‟s military leaders were conveying their

thoughts on geopolitical alliances and the oil supply to cabinet. British control was secure enough that

northern Iraq was important enough to contain hypothetical threats. “You will observe that the preceding

paragraphs relate to the only potential external menace to our Middle East oil interests that exists. You

should not conclude that this menace is considered real at the moment; on the contrary, it is quite possible

that it will never materialise” (War Cabinet 1994, p. 3).

The seeds of the Mosul frontier dispute lay in Britain‟s occupation of the vilayet four days after the

Mudros armistice brough a halt to fighting in Mesopotamia and the policy decisions that lead to this

move. The case for remaining hinged on a set of strategic assumptions about territorial possibilities in

Mesopotamia that had been articulated as early as 1915 (Schofield 2008). The shape of Iraq may have

been “largely predetermined by 1916” (Culcasi 2006, p. 684 fn 9). Britain understood empire through the

prism of India. This became obvious at the Cairo Convention in 1921, where British notables devised an

Iraq strategy calling for indirect rule. The “Quit Mesopotamia” campaign had highlighted the high cost of

putting down the revolt. Intensive engagement in India and Iraq were not possible at the same time. But

India would sufer if Iraq were not engaged at all. The empire had learned and sought a way around its

limits. Indirect rule meant an Arab king, political officers and the RAF in Baghdad. Kurdish autonomy

never materialised, and neither has a Kurdish state.

.

Part 2: Two Decolonizations, The Equilibrium of Chaos, One State of Exception

Uthman, shortly before the outbreak of hostilities in the 1960s, noted:

In the RCC we have nothing. In the army we have nothing, no key positions. In the oil

ministry, we have nothing. In the Ministry of the Interior we have nothing. In the Ministry of

Foreign Affairs we have nothing. In fact, we hold no key positions. The Kurds have no part

in decisions relating to domestic or foreign policies Everything is done by the Ba‟th party.

We have no participation in the regime. We only have participation on an administrative

level (Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, p. 167).

The late 1950s were critical years in Iraqi history along this course. In 1957, the last census was

conducted in Kirkuk that gives an indication of the city‟s ethnic breakdown. In 1958, the monarchy

was overthrown and its successor, the regime of Abd Karim al-Qassim, proclaimed Arabs and

Kurds to be “partners” in Iraq. In 1959, Kirkuk suffered awful violence along political lines that

revealed changing relations among sectarian groups (Jwaideh 2006). It is better remembered by

Turkmen than Kurds as such. The monarchy was so unpopular by the 1940s that virtually all of

Iraqi political life was meant to demonstrate the wisdom of Faisal in 1933. “Huge turn-outs and

militancy expressed in anti-British or anti-government demonstrations, were common by 1945

(Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett 2003, p. 18). Militants were the best organised political force in the

country. The census that stemmed from Qassim‟s “recognition of Iraq as the homeland of two

peoples, Arab and Kurd, was something entirely new” (Chalian 2004, p. 10). But if the Ottomans

wanted to develop imperial modernism, then Baghdad wold ultimately find this untenable, leading

to conquest and the eradication of a British mistake. The ethnic tensions that would alternatively

emerge and be suppressed in Baathist Iraq were evident in a 1946 strike at Iraqi Petroleum

Company facilities in Kirkuk that was, at the time, viewed more as the Great Game continued as

the Cold War.

Baathist attempts to change Kirkuk began in 1963. Indeed, despite Mulla Mustafa Barzani‟s

yeoman contributions to Qassim‟s attempt to eradicate his enemies in the late 1950s and early

1960s, all republican governments took some measures to adjust the ethnic balance in an around

Kirkuk. That began to change when Iraqi Arabs began moving to Kirkuk seeking work at Iraqi

petroleum facilities during the monarchy. Baathist attempts to change Kirkuk grew more brazen

and fatal after 1968. Muzhir al-Tikreeti, who hailed from the same town that produced Saddam

Hussein and his inner circle, was appointed mayor of Kirkuk in 1969 by the Minister of the Interior

(Talabany 2001). This was tied to attempts to nationalize the oil industry – to strengthen the Iraqi

hand against the PIC and then the Arab hand around Kirkuk.

In 1973, Saddam claimed “their draft is far removed from the concept of autonomy” (quoted in

Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett 2003, p. 166). His public appeals to reason were accompanied by

another level of appeals, to “reasonable” Kurds around Barzani who perhaps could be persuaded to

see for themselves that the Kurdish leader was failing to take the greater good into account. “The

regime‟s general line until the outbreak of fighting 1974 was to maintain that it was in reality

giving the Kurds as much as they could possibly expect, and that anything else would be

tantamount to separatism” (Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, ibid, p. 165). During a speech that

Saddam Hussein gave well into the “impasse,” he described the past four years: “thus in a review

of his discussions with the various Kurdish leaders over the previous four years in a speech in

March 1974, Saddam Husayn claimed to recall an occasion on which the Ba‟th negotiators had

been obliged to point out to the Kurdish side that ‟we were debating a draft for autonomy and not

for a new state in Iraq‟” (quoted in Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, ibid). In one of the most bizarre

episodes of the Kirkuk conflict Saddam Hussein then attempted to force Barzani to accept an

autonomy agreement of the Iraqi leadership‟s choosing, after Barzani had sworn to violently protest

use of the 1957 census. The casualities numbered about a hundred on both sides, resulting in

separate requests for UN presence on the ground. Barzani refused to join the National Front, having

been given fifteen days to do so. Those on the left of the KDP who opposed the party‟s alliance

with Iran and would have preferred peaceful ties with the Baath concede that Saddam did not want

an agreement (Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett 2003). The regime imposed a toal media blackout on

the conflict. It was possible then to deny that 60,000 peshmerga, 50,000 irregulars, 90,000 Iraqi

soldiers with 1200 tanks and armoured vehicles in addition to 200 planes were involved in the

conflict. In one September battle the Kurds claimed to have killed 500 Iraqi soldiers while suffering

only eight casualties on their own side. Iraqi figures in March 1975 showed the Iraqi army

casualties amounted to 1640 dead and 7903 wounded. Iranian assisance took the form of Rapier

missiles and 155mm cannon (Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, ibid, p. 169), but only when Kurds were

on the defensive, Iranian policy apparently maintained. Upon the Algiers Accord, the field cannons

were removed from Kurdistan within 48 hours (Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, ibid, p. 170). The

Kurds fought a last stand on Jabal Sinjar at a strategic point on the Hamilton Road to Iran. For the

price of humilitating himself in front of the Shah, and settling the Iran-Iraq Shatt al-Arab dispute on

the basis of the Constantinople Protocol, thus granting Iran virutally half the river, Saddam settled

the Kurdish issue in Iraq on his own terms. The countersinurgency aspect of the Baath military

strategy in 1974-75 had left many villages burnt and “dissidents” executed. For Barzani, a group

that called itself the “neo-KDP” including Ahmed Barzani and Jalal Talabani, accepted the

Autonomy Law. Five years later Barzani died of lung cancer in Washington, DC. Jawad writes:

It was a shameful disaster that long years of hope and struggle for a lasting peace ended in

this tragic manner. The Baath Party was able to monopolize and completely dominate power

in Iraq. The regime was almost an absolute dictatorship with one press and one party. The

Kurdish leadership, press and parties had previous acted as a counter-balance to prevent the

Baathists from monopolozing power, but the March 1970 agreement and the autonomy law

of March 1974 became nothing more than ink on paper (Jawad 2008, p., 32).

By 1973 most austerity measures introduced as a hedge against possible adverse consequences of

nationalizing the oil industry had been repealed and within five years the state‟s income from oil rose

almost tenfold, leading to subsidies, an annually rising minimum wage, projects such as an oil terminal at

Fao, the development of the north Rumayla field, not to mention braggadocio. “We cannot sacrifice

technology for ideology....Of course, we have to keep our friends happy and throw some business their

way. Thus we buy your Boeing aircraft and let you build our oil refineries. But a less important project,

like a brick factory, will go to Bulgaria, even though we know we can get a better one from France,” an

under-secretary in the economy ministry told the International Herald Tribune in April 1975 (quoted in

Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett 2003, p. 180). As Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett neatly summarize, “Following

the nationalisation of the IPC, the subsequent oil price rise and the „solution‟ to the Kurdish problem in

March 1975, the Ba‟th felt much more comfortable” (Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, ibid, p. 229). In 1976

Baghdad reduced the area of Kirkuk governorate by annexing four Kurdish areas to neighbouring

governorates (Talaby 2001). The arabization of the north and the nationalisation of the oil industry

appeared as detail-oriented totalitarian ends. Meanwhile, Iraq was also being defined, perhaps if only in

subtle ways, by centralization. “Since the fall of Qasim every group that seized power has relied to a very

considerable eextent on regional or family support. An important function of the „single party‟ or „leading

party‟ in Iraq and other similar states is to prop up, and to some extent conceal, these very personalised

political systems” (Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, ibid, p. 213). Likewise Barzani‟s overreliance on his

allies made Kurds vulnerable to the consequences of his tendency in claiming Kirkuk to make demands

that could not be met by the logic of the nation-state. The Kurdish dream would become more plausible

while Saddam Hussein would demonstrate that he was, for better or worse, one of history‟s great

survivors. Jawad (2008), who is critical of Kurdish unilateral moves in the new Iraq, says that the

crushing of the Kurds in the north allowed the Baath Party aboslute power. They had nationalised oil,

nationalised Kirkuk, beaten the Kurds militarily, and as the genocidal campaign against the Kurds in 1988

would be called: those are the “spoils of Anfal.” Before 1988, brutality was necessary to keep power and

do good works. After 1988, regime survival was an end in itself, “to be pursued regardless of the damage

inflicted on the social and political fabirc of Iraq, or the psychological and physical cost to ordinary Iraqi

civilians” (Anderson and Stansfield 2005, p. 120). Arabization until 2003 included but was not limited to

prohibitions on Arab-Kurdish land sales, the elimination of Kurdish from signs and advertising, and the

destruction, in Shorja, a lower-class Kurdish neighbourhood in Kirkuk, of high density lower-class homes

in the construction of a 60 metre-wide highway, along with cash incentives for the Arabs who

increasingly populated the city (Talabany 2001).

It reflects one Kurdish view that Kirkuk (“your country”) had always been Kurdish, that the wilderness

years of 1991-2003 were exile. If the frontier began as “Kurdish mountain nomadism as it was known in

Ottoman times...emerg[ing] as a cultural synthesis of the Turcomans‟ long-distance horizontal nomadism”

and “the originally short-distance vertical transhumance of the Kurds” (van Bruinessen in Jabar and

Dawod eds 2002, p. 167), then perhaps this is why there is an almost seasonal rhythm to the Kirkuk

dispute, and why the Kurdish claim does not appeal to post-imperial neighbours. The story of the Baath

Party and their oppostion with the Kurds, at least until the 1980s, is the sotry of how nationalisation and

arabization against the Kurds‟ eventual inability to be defeated militarily prompted extramilitary measures

and, ultimately, a sort of Kurdish victory through defeat. The trigger for the Anfal campaign appears to

have been Baghdad‟s perception (an accurate one) that Iraqi Kurds chose to align with “the Persians”

during the Iran-Iraq war (McDowall 1996), which Saddam promoted as his Qadisiyah. The Iranian-Iraqi

Kurdish alliance included attacks on the oil facilities in Kirkuk (Hiro 2001).

We must conclude that Barzani never intended anything other than to win Kirkuk on the field of battle,

while Saddam must have surely intuitively understood the scholarly point that follows: “The resurgence

of separatist agitations is far more likely to be the result of a reneging by the state, a watering-down of

agreements, of foot-dragging. All these state tactics create deep resentment, poison future attempts at

peaceful settlement, and lend credence to the belief that the separatists have no other option than complete

separation through a war of liberation”. (CITE) But liberation is not precisely what the Iraqi Kurds got in

1991. They got something called a „no-fly zone.‟

Part 3: End-Sate, Pax Peshmerga

“Hell is over. We have prevailed! We can control the oil in Kirkuk! Kurds can control the oil! We will

use this money for schools and hospitals, not to kill babies with chemical bombs and to pay Mukhabbarat

secret police to rape and torture and murder” (quoted in Tucker 2004, p. 141).

In 1991, a US State Department employee addressing the media during the humanitarian crisis that

launched UN Resolution 699 and Operation Provide Comfort thought it necessary to mention that while

the Kurds were considered legitimate minorities, they had not been mentioned in the Treaty of Lausanne.

Iraqi Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani‟s family had been supplying mayors from the Qadiri order in Kirkuk

before Saddam Hussein‟s Ministry of the Inteior installed a man with the last name Takrit. As one

Kurdish man on Kirkuk‟s Provincial Council stated to US reporteres, “How would you feel if you go

back to your country, and someone from Canada is living in your house?” (Mulrine 2006). There is an

interesting tendency in collective memory to neglect “ambiguous links” to foreign powers, including the

Kemalist regime, the British and Shia leaders in 1918, Qassim in 1958, the Baath Party in 1`063, Iran in

1984-86, the American military from 2003 onward, and even Shia leaders and Iran and Kirkuk‟s Turkmen

and the Turkish government (Tejel Gorgas 2008, p. 548).

The Kurdsh uprising at the conclusion of the second Gulf War was a rejection of Baathist rule and a

criticism of Kurdish leaders by tribal rivals of the Barzanis, such as the Surchi and others, some of who

had been jash – “traitors” hired by Saddam to serve as adjuncts of the Iraqi military – who did not

accompany KDP and PUK leaders to Iran during the war and subsequent uprising. The Iraqi Army nearly

lost control of Iraq after the conclusion of American hostilitary. “One second of this day is worth all the

wealth in the world,” said Massoud Barzani (Cockburn and Cockburn 2002, p. 19), when the government

fell in Kirkuk. The army finished the uprisings with 175,000 bullets, or enough for two more days

fighting (Cockburn and Cockburn, ibid). The Iraqi army had abandoned 2005 million bullets in Kuwait

and Jordan would not re-supply it. Izzat ad-Dour told a Kurdish delegation after the uprisings were

nevertheless crushed that “only when you Kurds took Kirkuk was it possible to mobilize against you”

(Cockburn and Cockburn, ibid, p. 28). Barzani invited Saddam Hussein to send 30,000 Iraqi troops to

Arbil to force a resolution to a civil war at a time when Iraqi Kurdistan would become a “transnational

zone” in the following years. In Kirkuk, in preparation for the 1997 census Baghdad passed an “identity

law” which required non-Arabs to register as Arabs. Kurds who refused were expelled to Iraqi Kurdistan

or to southern Iraq. A 2003 Human Rights Watch report estimated that since 1991 as many as 200,000

non-Arabs had been forcibly expelled to the Kurdish region. It hosted oppostion movements that worked

with the KDP, PUK and American intelligence agences to support disaffected Iraqi generals launch at

least one failed coup (Baer 2003). Kurds suffered under a double-blockade as Iraqis, through UN

sanctions, and as Kurds, embargoed by Baghdad, but international agencies funded the autonomous zone.

Smuggled oil made some rich. Meanwhile, Kirkuk gained power as a symbol among nationalists in the

1990s. Today it is close and unresolved (Andreson and Stansfield 2009) while “Kurdish oil” in three

provinces lacks a legal export route.

The 2003 invasion introduced a descent into disorder that resembled the first Gulf War to ex-Baathists.

But the proportion of foreign and local involvement was different. From the ex-Baathist perspective

Tehran-backed Iraqi Persian exiles returned to take over the government through opportunism and

demography, attended by US-designated opposition figures of diverse politics and generalized moderation

but no fierce local support. An insurgency spokesman in Damascas who identified himself as a Shia

doctor (but actually may have been president of the Iraqi Dentists Syndicate) pledged fealty to Izzat ad-

Douri, the former ice-seller who served as a Saddam deputy for decades but remained at-large throughout

the extended decapitation of the regime “deck of cards” in 2003 and 2004. The insurgency also brought

the Islamization of the Baathi, in which the Naqshbandiyya order appears to have played a role. Affiliated

agents of the Islamic Army of Iraq, which was though to be the main adjunct of underground Baathist

power, helped terrorize Baghdad roads and markets with increasingly sophisticated signalling technology

and thousands of 155mm armour-piercing artillery shells overlooked during the hunt for weapons of mass

destruction. Foreigners were kidnapped and publically beheaded on video. Neighbourhoods changed

hands. The Shia retort involved national political power and road-end garbage dumps for corposes of

Sunnis and collaborators. An American policy of countervailing the dissolution of the Iraqi military by

hiring known if impeachable characters bgun in Mosul in 2003 returned as “the surge” and payments to

largely Sunni “Sons of Iraq” to consolidate a reported tribal turn against foreign jihadists at the heart of

the insurgency. If it appears that the 2006 mosque bombing in Samarrah suggested some uncertainty

about the power balance between Sunni and Shia gangs, it would appear now to be a Shia game to lose in

the legal and urban warfare domains.

The Kurds played a larger spoiler role in all this than they did from 1980 to 1988. If in 1984 they only

managed an Iranian-backed attack of Kirkuk‟s oil facilities, from their autonomous zone in 2003 they

linked Kurdish military support to US war narratives and supplied documentation about the supposed

connection between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. They followed the Turkish rejection of US transit

rights with a pre-war joint assault on Ansar al-Islam, an allegedly al-Qaeda linked Kurdish militant group,

in Iraqi Kurdish territory and the “liberated” Mosul and Kirkuk with the help of US Special Forces. The

Kurdisatan region had 70,000 peshmerga and 23,000 ready in Dohuk district (Tucker 2004) as an Iraqi

version of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan (Stansfield in Dodge and Simon eds. 2003). The

peshmerga departed from Mosul within weeks at US request but there has not been postive interaction

between the Arab and Kurdish populations of West and East Mosul (Galbraith 2006). Shia Turkmen in

Tal Afar have complained that Kurds attempted to evict them from their land, citing Arabization as their

grievance and its reversal as their cause. Kurdish forces remained in Kirkuk and have seen the census and

referendum they hoped to intiate through constitutional measures not materialize, while each electoral

turn in Kirkuk province and city have gtiven reasons for Kurdish confidence should a census day arrive.

In Baghdad, a Kurdish and Shia coalition proceeded from exile and superior organisation to Sunni groups

but grew divided over Shia ethno-natinalism nourished in dispossession and Kurdish entho-regionalism

over a decade of sanctioned independence. Recently Massoud Barzani referred to Prime Minister Nouri

al-Maliki as the new Saddam. Suicide bombings have been noteworthy ocurrences in Iraqi Kurdistan. But

Kurdish tribes such as the Herki have sided with the insurgency (Herki, interview, 2007). An overriding

superpower principle has been the territorial integrity of Iraq. Like from 1980-88, “the territorial integrity

of defeated Iraq needed to be secured in order to preseve Iraq‟s function as a balance, primarily against

Iran” (Malanczuk 1991, p. 117). In American public opinion, in which strategic imperatives are sold, and

to which they are sometimes suborned, the “surge” allowed America to purify itself of considerably more

involvement in Iraq since 2003 than the covert assistance to Iraq and the reflagging of Kuwaiti tankers

passing through the Straits of Hormuz which it provided during the distant Iran-Iraq war, assenting to the

rise of a new Gulf policeman, whose removal was an interest that America and Iran had in common, even

if Iran has since won Iraq‟s recent proxy war on insecurity (see Baer 2003).

In 1991, the Iraqi government wound up supplying the founding facts of the Kurdistan Region. The

highest-level treatment of the Kurdish issue by an international organisation since the Treaty of Sevres

occurred as Saddam Hussein lost what amounted to 1/12 of Iraqi territory and then relieved himself of the

burden of supposedly needing to care and feed for 1/5 of its population. UN Resolution 699 and

Operation Provide Comfort established a Kurdish “safe haven” (Roberts 1996, p. 70) along the Turkish

border where some 300,000 refugees resituated themselves near Zakho, twelve thousand dying on the

way down from the mountains. In previous decades the Iraqi government had sought to establish a cordon

sanitaire. Turkey was not pleased with the Iraq refugee intrusion and suggested the safe zone idea.

Saddam Hussein opted to consolidate his northern army and withdraw. He followed the next autumn by

evacuating government administrators from northern Iraqi cities. The Kurds acquired three Iraqi Kurdish

capitols, Dohuk, Arbil and Sulaimaniyah. They paid with the destruction of an estimated 4,000 of

Kurdistan‟s 5,000 villages and the presence of model Iraqi cities such as Saddami Halabja, an act of

ownership that probably does more than “Nationalization” (Ta‟nim) or “Salahuddin” (for Saddam‟s home

province, named after the famed (Kurdish) Islamic general) to deprive Iraqi Kurds of their “national

rights.” The Kurdish region became the Mesopotamian plateaux along a ceasefire line just miles north of

Kirkuk. Arabization continued but none of it could have been easy for Saddam or Iraqi Kurds. Iraq

reunited with a corrupt bargain between Kurds and Shia that Kurds would not stand in the way of Shia

ascendance in exchange for the constitutional entrenchment of the Kirkuk dream.

And there has been trouble. Maliki has publically criticized the unwritten rules of post-invasion Baghdad,

where extreme inter-group violence has coincided with Muhassa rule in which political positions are

awarded not by merit but according to the presumed size of each major Iraqi group. Maliki declared in a

May 2009 television interview that if consensus rule (tawafuq) continued to cause problems in

governance, the alternative was pure democracy: “In the beginning, consensus was necessary for us. In

this last period, we all embraced consensus and everyone took part together. We needed calm between all

sides and political actors. But if this continues, it will become a problem, a flaw, a catastrophe. The

alternative is democracy, and that means majority rule.... From now on I call for an end to that degree of

consensus” (ICG 2009, p. 2). The Kurdish Regional Government issued a minority response: “The Prime

Minister belives that centralisation is the key to the problems of Iraq. Iraq‟s history, however, has proven

that centralisation is dangerous. It has resulted in the country being controlled by a select group, and

eventually by a single party and single individual” (ICG, ibid, p. 2 fn 7).

Kirkuk‟s significant Turkmen population nurture a spoiler role vacated by Kurds and refine their own

narrative after overstating their numbers only to suffer a humiliating corrective in 2005, elections proving

that their numbers cannot be what they claim. Today some Turkmen in Iraq have begun referring to the

north as Turkmenli, “Turkmen land” (van Bruinessen and Posch 2005) and accuse Kurds of war crimes

and ethnic cleansing now that they are the local power. This cannot have been unthinkable to the Turkish

government, which supports local Turkmen causes but for years had threatened to invade northern Iraq if

Kurdish independence bids sought to begin by disturbing the local status quo. The International Crisis

Group recommended before the invasion that, “Secondly, to buttress that effort, the United States should

make publicly clear to the Kurds that it expects them not to take any action that risks provoking Turkey,

and in particular that they should refrain from unilateral military steps and consent to a temporary

international prescence in Kirkuk” (ICG 2003, p. iii). The Turkish nationalist and military argument had

been that Kurdish designs on Kirkuk were tantamount to beginning succession and would embolden

Turkey‟s own Kurdish population to make similar demands. The Turkish press carried reports on the day

after the “conquest” of Kirkuk stating that Kurds had raided the city‟s land and population registries to

erase the Turkmen presence in the city, even destroyed Turkmen graveyards to erase the past (van

Bruinessen and Posh, ibid). General Basbug cited a historic and “blood” connection to the Turkmen

population, who nevertheless do constitute the second largest Kirkuk bloc. Turkey settled for $4bn in

contracts from an estimated $18bn in American reconstruction money set aside for post-war

reconstruction instead of boots on the ground in nothern Iraq and cultivated the Turkmen Front in Kirkuk,

which is thought to be a local front for Turkish intelligence (van Bruinessen and Posch, ibid), but has not

been an effective proxy for Kemalist interests, while the EU accession process frustrates the military

direction of Turkish foreign policy and Islamist bureaucrats reconnect with the Muslim world. The

Turkish perspective on events since 2003 is worth considering in light of Ottoman history in Iraqi

Kurdistan, the Kemalist struggle for Mosul Vilayet, and the wilderness yeras of 1991-2003, during which

Kurdistan suffered repeated incursions by Turkey chasing PKK separatists by treaty rights signed by

Hussein in 1983. The Turkish military maintains a 30-year occupation of northern Cyprus in one

hangover from Greece‟s 1830 declaration of independence that complicates Turkey‟s European Union

accession bid. Nevertheless, since the foundation of the Turkish Republic, the military has fought most of

its battles against Turkish Kurds, and has undertaken just under 30 cross-border movements in search of

recalcitrant Turkish Kurds, in late 2007 answering an attack on an dolmus in Diyarbakir and the

surprising death of Turkish soldiers with the destruction of several “mountain redoubts” leading to the

displacement of perhaps 1,000 PKK members. At such times the location of the Turkey-Iraq border has

come to attention. The scrutiny has not been focused, even though when, in 1995, 35,000 Turkish troops

invaded searching for PKK bases in the Qandil Mountains, while Turkish President Suleyman Demirel

said that it was time to revist the matter of the Turkey-Iraq border, and then issued a potted history in

which Mosul Vilayet was not “Arab land,” and the border would only need to be subject to a slight

adjustment of 200m (see Roberts 1995). The Turkish government and military have sought to put

pressure on what it has called the “Kurdish administration” – in keeping with 1975 language – to remove

the PKK card from its meagre deck. But the Turkish government also provided millions in aid to that

administration in the early 1990s and started dealing with the KRG (Olson 2005). For Kurds this

improves short term mateiral gain and acts as another integrating relationship, but trends against the

formal incorporation of Kirkuk into any Iraqi Kurdish political entity.

In America, the “betrayal” narrative in Kurdish nationalist victomology may be fuelled by recent gains in

neo-conservative revisitations of the Kurds as allies based now on the apparent corruption of the Barzani

and Talabani clans (see Rubin and the American Enterprise Institute). If Barzinji was a borderland

operator, and Mulla Mustafa a martyr, then the next generation of Barznis and Talabanis are required to

make Kirkuk the next Dubai so that Iraqi Kurdistan can become a Middle Eastern Switzerland through the

use and abuse of institutions. The Kurdish hydrocarbon proposal calls for the equitable distribution of

Kirkuk revenue among Iraqi groups accustomed by re-tribalization through the electoral process, “another

prop of the tribe” (van Bruinessen in Jabar and Dawod eds. 2002, p. 175). In Iraqi Kurdistan this has been

the Qadirification of retteritorialization. International solutions have been proposed whereby Kirkuk city

would be “internationalized” between the various factions and their supporters. The Barzani myth for

obstinancy on Kirkuk is now backed with increasingly irrefutable evidence of a majority and potential

stalemate-generating military power that a national or regional power could only dislodge by overcoming

its reluctance to commit genocide in a global media age where as Mackinder argued, everything

rebounds. Internally, the massacre of Halabja matters less than the burnt ruins of a commemorative

monument in Halabja to victims of that event, torched by locals during a recent anniversary visit by

notables with an international retinue which Halabjans attempted to stop with barricades. “Thus territorial

compartmentalization and the segregation of ethnic groups results from, and contributes to, conflict and

mutual antagonism. Segregation and physical separation may promote immediate territorial objectives

and conflict resolution but it does not contribute to longer-term normalization” (Newman in Kahler and

Walter eds., 2006, p. 94).

After weeks of travel Soane approached the Ottoman city of Kirkuk. It was “invisible till nearly

approached” (Soane 1914, p. 119). By his writing he appears to have noticed diversity and waylaid best-

laid plans. But Kirkuk city was well known to Soane. “Kirkuk is famous for Turkomans, fruit, and crude

oil, all of which abound,” he wrote (Soane, ibid, p. 120). Arabic architecture predominated but it was

“one of the trilingual towns of...Kurdistan...Turkish, Arabic and Kurdish are spoken by everyone, the first

and last being used indifferently in the bazaars (Soane, ibid). A caravanserai along an approaching road

was built by Shah Abbas of Persia 300 years before, one Kirkuki explained; later, Soane and his party

encountered a group of nomads who were “Kurds in dress and appearance, but persisted in talking Arabic

as they rode along, probably to conceal their dialect” (Soane, ibid, p. 119). Soane waited for the army unit

that was to accompany his caravan to Kirkuk to end their strike. In 1908, intermarriage between the

Barzinji clan and the Hamawand tribe generated a lucrative raiding business with lines into the bazaar,

endangering the road to Sulaimaniya in the Kurdish heartland. During his stay, Soane received a postcard

from the local postmaster and an invitation to pay a visit. Soane realized tha the postmaster had a

commercial matter he wanted to discuss. The postmster presented a collection of antique coins, “for

Ferangistan to him was a place where half the world sought antiques, and consequently anyone who had

been there, as he heard I had, must known the value of such relics as were to be found near Kirkuk.” This

included a small bag of coins and seals, “for the most part early Muhammadan, a Parthian or two, and a

few Assyrian pieces.” Soane had recently noted that the Kirkuk bazaar is a place where people will

illustrate “the tenacity with which two persons will haggle for an hour over fractional sums” (Soane, ibid,

p., 138). He would also be moved to write: “besides being strongly governed by a Turkish governor who

possesses sufficient military strength to keep in order almost every element, the Kurds [are] the only

difficult section of the population with their contempt for all rule and order that does not emanage from

their own khans” (Soane, ibid, p. 124). Ten years later, Major Soane described the Kurdish government as

a retrograde tribal system (Eskiander 2000, p. 149). His colleagues described him as “tyrannical.” Major

Soane burnt down the Sulaimaniyah bazaar at night and rebuilt it starting the next day, accoridng to one

traveller who passed through in the 1940s. Soane was speaking about the Kurds, but he may as well have

been speaking about the forces of disorder when he wrote: “They, after all, know that we could not do

anything if they chose to rise against us” (Sluglett 2007, p. 78).

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