0844007  

   

The Kurds and Kirkuk: A Border Story in Three Parts

7SSG5007 0844007

October 4, 2010 Word Count: 13,569/10,000

0844007  

   

"Man stands toward his fellow men in 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 fairly 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 com-prising more than one judge. - Herbert Liebesny, The Administration of Justice in Nuzi, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1943), pp. 128-144.

0844007  

    1

0844007  

    2

0844007  

    3

0844007  

    4

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 Oil Company in Khanaqin. Eventually, 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 a major 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 region after the Mudros armistice, Soane sought to forge a

country in fact to roughly 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.

0844007  

    5

To Kurdistan and Mesopotamia 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 from Kirkuk 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).

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 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

0844007  

    6

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 appear clearly defined in the historical record in 7th century Arab accounts of the

Islamic conquest 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 Morocco according to the traveller 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

0844007  

    7

into a left and a right wing, kept in balance by the ruler" (van Bruinessen in Jabar and Dawod

eds. 2002, p.167). Ottoman expansion in the 16th century brought the Persian Safavids west from

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

(Schofield 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, becoming 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 the 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

0844007  

    8

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

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

This paper shall focus on the unresolved resource and territorial disputes attending the Kurdistan

Region of Iraq, which has functioned as a state and promoted itself as a tourist and investment

destination, and hedges on undefined internal boundary divides on the other side of which, in

recent years, has been 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 Kirkuk 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

0844007  

    9

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 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 appears 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 the 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 southwest of the city of Arrapha, which was Kirkuk (Lewy 1968, pp.

156-57), have told archaeologists 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 building and rebuilding of Kirkuk, which

joined the Ottoman dominion for good in 1555 but would be recaptured by Persians twice in the

17th century and once in the 18th 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

0844007  

    10

largely of Turkish blood, descendents of Turkish settlers dating from the time of the Seljuks”

(Guclu 2007).The richest family went by the Turkish name of Neftcis, which in translation

roughly means “those who get oil,” due their ownership of local oil seepages. 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). 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 necessarily "anti-British"

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

continued 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 gas 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 fused 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 American invasion leaves “a divided

country that is left to fight over an undefined boundary with Kurdistan while a dysfunctional

0844007  

    11

Baghdad government governs in name only” (Hiltermann 2009), so did republican Iraqi

governments in the 1960s during a period defined by cyclical Arab-Kurdish escalation, violence

and “armed peace” (Chaliand 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, Syria, Armenian, Chaldean, Turk, Turkoman, and Kurd - and

consequently enjoys considerable freedom from fanaticism" (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 from 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 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 nationalism there already was a sense of common identity among tribes

whose cultures were ‘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 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

0844007  

    12

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 particularity 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 de-integration 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 satisfied the

“territorial imperative” in 1991 (McColl 1969, p.614). Through folly into humanitarian

intervention despite European and regional dissent the “international 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 guerrilla war. It occurs against a longer trend of deterritorialization highlighted by

0844007  

    13

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 interests 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 look 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 political archaeology includes 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 Foucault, 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

0844007  

    14

that Kurdish rights should be observed. A recognized 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).

Juridical 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, through

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 threat

during and after a decade of UN sanctions that ended Iraqi sovereignty, in what has been

described as a unipolar move for a unipolar moment. This occurred through the strategic use of a

0844007  

    15

neo-Ottoman premise that Mesopotamian and Kurdistan's sovereignty reside in people and not

territory. Disorder, now permanent, is rooted in an old tradition of transhumance related to

environment 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 years 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 hundred years previous.

America, Mackinder considered 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

0844007  

    16

“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’’ (PNAC, 1997). Likewise: “On 1 January I9I5 Lloyd George,

then Chancellor of the Ex-chequer, 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 ahead 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 Kurds 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

0844007  

    17

heightened the possibility that an estimated 50, 000 to 182,000 Kurds were 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”

(HRW 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

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.I).

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

0844007  

    18

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

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

occurred in other Iraqi cities” (O’Leary 2008). As Martin van Bruinessen has observed in his

study of “primordial loyalties,” tribes in southern Kurdistan would, when seeking to avoid

incurring a blood feud, nevertheless agree to fight, the winner being that tribe which missed on

purpose the most, illustrating their power through conspicuous consumption (van Bruinessen

1992). Kedourie (1993) discusses the difference 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” (Kedourie, 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,

0844007  

    19

through legislation and the administration 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 its

physical survival is compatible with Iraqi sovereignty” (Gottlieb 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

2003-5 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 international scene, but this

author notes that had a “peace to end all war” (Fromkin 1989) reigned instead, on a long enough

timeline, the survival rate is nevertheless still zero. Now we approach Iraq through the Sublime

State, the nation-state and Mosul Vilayet.

0844007  

    20

Figure 1: P.E.J.Bomli, "L'Affaire de Mossoul", Amsterdam: H.J. Paris, 1929, solami.com/mvc

0844007  

    21

Part 1: 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 a means, 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 Mesopotamia to report that Britain 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 Iraq 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

0844007  

    22

Faisal noted that the Iraqi government 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 years 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 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 northern extreme in Erzurum it stretches by Van, Hakkari, Cizre, Amadiya, Mosul, Shahrazur,

Harir and Ardalan to Baghdad, Darna, Dartang and even as far as Basra: seventy day's journeys

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

0844007  

    23

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 coreligionists 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

duelling 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 incomplete 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. The Kurdish

0844007  

    24

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

Safavid, and later Qajar moves, while Kurdish leaders enjoyed freedom from local Ottoman

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 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).

0844007  

    25

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 hoping 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 the

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 homogeneous 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 leaders 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 communication and distance to

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

0844007  

    26

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

the forces of central government 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 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 install 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 of 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 that the

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

0844007  

    27

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 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

0844007  

    28

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 (Question 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 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 Barzinji that occasioned

the bombing of Sulaimaniyah 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 if so facto retard the attainment of

equilibrium (even if it be the equilibrium of chaos)” (Bidwell, et al 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 Gulbenkian

compiled several reports on behalf of the Ottoman Ministry of Mines, early geological surveys

0844007  

    29

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, 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 previously 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

0844007  

    30

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 the 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 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 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 1944, p.3).

0844007  

    31

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

the Mudros armistice brought 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

suffer 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 materialized, but neither had a Kurdish state.

0844007  

    32

0844007  

    33

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

Uthman, shortly before the outbreak of hostilities 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 2003, 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). They were the most 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” (Chaliand 2004, p.10).

But if the Ottomans wanted to develop imperial modernism, then Baghdad would 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

0844007  

    34

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 and

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 IPC and then the Arab hand around Kirkuk.

In 1973, Saddam claimed that “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

0844007  

    35

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 casualties 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 total

media blackout on the conflict. It was possible then to deny that 60,000 peshmerga and 50,000

irregulars and 90,000 Iraqi soldiers with 1200 tanks and armoured vehicles and 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 that Iraqi army casualties amounted to 1640 dead and 7903 wounded. Iranian assistance

took the form of Rapier missiles and 155m 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 humiliating 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 virtually half the river, Saddam settled the Kurdish issue in Iraq on his own terms.

The counterinsurgency 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

0844007  

    36

Ahmed and 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 previously acted as a counter-balance

to prevent the Baathists from monopolizing 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, and projects such as

an oil terminal at Fao, and he development of the north Rumayla field, and 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

IHT 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’ of 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 (Talabany

2001). The “arabization” of the north and the nationalisation of the oil industry appeared as both

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

subtle ways, by growing centralization. “Since the fall of Qasim every group that seized power

0844007  

    37

has relied to a very considerable extent 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 absolute power. They had nationalised oil, nationalised Kirkuk,

beaten the Kurds’ military, and as the genocidal campaign against the Kurds in 1988 would be

called: those are the “spoils of Anfal.” Before 1988, brutality was necessary prerequisite 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 fabric 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, the destruction in Shorija, a lower-class

Kurdish neighbourhood, of high density lower-class homes in the construction of a 60 metre-

wide highway, and continued cash incentives for the Arabs who populated Kirkuk (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...emerged as a cultural synthesis of the Turcomans’ long-

0844007  

    38

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 opposition with the Kurds, at

least until the 1980s, is the story of how nationalisation and arabization against the Kurds’

eventual inability to be defeated militarily prompted extramilitary measures and 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 joint 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 agitation is far more likely to be the result of a reneging by the

state, a watering-down of agreements, or 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”

(Heraclides). But liberation is not precisely what the Iraqi Kurds got in 1991. They got

something called a ‘no-fly zone.’

0844007  

    39

0844007  

    40

Part 3: End-State, 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” (Tucker 2004, p.141).

In 1991, a US state 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 Interior installed a man with the

last name Takrit. As one Kurdish man on Kirkuk’s Provincial Council stated to US reporters,

“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 the Shia

leaders in 1918, Qassim in 1958, the Baath Party in 1963, Iran in 1984-86, the American military

from 2003, and even the Shia leaders and the Turkish government (548, Tejel Gorgas 2008,

p.548).

The Kurdish 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, who did not accompany KDP and PUK leaders to Iran during the

war and the uprising. The Iraqi Army nearly lost control of Iraq after the conclusion of American

0844007  

    41

military hostility. “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 205 million bullets in Kuwait and Jordan would

not re-supply it. Izzat ad-Douri 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 was becoming 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 opposition movements that worked with the KDP, PUK and American

intelligence agencies to support disaffected Iraqi generals launch at least one failed coup (see

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 it is unresolved (Anderson and Stansfield, 2009) while

“Kurdish oil” in three provinces lacks an 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

0844007  

    42

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

Damascus, who identified himself as a Shia doctor and whose reports suggest is the former head

of the Syndicate of Dentists pledged fealty to the unlikely figure of 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 thought to be the main adjunct of

underground Baathist power, helped terrorize Baghdad roads and markets with increasingly

sophisticated signalling technology and thousands of 155m armour-piercing artillery shelves

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 corpses of Sunnis and collaborators. An

American policy of countervailing the dissolution of the Iraqi military by hiring known if

impeachable characters begun 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 legalistic and urban warfare domains.

The Kurds played a larger spoiler roll 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

0844007  

    43

supposed connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. They followed the Turkish

rejection of US transit rights with a pre-war joint US assault on Ansar al-Islam in Iraqi Kurdish

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

Kurdistan 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

much positive 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 initiate

through constitutional measures not materialize, while each electoral turn in Kirkuk province and

city have given 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-nationalism nourished in dispossession and Kurdish ethno-

regionalism in over a decade of sanctioned independence. Nevertheless, recently Massoud

Barzani referred to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as the new Saddam. Suicide bombings have

been noteworthy occurrences in Iraqi Kurdistan. 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 preserve 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

0844007  

    44

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

Iraqi 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 (note discrepancy) and the presence of model Iraqi cities such as

Saddami Halabja, an act of naming 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

0844007  

    45

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 is 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

Kurdistan Regional Government issued a minority response: “The Prime Minister believes 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 Iraqi

have begun referring to the region as Turkmeneli, “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

0844007  

    46

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 presence in Kirkuk” (ICG 2003, p.iii). The Turkish nationalist and military

argument had been that Kurdish designs of 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 Posch, 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 $4 billion in contracts from an estimated $18

billion in American reconstruction money set aside for post-war reconstruction instead boots on

the ground in northern 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 years of 1991-2003,

during which Kurdistan suffered repeated incursions by Turkey chasing PKK separatists by

treaty rights signed by Hussein in 1983. Turkish military maintains a 30-year occupation of

northern Cyprus in one hangover from Greece's 1830 declaration of independence that

0844007  

    47

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, and in

late 2007 answering an attack on a dolmus in Diyarbakir and the surprising death of Turkish

soldiers with the destruction of several "mountain redoubts" leading to the death 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, Turkish President Suleyman Demirel said that

it was time to revisit 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 200 m (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 material 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 victimology 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 Mullah Mustafa a martyr, then the next generation of

Barzanis and Talabanis are required to make Kirkuk must become the next Dubai so that Iraqi

0844007  

    48

Kurdistan can become a Middle Eastern Switzerland through the abuse and abuse of institutions.

The Kurdish hydrocarbon proposal calls for the equitable distribution of Kirkuk revenue among

Iraqi groups accustomed to the centralization of oil revenue following nationalisation.

Reterritorialization has been accompanied 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 reterritorialization. International solutions have

been proposed whereby Kirkuk city would be “internationalized” between the various factions

and their supporters. The Barzani myth for obstinacy 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 the

immediate territorial objectives of 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

0844007  

    49

architecture predominated but it was “one of the trilingual towns of the Kurdistan borders

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 road

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 Sulaimaniyah in the Kurdish heartland. During his stay,

Soane received a postcard from the local postmaster and an invitation to pay a visit. Soane

realized that the postmaster had a commercial matter he wanted to discuss. The postmaster

presented a collection of antiques and old 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

know 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 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 emanate from their own khans” (Soane, ibid, p.124). Ten years later, Major Soane

described the Kurdish government as a retrograde tribal system (Eskander 2000, p.149). His

colleagues described him as “tyrannical.” Major Sloane burnt down the Sulaimaniyah bazaar at

0844007  

    50

night and rebuilt it starting the next day, according 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).

    0844007  

    51

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio (translated by Kevin Attell). (2005) State of Exception. London: The University of Chicago Press. Agnew, John. (1994) “The territorial trap: The geographical assumptions of international relations theory,” Review of International Political Economy, Vol.1 No.1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 53-80. Aksakal, Mustafa. (2008) The Ottoman road to war in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War. New York: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, Liam and Gareth Stansfield. (2005). The future of Iraq: Dictatorship, democracy or division? New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Anderson, Liam and Gareth Stansfield. (2009). Crisis in Kirkuk: The ethnopolitics of conflict and compromise. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Atarodi, Habibollah. (2003) Great powers, oil and the Kurds in Mosul: (Southern Kurdistan/Northern Iraq), 1910-1925. University Press of America.

Baer, Robert. (2003) See no evil: The true story of a ground soldier in the CIA’s war on terrorism. New York: Three Rivers Press. Barth, Fredrik. (1953) Principles of social organization in southern Kurdistan. Oslo, Brldrene Jlrgensen boktr.

Bidwell, Robin Leonard, K. Bourne and D.C. Watt eds. (1986). British documents on foreign affairs – reports and papers from the Foreign Office confidential print: From the First to the Second World War. Series B, Turkey, Iran, and the Middle East, 1918-1939, Volume 6. University Publications of America.

Borovali, Ali-Fuat. (1987) “Kurdish insurgencies, the Gulf War, and Turkey’s changing role.” Conflict Quarterly. Vol. VII, No. 4. (Fall 1987). pp. 29-45. Brown, Philip Marshall. (1924) “From Sevres to Lausanne,” The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Jan., 1924), pp. 113-116. Cadman, John. (1934) “Middle East Geography in Relation to Petroleum,” The Geographical Journal, Vol. 84, No. 3 (Sep., 1934), pp. 201-212. Cerny, Philip G. (2004) “Terrorism and the new security dilemma,” Naval War College Review, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Winter 2005), pp.11-33.

    0844007  

    52

Chaliand, Gerard (translated by Philip Black). (2004) The Kurdish tragedy. London; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Zed Books, in association with UNRISD. Cockburn, Andrew and Patrick Cockburn. (2002) Saddam Hussein: An American obsession. London: Verso. Cockburn, Patrick. (2008) Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival, and the struggle for Iraq. New York: Scribner. Cohen, Saul Bernard. (2003) Geopolitics of the world system. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Connolly, William E. (2007) “The complexities of sovereignty,” Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and life. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli eds. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press. pp. 23-42. Cooper, Robert. (2004) The breaking of nations: Order and chaos in the twenty-first century. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd. Culcasi, Karen. (2006) “Cartographically constructing Kurdistan within geopolitical and orientalist discourses,” Political Geography, 25 (2006), pp. 680-706. Deringil, Selim. (1991) “Legitimacy Structures in the Ottoman State: The Reign of Abdulhamid II (1876-1909),” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Aug., 1991), pp. 345-359. Dodge, Toby. (2003) Inventing Iraq: The failure of nation-building and a history denied. New York: Columbia University Press. Edkins, Jenny. (2007) “Whatever Politics,” Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and life. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli eds. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press. pp.70-91. Elden, Stuart. (2007) “Terror and Territory,” Antipode, Vol.39, No. 5, pp. 821-845. Emrence, Cem. (2008) “Imperial paths, big comparisons: The late Ottoman Empire,” Journal of Global History, Vol. 3, No. 3 (2008), pp. 289-311. Eskander, Saad. (2000) “Britain's Policy in Southern Kurdistan: The Formation and the Termination of the First Kurdish Government, 1918-1919,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Nov., 2000), pp. 139-163. Eskander, Saad. (2001) “Southern Kurdistan under Britain's Mesopotamian Mandate: From Separation to Incorporation, 1920-23,” Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Apr., 2001), pp. 153-180.

    0844007  

    53

Farouk-Sluglett, Marion and Peter Sluglett. (2003) Iraq since 1958: From revolution to dictatorship. London; New York: KPI. Fromkin, David. (1989) A peace to end all peace: The fall of the Ottoman empire and the creation of the modern Middle East. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Galbraith, Peter. (2006) The End of Iraq. New York: Simon and Schuster. Gottlieb, Gidon. (1993) Nation against state: A new approach to ethnic conflicts and the decline of sovereignty. New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press. Guclu, Yucel. (2007) “Who owns Kirkuk? The Turkoman case.” Middle East Quarterly, Vol. XIV, No. 1 (Winter 2007), pp. 79-86. Hannah, Matthew G. (2008). “Spaces of exception and unexceptionability,” War, citizenship, territory. Deborah Cowen and Emily Gilbert eds. New York; Oxon: Routledge. pp. 57- 76. Hensel, Paul R. and Paul F. Diehl. (2004) “Testing empirical propositions about shatterbelts, 1945-1976.” Available from: http://www.paulhensel.org/Research/pgq94.pdf Herki, Jawar. (2007) Interview; Damascus, Syria, 16 November 2007. Hilterman, Joost R. (2009) “Iraq on the Edge,” The New York Review of Books, Vol.56, No. 18 (November 19, 2009). Hiro, Dilip. (2001) Neighbours, not friends: Iraq and Iran after the Gulf Wars. London, New York: Routledge. Houston, Christopher. (2007) ““Set aside from the pen and cut off from the foot”: Imagining the Ottoman Empire and Kurdistan,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 27, No. 2 (2007), pp. 397-411. Houston, Christopher. (2008) Kurdistan: Crafting of national selves. Oxford; New York: Berg. Human Rights Watch. (1995) Iraq’s crime of genocide: The Anfal campaign against the Kurds. Connecticut: Yale University Press. International Crisis Group. (2003) War in Iraq: What’s next for the Kurds? Middle East Report No.10, 19 March 2003. Available from: http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/Middle%20East%20North%20Africa/Iraq%20 Syria%20Lebanon/Iraq/War%20In%20Iraq%20Whats%20Next%20For%20The%20Kur ds.ashx International Crisis Group. (2009) Iraq and the Kurds: Trouble along the trigger line. Middle East Report No.88, 8 July 2009. Available from:

    0844007  

    54

http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/Middle%20East%20North%20Africa/Iraq%20 Syria%20Lebanon/Iraq/88_iraq_and_the_kurds___trouble_along_the_trigger_line.ashx Jabar, Faleh A. and Hosham Dawod eds. (2006) The Kurds: Nationalism and politics. London: Saqi. Jackson, Robert H. (1990) Quasi-states: sovereignty, international relations and the third world. New York: Cambridge University Press. Jawad, Saad Naji. (2008) “The Kurdish question in Iraq: historical background and future settlement,” Contemporary Arab Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 25-41. Jwaideh, Wadie. (2006) The Kurdish national movement: Its origins and development. New York: Syracuse University Press. Kedourie, Elie. (1993) Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Khadduri, Majid. (1969). Republican ‘Iraq; a study in ‘Iraqi politics since the revolution of 1958. London: Oxford University Press. Klieman, Aaron S. (1968) “Britain's War Aims in the Middle East in 1915,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 3, No. 3, The Middle East (Jul., 1968), pp. 237-251. Laclau, Ernesto. (2007) “Bare life or social indeterminacy?,” Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and life. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli eds. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press. pp. 11-22. Lambert, Gregg. (2006) Who’s afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? London: Continuum International Publishing Group. Langewiesche, William. (2008) “House of war,” Vanity Fair. December 2008. Available from: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/12/kosovo200812 Lemke, Thomas. (2005) “A zone of indistinction – a critique of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of biopolitics,” Outlines Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 3-13. Lewy, Hildegard. (1968) “A Contribution to the Historical Geography of the Nuzi Texts,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 88, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1968), pp. 150- 162. Liebesny, Herbert. (1943) “The administration of justice in Nuzi,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1943), pp. 128-144. McColl, Robert W. (1969) “The Insurgent State: Territorial Bases of Revolution,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Dec., 1969), pp. 613-631.

    0844007  

    55

McDowall, David. (1996) A modern history of the Kurds. London: I.B. Tauris. Maccartney, Carlile Aylmer. (1934) National states and national minorities. New York: Russell and Russell. Mackinder, Halford J. (1904) “The geographical pivot of history,” The Geographical Journal, Vol. XXIII, No. 4 (April 1904), pp. 2-25. Malanczuk, Peter. (1991) “The Kurdish Crisis and Allied Intervention in the Aftermath of the Second Gulf War,” European Journal of International Law, Vol.2, No.2, pp. 114-132. Morony, Michael G. (2005) Iraq after the Muslim conquest. New Jersey: Gorgias Press. Morris, Christopher ed. (1992) Academic Press dictionary of science and technology. San Diego; Toronto: Academic Press. Mulrine, Anna. (2006) “This land is my land: The big stakes-and bubbling tensions-over who will control Iraq's oil capital,” US News & World Report. December 17, 2006. Available from: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/061217/25iraq.htm Natali, Denise. (2005) The Kurds and the state: Evolving national identity in Iraq, Turkey and Iran. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Newman, David. (2005) “Conflict at the interface: The impact of boundaries and borders on contemporary ethnonational conflict,” The geography of war and peace: From death camps to diplomats. Colin R. Flint ed. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 321-346. Newman, David. (2006) “The resilience of territorial conflict in an era of globalization,” Territoriality and conflict in an era of globalization. Miles Kahler and Barbara F. Walter eds. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, pp.85-110. New York Times. (1913) “Braving death in Kurdistan disguised as a native.” March 9, 1913. Note on the Mesopotamia-Persia situation by Sir Percy Cox. (1920) CAB/24/110, July 1920. O’Ballance, Edgar. (1996) The Kurdish Struggle, 1920-74. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press. O’Leary, Brendan (with David Bateman). (2008) “Article 140: Iraq’s Constitution, Kirkuk and the Disputed Territories.” Available from: http://www.kncna.org/docs/pdf_files/OLeary_Paper.pdf O’Shea, Maria T. (2004) Trapped between the map and reality: Geography and perceptions of Kurdistan. London: Routledge.

    0844007  

    56

Olson, Robert. (2005) The goat and the butcher: Nationalism and state formation in Kurdistan- Iraq since the Iraqi war. Costa Mesa, CA.: Mazda Publishers. Parker, Geoffrey. (1985) Western geopolitical thought in the twentieth century. Sydney: Croom Helm Ltd. Political Survey of Iraq by Sir Henry Dobbs. (1929) CAB/24/201, February 1929. Project for a New American Century. (1997) “Statement of Principles.” Available from: http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm Question of the frontier between Turkey and Iraq. (1925) C/400/M/147, August 20, 1925. Roberts, John. (1995) “Turkey’s invasion of Northern Iraq,” IBRU Boundary and Security Bulletin, April 1995, p.59. Roberts, John. (1996) “The Kurdish crisis of 1996.” IBRU Boundary and Security Bulletin, Autumn 1996, p.70-75. Schofield, Richard. (2006) “Old boundaries for a new state: The creation of Iraq’s eastern question,” SAIS Review, Vol. XXVI, No. 1 (Winter-Spring 2006), pp. 27-39. Schofield, Richard. (2008) “Laying it down in stone: Delimiting and demarcating Iraq’s boundaries by mixed international commission,” Journal of Historical Geography, 34 (2008), pp. 397-421. Sluglett, Peter. (2007). Britain in Iraq: Contriving king and country. New York: Columbia University Press.

Soane, Ely Banister. (1914). To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in disguise: With historical notices of the Kurdish tribes and the Chaldeans of Kurdistan. Boston: Small, Maynard.

Stansfield, Gareth R.V. (2003) “The Kurdish Dilemma: The golden era threatened,” Iraq at the crossroads: state and society in the shadow of regime change. Toby Dodge and Steven Simon eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 131-147. Stansfield, Gareth. (2007) Iraq: People, history, politics. Cambridge: Polity. Talabany, Nouri. (2001) Arabization of the Kirkuk Region. Available from: http://www.kirkukcenter.com/Files/MBAN/3.pdf Tejel Gorgas, Jordi (2008) “Urban Mobilization in Iraqi Kurdistan during the British Mandate: Sulaimaniya 1918-30,” Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 44, No. 4, pp.537-552. Thomas, Martin. (2008) Empires of intelligence: Security services and colonial disorder after 1914. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA.; London: University of California Press.

    0844007  

    57

Trevor-Roper, H.R. (1972) “Fernand Braudel, the Annales, and the Mediterranean,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Dec., 1972), pp. 468-479. Tuathail, Gearoid O. (1999) “Understanding critical geographies: Geopolitics and risk society,” Geopolitics, geography and strategy. Colin S. Gray and Geoffrey Sloan eds. Oxon: Frank Cass Publishers. pp.107-124. Tucker, Mike. (2004) Hell is over: Voices of the Kurds after Saddam. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press. Van Bruinessen, Martin. (1992) Agha, sheikh, and state: The social and political structures of Kurdistan. London; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Zed Books. Van Bruinessen, Martin. (1994) “Kurdish Nationalism and Competing Ethnic Loyalties,” Original English version of: “Nationalisme kurde et ethnicités intra-kurdes,” Peuples Méditerranéens, No. 68-69 (1994), pp. 11-37. Available from: http://www.let.uu.nl/~martin.vanbruinessen/personal/publications/Competing_Ethnic_Lo yalties.htm#_ftn5 Van Bruinessen, Martin. (1999) "The Kurds and Islam." Working Paper no. 13, Islamic Area Studies Project, Tokyo, Japan. pp. 1-30. Available from: http://www.let.uu.nl/~martin.vanbruinessen/personal/publications/Kurds_and_Islam.htm

Van Bruinessen, Martin. (2000) “Kurdistan in the 16th and 17th centuries, as reflected in Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname,” The Journal of Kurdish Studies, Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 1-11. Van Bruinessen, Martin. (2002) “Kurds, states and tribes.” Tribes and power: nationalism and ethnicity in the Middle East. Faleh A. Jabar and Hosham Dawod eds. London: Saqi, 2002, pp. 165-183. Van Bruinessen and Walter Posch. (2005) Looking into Iraq. Chaillot Paper no.79. Paris: European Union Institute for Security Studies. War Cabinet. Strategic aspect of the discussions on oil policy. (1944) CAB/66/48/37, April 5, 1944. Younes, Kristele and Nir Rosen. (2008) “Uprooted and unstable: Meeting urgent humanitarian needs in Iraq.” Refugees International. Available from: http://www.refugeesinternational.org/policy/in-depth-report/uprooted-and-unstable- meeting-urgent-humanitarian-needs-iraq

    0844007  

    58

Maps Bomli, P.E.J. (1929) L'Affaire de Mossoul. Amsterdam: H.J. Paris. All other maps are original and were created for this document based on the following maps: Cannistra, Mary Kate. (2008) “Kurdistan Regional Government,” The Washington Post, September 13, 2008. Available from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/graphic/2008/09/13/GR2008091300327.html Global Security.org. “Kurdistan 1974-1994.” Available from: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/images/kurdistan_1974-95.gif United Nations. (2004) “Iraq.” Map No. 3835, Rev. 4. January 2004. Available from: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Un-iraq.png Unosat. “Iraq – Ethnoreligious Groups.” Available from: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iraq/images/iraq-ethnic-map.gif