The Shameless Abandonment of the Kurds

 

How many times will the Kurds be betrayed?  You recently heard that the United States will pull its military out of Syria, leaving their best ally, the Kurds, alone and vulnerable to an attack promised by the Turkish despot Erdogan. It has been the Kurds that have been the main source of the defeat of ISIS.  For all their heroic effort, they’re basically stabbed in the back, again.

The Kurds are spread between four countries, Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran.  In history, this area has been conquered by the Persian, the Greeks under Alexander the Great, the Ottoman Turks and after World War I ignored by the British and the French who were both responsible for carving out new countries from the defeated Ottoman Empire.  The 1916 document knows as the Sykes-Picot Agreement was a secret British-French plan to carve out the Middle East after the defeat of the Ottomans.   At the end of the War, the Treaty of Sevres was drafted to deal with the dissolution and partition of the Ottoman Empire. This treaty provided for a referendum on the formation of an independent Kurdish state, Kurdistan. After the new Turkish nation rejected this plan, the Kurdish question was abandoned.  To this day nothing has been done.  For a further discussion of the history of the Kurds click here. 

The decisions made by the Allies at the end of World War I, led by President Wilson of the United States, and put in place by the British and French Empires were, to say the least, disastrous.  Two examples:  1) The Allies decided to give the job of securing the semi-independent city of Smyrna in modern day Turkey, to the Greeks.  Smyrna was the "Hong Kong" of the Middle East under the Ottomans, populated by Christians, Greeks, Armenians and other Europeans.  Since the Greeks and the Turks hate each other with a passion, this was the equivalent of pouring gasoline into a fire.  The Greeks were then crushed by the Turks and Smyrna was burned to the ground in 1922 by the Turks who raped and murdered most Christians in the City. For an exhaustive documentation of this read the books, “Paradise Lost” by Giles Milton and “The Great Fire” by Lou Ureneck.  2) The carving out of new nations in the Middle East was done with a blind fold, as we now know.  Every decision made failed. The British and the French carved out new Middle East nations, not in a thoughtful methodical way, but in a matter that would suit their own colonial interests.  The Kurds were left hanging.  As a result, they have remained a persecuted minority in all these countries.  In Turkey, the Kurds are considered terrorists for their ambition to be free and frequently attacked by Turkish military forces. 

In the early 1990’s the Kurds won a slim victory in that they were allowed a certain degree of autonomy in Iraq, but this, again was a weak olive branch.  Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Kurds have been our best friends.  They have carried the load in fighting both Saddam Hussein and later ISIS.  They managed to defeat ISIS and for their effort, they’ve been abandoned by the world, again.  A reasonable person would ask where is the UN on this?  As usual, the UN is useless and a total waste of time. They've never lifted a finger or raised one voice for the Kurds.