The Peshmerga: Fighters for a Free and Independent Kurdistan
With constant threats from neighboring nationalists to dealing with Saddam Hussein and ISIS, members of the Kurdish military, known as the Peshmerga, have always fought for a free Kurdistan.
By: Daniel Miller
“No friends but the mountains” is a well-known aphorism used by the Kurdish people, an ethnic group in the Middle East who have been fighting external—and sometimes internal—threats throughout their history. “Peshmerga” was the name given to Kurdish guerrilla coalitions during the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Turkish nationalism, roughly translating to “those who face death.” The moniker has remained accurate for over a century. Today, despite losing all of its territory and having membership numbers not exceeding a few thousand, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) continues to employ sporadic terrorist attacks on villages and areas in eastern Syria and along the ambiguous frontier with Kurdistan and Iraq. There are also occasional missile strikes from neighboring Turkey and Iran.
With around 35 million people identifying as Kurds, they are the world’s largest stateless ethnic group, with the majority residing in southern Turkey and northern Iraq. They also inhabit large portions of northern Syria and western Iran but identify as neither Turks, Arabs, nor Persians. Anthropology and ethnology indicate that they are either Indo-European or Aryan, having inhabited the region for several thousand years.
The Ottomans viewed Kurdistan simply as a territory with a majority Kurdish population and provided it with a great deal of autonomy until the Tanzimat Reform period in the mid-19th century, which sought to establish a centralized government; however, this move ultimately strengthened burgeoning nationalist movements across the Balkans. The Empire was greatly weakened after decades of nationalist uprisings demanding greater autonomy and was on the verge of collapse after the First World War. In 1918, the Bolsheviks revealed the secretive Sykes-Picot Agreement, a deal between the French and British to partition and annex the Middle East for their own colonial interests after the war, such as controlling trade routes and oil production. Winston Churchill wanted a centralized, pro-British nation-state to control the vast oilfields between Mosul and Kirkuk, but the Kurds were among the most difficult people in the Middle East to subdue.
The agreement between the two allies embarrassed President Woodrow Wilson because it undermined his public condemnation of international backroom deals, prompting him soon to issue his Fourteen Points declaration for enduring lasting peace. His twelfth point stated that “the other nationalities which are now under Ottoman rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development…”
Because of this stipulation, Kurdish autonomy was granted when the French and British drafted the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres. The treaty also recognized the Kurdish people as a distinct ethnic group and guaranteed the protection of their rights. However, Sultan Mehmed VI, representing a dying Ottoman Empire, refused to sign it. A new treaty, the Treaty of Lausanne, was drafted in 1923 after nationalist Mustafa Kemal, a staunch nationalist known across Turkey as the revered Atatürk, led an uprising establishing Turkey’s modern-day borders. This new treaty did not recognize the Kurds as a distinct ethnic group; they were and still are viewed as Turks, Arabs, and Persians. It’s a very similar mindset to that of Russian nationalists toward Ukrainians.
In response to these changes, various Kurdish tribes banded together to form a defensive coalition of fighters. The Peshmerga have mainly operated in what is now western Iran and northern Iraq, but they have always fought for all Kurds and greater Kurdish autonomy.
The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne left the stateless Kurds stuck along the convergence of the Turkish, Syrian, Iraqi, and Iranian borders – not the most desired place to live in the realm of geopolitics. Since then, they have experienced many forms of oppression, persecution, betrayal, and abandonment throughout their struggle for recognition and autonomy. In Turkey, for example, flying or possessing the Kurdish flag is illegal, and speaking Kurdish in public can quickly lead to conflicts and even arrests.
Experienced Kurds can tell stories of persecution and attacks by the Ba’ath Party led by Saddam Hussein, including genocide and concentration camps, and the older ones can tell stories of betrayal by the Soviets and abandonment by the United States. Haider Mahmood remembers well the terror campaigns perpetrated by Saddam’s regime in the 1980s and ‘90s. He was born in 1967, one year before the nationalist wing of the Ba’ath Party assumed complete control over the government in a bloodless coup. Saddam spent the next eleven years consolidating power and, in 1979, successfully carried out a sadistic and diabolical coup attempt that left the country in shock.
In his detailed book The Republic of Fear, Iraqi Professor Kanan Makiya described the regime well by saying “The range of cruel institutional practices in contemporary Iraq – confession rituals, public hangings, corpse displays, executions, and finally torture – are designed to breed and sustain widespread fear.” Like the Turkish nationalists, Saddam also despised the Kurdish people and always held a special place in his black heart for them. He routinely attacked and burned Kurdish villages, which galvanized Haider to join the Peshmerga in 1982 at the age of fifteen.
Serving as a scout, Haider told me that the primary objective “was to free Kurdistan.” He was appointed to the position due to his extensive knowledge of the topography of the mountains protecting the city of Sulaymaniyah. After sunset, he would traverse the landscape on foot, locate and survey encampments set up by the Iraqi military, and then report back before daybreak so the Peshmerga could execute a subsequent attack. Haider feels strongly that Saddam should have been removed from power during the Gulf War, after the invasion of Kuwait. By that time, the physical scars of pain from six months as a political prisoner and the emotional scars of resentment after having barely survived one of the numerous genocidal chemical attacks on Kurdish villages were enough for him to form that opinion. He is far from the only one who feels that way.
The same can also be said about the time Saddam was overthrown twelve years later. A staunch admirer of Stalin, the sociopathic dictator had become so feared and so hated that U.S. troops across the country were viewed as emancipators once he was removed from power, a fact that has been lost surrounding the discourse of the Iraq War. While that may come as a surprise to those outside the region, it should come as no surprise that those same people also condemn the subsequent occupation as an unmitigated disaster.
“Nobody would accept the fact that a foreign country would come by force and take the role just like the US did with Iraq,” said Mosul resident Malik Watari. “It was brutal, and they abused a lot of people. They ruined the country. That’s every Iraqi’s opinion, I believe; but that doesn’t mean that we were ok with Saddam Hussein’s regime... He did a lot of bad things, and he killed and jailed people. Nobody could stand against him.” Malik also believes that Saddam and his family would’ve continued their reign of terror and corruption had he remained in power.
These two thoughts are not contradictory but are instead mutually exclusive. Much is left out of the discourse surrounding the Iraq War and its last dictator. Saddam was a cruel and capricious tyrant who terrorized his country through fear, paranoia, imprisonment, torture, and execution for minor offenses, such as security members setting up hidden cameras in his office that recorded him at an unflattering angle. But human rights violations alone are not reason enough to invade a sovereign country. In his compilation of articles titled A Long Short War, journalist Christopher Hitchens, after visiting the region multiple times, argued that the U.N. Security Council was long overdue in deciding to topple Saddam. He stated that a country loses its sovereignty and risks being invaded once it is found guilty of these four actions: violating the Genocide Convention, invading neighboring countries, harboring support for terrorism, and using chemical weapons on his own territory.
Saddam had violated all four multiple times. I don’t have to defend the lies, blunders, and war crimes committed by the Bush Administration by pointing out this other information, and I’m not going to. But this also has nothing to do with him “continuing what his father started” by overthrowing Saddam. While many of Bush Sr.’s military actions in the Gulf War amounted to war crimes, declassified documents reveal that he also placed a lot of faith in hoping that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev would be able to talk Saddam into complying with the U.N. resolution that ordered him to withdraw from Kuwait. His goal was to liberate Kuwait, not to overthrow Saddam. U.S. policy at the time sought to maintain the stability of the region but not let those countries get too powerful.
It was President Clinton who signed the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998, which passed Congress with unanimous support from the Senate and 83 percent of the House, officially stipulating that U.S. foreign policy included regime change in Iraq. This came at a time when Saddam was failing to comply with the U.N. weapons inspectors, which gave everyone cause for concern.
I don’t feel like this is talked about enough: After the 2003 invasion, one of Saddam’s top nuclear scientists, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, turned over components for a nuclear reactor that he had buried in his yard. In his wonderful book, The Bomb in My Garden, he tells the story of what it was like to work for Saddam and how he was forced to hide the reactor components as part of an official government concealment program. He and many others who survived Saddam’s terror regime believed that he was going to begin seeking out ways to develop a nuclear weapon once the inspections ceased, which was going to soon be the case had Bush not decided to invade.
In 2005, two years after Saddam was overthrown, Iraqi Kurdistan regained autonomous status again, along with its own democratic constitution. The people of Kurdistan have tasted democracy and experienced varying degrees of autonomy at times throughout the past, but it has never lasted more than a few years. Perhaps the Peshmerga’s biggest challenge came recently when the Islamic State started growing and controlling territories in Syria and Iraq amid a second Iraqi civil war, which saw the Iraqi military completely collapse. Kurdistan was only able to survive with the assistance of the U.S. and other Western allies.
Commander Almi Mzuri has been there for all of it. Before experiencing the rapid instability that followed the overthrow of Saddam, his unit was involved with assisting the US military in locating a quivering Saddam hiding in a hole outside of Tikrit. As my translator, Znar, and I were waiting to be served breakfast at a military base south of Erbil, the capital city of Iraqi Kurdistan, Commander Mzuri burst in, expressing his frustration that we woke him up for an interview without the proper permissive paperwork (it was 10:30 am), and there would be no interview until we did. He also berated the kitchen staff for making us wait for our food, a true testament to the culture of Kurdish hospitality and altruism: “I won’t let you starve while I cuss and scream at you.” All of this was in Kurdish, so Znar showed him the text messages I had received from the media headquarters and mentioned the names of the General who sent us there. About halfway through breakfast, Znar mentioned that the Commander was ready to see us.
We were led into the Commander’s spacious office which was lined with couches and chairs. After shaking hands, we sat in the two chairs in front of his desk and proceeded to talk about how the Kurdish government, along with international partners, is actively working to combat the presence of ISIS and eradicate their jeopardous ideology.
“ISIS is a threat against humanity,” he proclaimed. “Kurdistan starts teaching kids about the dangerous ISIS ideology in kindergarten. They teach them that we have always lived together and go to universities, mosques, churches, etc. It’s not a religion if it’s terror. We have to set examples. Peshmerga is made up of multiple religions.” He continued to explain that with the help of the intelligence apparatus and help from locals in communities across Kurdistan, they are slowly eradicating the toxic extremist belief that has plagued the region and infected so many. This method has so far been successful in containing and slowly suffocating a group that is on life support but still remains incredibly dangerous.
Iraqi Kurdistan voted overwhelmingly for an independence referendum back in 2017, but the US and its other allies refused to recognize the results. According to the Iraqi constitution, the window of opportunity for Kurdish independence closed a decade prior, but it probably has more to do with the fact that it could lead to another phase of destabilization in the region. A fully independent Kurdistan would most likely galvanize separatist movements across southern Turkey, western Iran, and northeastern Syria, something that the governments of those countries will not allow. Currently, the U.S. bases across Kurdistan are what’s keeping the region stable, since a complete withdrawal would mean little standing in the way of an invasion from Turkey and Iran.
It’s understandable why Commander Mzuri was lamenting these facts as our conversation progressed, but he was defiant in his stance that Kurdistan would always exist in some form. “We will never stop fighting if the US withdraws. Kurds become soldiers at six years old. They begin thinking differently and have truly seen hard times. We will always live a life of respect and dignity and would rather live in caves than surrender. Our motto is ‘Kurdistan or death.’”
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