The Iranian regime is known for its intolerance of anti-regime sentiment of any kind, and its anti-riot tactics include shutting off the Internet, wireless services and other means of communication in addition to banning reporters from the area. This means the Iranian Kurdish “revolution” has not yet been televised, but much like the uprisings in Syria and Egypt, it is being broadcasted on social media.
There is some horrible news out of Kurdistan today. Ekurd.net reports that Mawloud Afand, editor of an Israel-Kurdish magazine called Israel Kurd “disappeared ten days ago in [the] Kurdistan region of Iraq.” Israeli news sources say he was kidnapped by Iranian intelligence in the city of Sulaimaniyah. Ekurd.net claims that Iran had told the Kurdish government to shut Israel Kurd down and it refused.
ERBIL-Hewlêr, Kurdistan region ‘Iraq’, — A number of Israeli political experts say Israel will be among the countries that would support Iraqi Kurdistan if it declared independence. They also suggest that Kurdistan not make the decision hastily and ensure the grounds are properly prepared first, Rudaw reported
Furthermore, with their initial sale last week of a tanker full of oil, to Israel no less, the Kurds have shown that they are willing not just to cleave themselves from Baghdad but to stand as a magnanimous force for stability in the region.
According to numerous reports by Reuters, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal, the tanker SCF Altai transferred a cargo of Kurdish oil from another tanker United Emblem, which had been plying the Mediterranean for two weeks after loading at the Turkish port of Ceyhan. The SCF Altai then docked at the Israeli city of Ashkelon and off-loaded its crude.
In 1966, Iraqi defense minister Abd al-Aziz al-Uqayli blamed the Kurds of Iraq for seeking to establish “a second Israel” in the Middle East. He also claimed that “the West and the East are supporting the rebels to create [khalq] a new Israeli state in the north of the homeland as they had done in 1948 when they created Israel. It is as if history is repeating itself.”
What attracts me to a story like this one is the possibility of encouraging and securing ethnic self-determination for a true ethnic minority. In that regard, Kurds and Israelis may understand one another. The above scholarly piece by Ofra Bengio goes into detail on the history of the Kurdish-Israeli relationship, and that in turn informs just a little bit how it has turned out that members of the Kurdish community seeing an Israeli group in Lafayette Park (in front of the White House) would (naturally) join them in solidarity.
(8:21): “Terrorists and ISIS want to make this place just like all the others by killing and committing crimes here.”
VICE interviewer Danny Gold tweets as @DGisSERIOUS.
The web would seem to be coming along for near real time experience of the world’s war zones. This environment from field signal to page makeup to Twitter publicity to blog to reader is not another generation’s evening network news: I’m not holding my breath but am waiting for the waves of live remote feeds to come marching over the virtual berms at any time.
Par for the middle east course and evident in the above clip: deeply shared Kurdish and Arab tribal animus, and that with each attempting to align the other with ISIS (of the two, I would suggest the Kurds have the more coherent view of the fighting and how it will play both to their autonomy, defense, and expansion).
The “love of the land” also plays in the Kurdish script as regards how things should be and, therefore, how events should unfold for the Kurds as a people free — self-determining — in their own lands.
We shall see how that motivation plays in the coming days.
ISIS appears to be its own wild and piratical machine.
In fact, ISIS reminds me of the al-Shabaab saga in Somalia in which Islamic anarchists, essentially, have long terrorized the state, at times controlling the bulk of it, at others finding their footprint reduced to their southern reaches. To this day, they’re still part of the Somali landscape and proven capable of instigating or conducting attacks on targets in their vicinity. One expects that even a smashed ISIS will continue spinning around Iraq’s landscape as a human version of the chemist’s “free radical”.
While ISIS makes progress in Iraq it has also gotten itself surrounded by either natural enemies or enemies it has been making on its beyond-all-limits killing spree in Iraq. It’s presence has urged a nation to its feet, but the same today has many different kinds of feet, and they seem not to want to advance in the same direction.
Externals: the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei becomes now the dictator Khamenei-Assad-Putin driving a Russia-aligned Shiite bloc against the Saudi sphere’s NATO-aligned Sunni bloc, the same that was to have produced a modern people’s revolution in Syria. Probably, that alignment has run its course, worn itself out, and pushed the White House into deep reconsideration of how to sort out the middle east for its own sake, for oil, and for NATO’s existence and the values it promotes.
Aside: America’s chief oil suppliers have been Canada and Mexico, and as American energy policy produces greater flexibility in access to crude, one may expect related politics to follow.
Back to Iraq: It turns out deposing Saddam the Tyrannical was the easy part. Then too, perhaps the way in always is, for everything else having to do with the middle east has been twisted up, torn apart, patched back together, and totally fucked up beyond all repair (FUBAR).
As a result of their American-enforced protections until 2003, and later as a result of the weakened central government in Baghdad after Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Iraqi Kurds were left to govern themselves for 22 years, from 1991 to present. During this period, the Kurds have literally lifted their corner of Iraq from the ashes, establishing not only one of the most prosperous polities in the region, but also by far the best approximation of secular democracy that the Middle East can currently offer.
At least at the moment, “Syria Kurds fighting” isn’t bring up hours old reports and videos.
All may be tense on that front but, so far as the reality-to-news lag is concerned, it’s quiet, and that’s a good thing: in addition to fending off the AQTypal Out There, the Kurds in their camps and villages have a turn coming in the weather to be followed by winter.
It’s good, I’m sure, to have a few fair days ahead of what’s to come, winter being always certain.
This year may be different — different zone, relief planes instead of trucks, bands of marauders instead of Saddam Hussein’s military, etc.
The web may make a difference too.
What was barely out of the laboratory in 1992 has produced its own civilization and intelligentsia. However, while the newfangled global political system may prove responsive to those in distress and more than worthy of aid, it seems not to have really kicked in yet. In fact, the Internet’s Emerging Global Order (I-EGO) has at this point only to watch the world, take it in, set up its emotions, think about what it will do when it’s a little more capable of urging its own defense and better attending to the security of those it loves — and there will be those it loves.
Turkey and the Syrian Kurds: A little-noticed battle | The Economist – 9/25/2013: “A Syrian rebel fighting the Kurds told our correspondent that “Allah be praised, Turkey is giving us some weapons” though he added that the France and Saudi Arabia were “much more generous”.
These two are not even remotely “on topic” but they’re telling of the type of wars being fought, i.e., two wars of annihilation and enslavement and a smaller one about democracy.
We are fighting America’s war on terror right here on the ground,” says Kurdish fighter Dijwar Osman. “Our enemies are those al Qaeda fighters who want to destroy our 4,000-year-old Kurdish culture. These jihadists come from Belgium, Holland, Morocco, Libya, and other countries. Unfortunately, the U.S. and Turkey are on the side of al Qaeda, just like the U.S. was on al Qaeda’s side in Afghanistan during the ’80’s
This is the hard punch from the same article: “They have their own army and police here, names of towns have been changed from Arabic to Kurdish, and the Kurdish language is being taught in schools — something that was forbidden under the Assad regime.”
Call this lead still hot:
People’s Defense Units (YPG) and Women’s Defense Units (YPJ) guerrillas in Rojava are engaged in fighting al-Qaeda-linked armed groups since 15 July 2013. A remarkable part of the region has been cleared of the gang groups as a result of the resistance by Kurdish guerrillas as well as by local people supporting them in the villages, towns, districts and provinces of western Kurdistan.
An Islam tolerant of others may be tolerated, and for all outside its Ummah, as much seems a theme heavily argued.
However, the better nature of human nature may fit with nature: a still wild species would seem Homo sapiens sapiens in a still wild world where abundance and variety fill out to their edges every physical, political, and social niche. There are no tribes that would regard themselves as other than a “First People” but even the Jews — perhaps simply the Jews — recognize the chosen qualities in others and unless assaulted leave each to go their way.
Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Ministry of Peshmerga secretary-general Jabbar Yawar told Asharq Al-Awsat that the Kurdish military delegation “informed the Iraqi side of the Peshmerga ministry’s complete readiness to send its forces to any spot in Iraq to confront terrorism, in the event of the federal Ministry of Defense requesting this.”
After so many years of state-related parlay, the pressure placed on the Kurds by the forces of Islamic Jihad seems to have wrested Kurdish space from state control in Syria and encouraged Kurdish martial consolidation and political solidarity in line with self-government.
While Putin plays Syria for all it’s worth — I should think the Greek Orthodox Church and the Ayatollah’s enterprise have the deepest of natural disaffinities — and Cameron plus Obama work with Qatar plus the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, history (plus a little chaos theory by way of the Al Qaeda types) may have just brought the Kurdish community an opportunity to settle down to defending itself in its own space.
We shall see.
* * *
Kurdish-inhabited area by CIA (1992). Secondary source: Wikimedia Commons.
During the Syrian civil war, the Popular Protection Units (YPG) were created under the administration of the Kurdish Supreme Committee to control the Kurdish inhabited areas in Syria. On 19 July 2012, the YPG captured the city of Kobanê (Ayn al-Arab), and the next day captured Amûdê and Efrîn.[6] The two main Kurdish groups, theKurdish National Council (KNC) and the Democratic Union Party (PYD), afterwards formed a joint leadership council to run the captured cities.[6] By 24 July, the Syrian Kurdish cities of Dêrika Hemko (Al-Malikiyah), Serê Kaniyê (Ra’s al-‘Ayn), Dirbêsî (Al-Darbasiyah) and Girkê Legê (Al-Ma’bada) had also come under the control of the Popular Protection Units. The only major Kurdish inhabited cities that remained under government control were Hasaka and Qamishli.[7][8]
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