Ihsan Nuri Pasha

Ihsan Nuri Pascha at the time of the Ararat uprising (second from left in the front row). The remaining men in front are, from left to right, Sipkanlı Halis Bey and Hasenanlı Ferzende Bey

Ihsan Nuri with his wife Yaşar Hanim during the Ararat uprisings.

İhsan Nuri Pascha (also Ihsan Nouri , in Kurdish ئیحسان نووری پاشا Îhsan Nûrî Paşa ; * 1892 or 1893 in Bitlis ; † March 25, 1976 Tehran ) was an Ottoman - Kurdish officer (subay) and captain (yüzbaşı) and, as the leading head of the Ararat uprising, a well-known person in the Kurdish national movement after the First World War. He was married to Yashar Ihsan.

Life

Ihsan Nuri was born in Bitlis in 1892 or 1893. His family had a high position within the Celali tribe . His origins enabled Ihsan Nuri to pursue a military career in the Ottoman Empire. He attended the army school in Erzincan and later the military academy in Istanbul . He served as a lieutenant in Albania in 1910 , in Yemen from 1911 to 1913 , for a short time in World War I on the Dardanelles Front, and later in Georgia . He was injured on the Caucasus front against the Russians.

After the end of the war, Ihsan Nuri experienced the Allied occupation of Istanbul. He met the editor Zeki Bey Bitlisi and wrote articles on Kurdish history and culture for his magazine Jin (Life). He became a member of the first Kurdish association, the Kürdistan Teali Cemiyeti .

Like nationalist Turkish officers, Ihsan Nuri refused to be occupied by foreign troops. He became chairman of the officers' representation of Istanbul and maintained close contact with Kamal Aldin Sami, Mustafa Kemal's representative in Istanbul.

Because of a joint plot with Turkish nationalists to kidnap the Minister of War Süleyman Schafik Pascha of the government under Damat Ferid Pascha , Ihsan Nuri came into the crosshairs of the British. The aim of the failed plot was to hand over the Minister of War to Mustafa Kemal.

He came under suspicion among the Turks because of his membership in a Kurdish association . Ihsan Nuri requested transfer via Bitlis to the Caucasus. The General Staff, informed of its Kurdish activities, refused. Ihsan Nuri was transferred directly to Trabzon, where he received an order from Rüschdü Pascha, commander of the 9th Army, from Mustafa Kemal to provide Soviet support for the nationalist armed forces of Ankara in Baku.

Ihsan Nuri, like other Kurdish army officers, relied on Ataturk's promise of autonomy for the Kurds in 1920. After the victories against the Greeks, there was no longer any talk of these promises.

During his service on the Turkish-Iraqi border in 1922, Ihsan Nuri met members of the Kurdish organization Azadî and became the head of the Azadî in Siirt . Ihsan Nuri and three other Kurdish officers brought under his control the regiment that had been sent from Mosul to Beytüşşebap (Şırnak province) because of the Turkish-British conflict over control of the oil wells .

Weapons and ammunition of the 18th regiment were distributed to Kurdish insurgents. 350 soldiers defected. Ihsan Nuri tried in vain to march to Bitlis to proclaim Kurdistan independence.

The uprising was quickly put down. Ihsan Nuri fled first to Syria and then to Mahmud Barzanji in Iraq . Ihsan Nuri later became a member of the Kurdish Xoybûn , which commissioned him in 1927 as General of the Liberation Army to support the Ararat uprising. Ihsan Nuri's strategy was to work on Ararat. When he arrived in the uprising area on the Ararat in 1928, he renamed the village of Türkmen Kurdawa and declared it the capital of the Republic of Ararat . Ihsan Nuri built an administrative apparatus and appointed governors. Thanks to a printing press that he had brought with him, he published the magazines Agri , Gaziya Welat and a propaganda pamphlet called Agri egir dibarine ("Ararat makes fire rain").

In 1930 the Turkish army put down the uprising. That was the end of the Republic of Ararat. Ihsan Nuri fled to Iran and lived there with his wife and daughter. He was under surveillance by the Iranian secret service. In view of the censorship in Iran, his secretly written books mainly cover the period up to 1930. In 1962, accompanied by a SAVAK official, Ihsan Nuri went on a trip to West Berlin . He died on March 25, 1976 as a result of a traffic accident.

Works

• History of the origins of the Kurdish people , Kouhistan Verlag, Tehran 1955 (Persian: Tarikh risha nejadi Kurd)
• La révolte de l'Agridagh "Ararat" (1927–1930) , "Agri", éditions kurdes, Genève 1986 (further editions in Persian, Kurmanji and Sorani )
• Story of my life , (Persian; his wife also wrote a biography with the same title)

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• Ihsan Nouri Pasha: La révolte de l'Agridagh "Ararat" (1927–1930) , "Agri", éditions kurdes, Genève 1986

Individual evidence

1. ↑ rohat alakom : Hoybûn örgütü ve Ağrı ayaklanması , Avesta, 1998, ISBN 975-7112-45-3 , p 180. Turkish