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The Kurds as cannon fodder

  • 26 September 2014

Once again the West has found a way to use the Kurds as cannon fodder for its own purposes. Once more, however, the biggest losers will be the ordinary Kurdish people.

The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq comprises two rival armed groups — the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) — which have a history of killing each other’s supporters in their mutual drive for absolute power. The PUK began as a faction inside the KDP. In 1964 the KDP militia literally pushed the dissident faction into Iran.

The KDP and the PUK are roughly matched militarily. Mindful of this, the two factions have historically competed for US patronage, in order to obtain the upper hand. This leaves both open to manipulation by unscrupulous Western politicians.

Between 1974 and 1975 both factions were convinced by the US to fight Saddam Hussein, after the US promised them military support. But the Iraqi Kurds were lured into war with Baghdad only to pressure the Ba’athists to cease threatening US regional interests. A 1974 CIA memo reveals that both the Shah and the White House desired that Baghdad and the Kurds mutually weaken each other: ‘Neither Iran nor ourselves wish to see the matter resolved one way or the other’. The US Congress’s Pike Committee commented: ‘This policy was not imparted to [the Kurds], who were encouraged to continue fighting. Even in the context of covert action, ours was a cynical enterprise’. Even before this, the KDP had handed over many dissident Iranian intellectuals to the Shah’s brutal regime.

In due course Saddam got the message and concluded the Algiers Agreement with the Shah’s Iran — a firm Washington ally. Iraqi resistance collapsed and hundreds of Kurdish leaders were executed. Questioned about this later, the then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger callously remarked: ‘Covert action should not be confused with missionary work’. 

History repeated itself after the 1990-91 Gulf War, when Kurdish nationalists in Iraq were urged by the United States to rise up against Saddam Hussein — only to be left without US support at the critical moment and to face even greater casualties than in 1975.

Following the First Gulf War, the US militarily guaranteed Iraqi Kurdistan against Saddam and a ‘semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government’ was established with US patronage. But the inherently rapacious natures of the KDP and the PUK warlord factions soon led them to turn their guns
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