Volume 21, Number 12 · July 18, 1974
The Kurdish Tragedy
By Simon Head
The news that Kurds and Arabs are fighting one another in the remote hills of northeastern Iraq has hardly been noticed in the past few months. When the outside world is aware that the Kurds exist at all it classifies them along with those ferocious warrior races which inhabited the outer fringes of the British Raj—Nagas, Pathans, Zulus—as a people so fierce and warlike that the English could never completely subjugate them. Consequently the struggle of the Kurds to be free of the Baathist regime in Iraq is regarded less as the fully fledged war of national liberation which it in fact is, and more as some obscure and archaic tribal uprising. Anti-imperialists in the West find in it none of the heroism, romance, and moral legitimacy which they admire in more fashionable liberation struggles in Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, and Mozambique. The Kurds have few friends.
Feature, 2931 words
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