Kingdom of Kurdistan

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Presumed flag of the Kingdom of Kurdistan
The disputed Mosul area between Turkey, Great Britain and Iraq (red)
Sulaimaniyya Province in the Kingdom of Iraq (1921 to 1958) and the Berzincî revolt of 1919 (red) in this province

The Kingdom of Kurdistan ( Kurdish Memlekey Kurdistan ) was an internationally unrecognized short-lived state structure in northern Iraq from October 1922 to July 1924 under the king (malik) Mahmud Barzanji .

history

background

Great Britain conquered the Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra during World War I. After the war, Great Britain received a mandate over these provinces from the League of Nations and in 1920 created the British Mandate Mesopotamia . However, there was a problem with Turkey about the membership of the Mosul province in the mandate area. This Mosul question was not to be resolved until 1926. The British set up a government of tribal leaders in the Kurdish part of the Mosul province based on the tribal government in the federally administered tribal areas in British India . As governor of Sanjak Sulaimaniyya the sheikh was Mahmud Barzandschi in Sulaymaniyah used. He used his position for an uprising against the British. In 1919 he was defeated and exiled. During British rule, the colonial administration worked intensively on building a Kurdish national consciousness that had previously hardly been widespread among the population, as there were plans to create a formally independent Kurdish state from the Turkish and Iraqi parts of Kurdistan, dependent on Great Britain .

Establishment of the kingdom

In 1921 Mahmud Barzanji was pardoned in the hope that he would support the British in the fight against tribes allied with the Kemalist government of Turkey and reinstated as governor of Sulaimaniyya, where on October 10 (according to other information in October 1922) he became a Kurdish Government and proclaimed an independent state. He declared Sulaimaniyya the capital of the Kingdom of Kurdistan. Previously he was appointed king by the cabinet.

The cabinet consisted of the following ministers:

The kingdom's army was called the Kurdish National Army .

War with Britain

The kingdom was not recognized by Great Britain and fought militarily. The king tried to expand his domain, which barely extended beyond the area around Sulaimaniyya, but failed due to the resistance of the Jaf and Pishdar tribes, most of which opposed him. He also made himself unpopular among intellectual Kurdish nationalists by failing to fulfill the hopes of some representatives who had come from Baghdad to participate in the government and by having one of them murdered. The British used the Royal Air Force against the Kingdom . As part of the rule by bomb doctrine specially developed for counterinsurgency in Iraq , Sulaimaniyya was bombed four times between March 1923 and May 1924, causing over 95% of the residents to flee the city temporarily. In July 1924 British troops retook Sulaimaniyya, in 1926 the League of Nations awarded the province of Mosul to Iraq; however, the Iraqi government had to guarantee the Kurds special rights.

See also

literature

  • David McDowell: A Modern History of the Kurds . Tauris Press, London 1996, ISBN 1-85043-653-3 , pp. 155-163, 194-196.
  • Noam Chomsky : The New Military Humanism. Lessons from Kosovo . Pluto Press, London 1999, ISBN 0-7453-1633-6 .
    • German: The new military humanism. Lessons from Kosovo . Edition 8, Zurich 2000, ISBN 3-85990-027-7 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ J. Prince: A Kurdish State in Iraq . In: Current History , January 1993
  2. ^ S. Eskander: Britain's policy in Southern Kurdistan: The Formation and the Termination of the First Kurdish Government, 1918-1919 . In: British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies , Vol. 27, No. 2, 2000, pp. 139-163
  3. ^ Günter Behrendt: Nationalism in Kurdistan. Prehistory, conditions of origin and first manifestations up to 1925 . Hamburg 1993, p. 348 ff.
  4. ^ A b c Günter Behrendt: Nationalism in Kurdistan. Prehistory, conditions of origin and first manifestations up to 1925 . Hamburg 1993
  5. ^ R. Fatah: Mustafa Pasha Yamolki: his life and role in the Kurdish nationalist movement , Kurdishmedia.com 2005
  6. ↑ ediss.uni-goettingen.de (PDF)