I agree with you except the Kurds are not troublemakers. They can’t afford to be violent or they would be deported. Europe and Britain should bring a genocide complaint against Syria, Iran, Iraq and Turkey for suppressing the Kurds. See my comment above.
D Walsh
3 months ago
British Kurds. You what mate, is Kurdistan not in the Middle East
British Indians and British Pakistanis ethnicly come from even further away. If the situation in Europe leaves the UK being threatened by a beligerent Russia how many of them will join-up to help the British English/Welsh/Scots/Irish? I’m sure that British Kurds along with British Poles, Etc will stay and fight.
David McKee
3 months ago
Judging by the two comments so far, the commentors got hopelessly confused half-way through this excellent piece, because they were asking themselves, “Who are the good guys here?” They were not getting any coherent answers.
Well, guess what, that is what politics is like for most of the human beings who inhabit this planet. Politics, Middle East-style, is messy, confused, brutal and violent. It is not remotely reducible to some infantile, “goodies vs baddies” narrative.
Thank you, Mr. Broomfield, you tell a very complex story in a way that is balanced and coherent. You kept the story limited too – you could have included what’s going on in the Caucasus, which would have added vastly more complexity to your tale.
I suspect what is going on here is that the Foreign Office is hopelessly confused, because it wants to back all the horses at some point – this horse this week, that horse next, and so on. So the Home Office is getting contradictory messages from the Foreign Office. And PC Plod, bless him, doesn’t know if he’s on his head or his rear end.
Wyatt W
3 months ago
This was a great article. I was blessed to be able to go to Iraqi Kurdistan recently. Seeing what these people went through from Saddam and ISIS was eye opening to say the least. The fighters are viewed as heroes by the locals.
Erdogan is an evil thug, not much different than Putin. One the UK will cozy up to and one they’ll fight a proxy war with. Pretty disheartening, the Kurds were some of the best people I’ve ever met.
Michael Spedding
3 months ago
Thanks for this excellent discussion, which is very serious, and I cant understand some of the blinkered comments above. Al-Qaieda (ISIS) is a fervent enemy of the UK and of democracy. Their list of battles in the middle east is horrendous (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_battles_involving_the_Islamic_State) and it is thanks to the Kurds among others that they were defeated.
The Kurds have been in the front line, against them, with very little support, and being betrayed by Erdogan and also Trump.
I have had my hair cut (!) in the UK by a Kurdish immigrant, an extremely brave guy who fought ISIS in a very hard battle at Mosul where many of his friends were killed. He is now working hard in the UK and is an example of good immigration,
Thus I agree fully with the article, and if we had helped them more (after the mess Blair and Bush created in Irak) some of them wouldnt need to be in the UK.
Gayle Rosenthal
3 months ago
Israel and the Jews have been, and continue to be, on the front lines of this nagging debate on how best to arrange the ruling and the rulers. Empires are a thing of the past, as are monarchies in the west. We continue to have Islamic theocracies, some with monarchs. These are totalitarian theocracies with more in common with communist Russia and China than with a recognizable faith-based nation.
Israel is playing out God’s directive to be a nation, people, and a religion all in one, chosen to be apart from others. Not better than, as anti-semites would distort, just apart and to be a “light among the nations.”
Kurds, Druze, Sikhs, and many native American peoples have ties to a particular piece of land, just as the Hebrews/Jews have ties to Eretz Israel. They are recognized ethnicities and should have homelands just as Israel has managed to reclaim. Balochs in Iran @ the Pakistan border are also an ethnicity that could likely self-govern if allowed to.
Palestinians are the inescapable point of comparison, and they do not compare well. They are products of Arab colonization of the Levant; their names are almost all Arabic. Palestine was never part of Arabia, so why are so many Arabs there ? They were imported from the Ottoman Empire and the ones in Gaza were imported mostly from Egypt in the 19th Century.
It would benefit the world tremendously if western nations would bring a genocide complaint at the Hague against Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria for attempts to wipe out the Kurdish people’s identity. Mahsa Amini had a Kurdish name that was not recognized by Iran. Only Persian and Arabic names are recognized. What Mahsa murdered because she wore her headscarf incorrectly or because she is Kurdish and identified as such ?
My heart is with the Kurds – they should have a homeland. Shame on the west for denying them one after WW 1. They should remedy this failure now even if it means angering the 4 nations with Kurdish populations.
Steve Jolly
3 months ago
Turkey’s inclusion in NATO was and is, first and foremost, a geopolitical strategic alliance. Turkey’s geographic position at the mouth of the Black Sea makes it possible to blockade Russia’s few warm water ports basically at will. Whoever controlled the Bosporus effectively controlled access to the entirety of the Black Sea. This alliance was struck during the Cold War for that express purpose when the Soviet Navy was still somewhat threatening. In return for that advantage, the US and others have basically looked the other way regarding Turkey’s poor treatment of minorities and violent opposition to the creation of a Kurdish state. When the US invaded Iraq, they made a point of assuring the Turks they would not partition Iraq into Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish states, regardless of how eminently practical that would have been and how much easier it would have made the occupation.
It’s debatable whether or not this arrangement is still worth the cost. Turkey’s current leader is leaning awfully hard on western tolerance even as he gets uncomfortably friendly with Putin. The time may soon come to cut Turkey out of the alliance, or at least threaten to do so. The bad behavior that gets tolerated is getting harder to ignore and the benefits of the arrangement are not as relevant as they once were.
Excellent points all, very well said. Perhaps an opening salvo would be to simply raise the possibility of NATO ditching the unanimous consent requirement for membership. Just talking about it might help chill out Erdogan a bit regarding Sweden.
Eleanor Barlow
3 months ago
What a pity that all the1000s of people who took to the streets in their misplaced support of the Palestinians are not out supporting the Kurdish cause instead. But for some unknown reason, the Kurds obviously aren’t ranked anywhere on the left wing list of oppressed minorities. Possibly because they don’t act like victims or call on Islamist terrorists to fight for them.
They can’t stand the Kurds as their most loyal supporter has always been Israel
Fafa Fafa
3 months ago
The question is this: Does Kurdistan have “the right to exist”? If not, why not. If yes, then the British Foreign office or some similar outfit should declare it in writing, find their old Middle East maps and resurrect their practice of drawing lines on them and assigning territories to people. It worked out so well in the past!
It would be nice if all of these foreigners could kindly take their various disputes off our streets and back to their own countries.
I bet Iraqis were thinking along the same lines a while back.
Not to mention the Afghans.
Which western countries have been fighting each other in Iraq this century?
Hypocrisy much lol ?
I agree with you except the Kurds are not troublemakers. They can’t afford to be violent or they would be deported. Europe and Britain should bring a genocide complaint against Syria, Iran, Iraq and Turkey for suppressing the Kurds. See my comment above.
British Kurds. You what mate, is Kurdistan not in the Middle East
British Indians and British Pakistanis ethnicly come from even further away. If the situation in Europe leaves the UK being threatened by a beligerent Russia how many of them will join-up to help the British English/Welsh/Scots/Irish? I’m sure that British Kurds along with British Poles, Etc will stay and fight.
Judging by the two comments so far, the commentors got hopelessly confused half-way through this excellent piece, because they were asking themselves, “Who are the good guys here?” They were not getting any coherent answers.
Well, guess what, that is what politics is like for most of the human beings who inhabit this planet. Politics, Middle East-style, is messy, confused, brutal and violent. It is not remotely reducible to some infantile, “goodies vs baddies” narrative.
Thank you, Mr. Broomfield, you tell a very complex story in a way that is balanced and coherent. You kept the story limited too – you could have included what’s going on in the Caucasus, which would have added vastly more complexity to your tale.
I suspect what is going on here is that the Foreign Office is hopelessly confused, because it wants to back all the horses at some point – this horse this week, that horse next, and so on. So the Home Office is getting contradictory messages from the Foreign Office. And PC Plod, bless him, doesn’t know if he’s on his head or his rear end.
This was a great article. I was blessed to be able to go to Iraqi Kurdistan recently. Seeing what these people went through from Saddam and ISIS was eye opening to say the least. The fighters are viewed as heroes by the locals.
Erdogan is an evil thug, not much different than Putin. One the UK will cozy up to and one they’ll fight a proxy war with. Pretty disheartening, the Kurds were some of the best people I’ve ever met.
Thanks for this excellent discussion, which is very serious, and I cant understand some of the blinkered comments above. Al-Qaieda (ISIS) is a fervent enemy of the UK and of democracy. Their list of battles in the middle east is horrendous (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_battles_involving_the_Islamic_State) and it is thanks to the Kurds among others that they were defeated.
The Kurds have been in the front line, against them, with very little support, and being betrayed by Erdogan and also Trump.
I have had my hair cut (!) in the UK by a Kurdish immigrant, an extremely brave guy who fought ISIS in a very hard battle at Mosul where many of his friends were killed. He is now working hard in the UK and is an example of good immigration,
Thus I agree fully with the article, and if we had helped them more (after the mess Blair and Bush created in Irak) some of them wouldnt need to be in the UK.
Israel and the Jews have been, and continue to be, on the front lines of this nagging debate on how best to arrange the ruling and the rulers. Empires are a thing of the past, as are monarchies in the west. We continue to have Islamic theocracies, some with monarchs. These are totalitarian theocracies with more in common with communist Russia and China than with a recognizable faith-based nation.
Israel is playing out God’s directive to be a nation, people, and a religion all in one, chosen to be apart from others. Not better than, as anti-semites would distort, just apart and to be a “light among the nations.”
Kurds, Druze, Sikhs, and many native American peoples have ties to a particular piece of land, just as the Hebrews/Jews have ties to Eretz Israel. They are recognized ethnicities and should have homelands just as Israel has managed to reclaim. Balochs in Iran @ the Pakistan border are also an ethnicity that could likely self-govern if allowed to.
Palestinians are the inescapable point of comparison, and they do not compare well. They are products of Arab colonization of the Levant; their names are almost all Arabic. Palestine was never part of Arabia, so why are so many Arabs there ? They were imported from the Ottoman Empire and the ones in Gaza were imported mostly from Egypt in the 19th Century.
It would benefit the world tremendously if western nations would bring a genocide complaint at the Hague against Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria for attempts to wipe out the Kurdish people’s identity. Mahsa Amini had a Kurdish name that was not recognized by Iran. Only Persian and Arabic names are recognized. What Mahsa murdered because she wore her headscarf incorrectly or because she is Kurdish and identified as such ?
My heart is with the Kurds – they should have a homeland. Shame on the west for denying them one after WW 1. They should remedy this failure now even if it means angering the 4 nations with Kurdish populations.
Turkey’s inclusion in NATO was and is, first and foremost, a geopolitical strategic alliance. Turkey’s geographic position at the mouth of the Black Sea makes it possible to blockade Russia’s few warm water ports basically at will. Whoever controlled the Bosporus effectively controlled access to the entirety of the Black Sea. This alliance was struck during the Cold War for that express purpose when the Soviet Navy was still somewhat threatening. In return for that advantage, the US and others have basically looked the other way regarding Turkey’s poor treatment of minorities and violent opposition to the creation of a Kurdish state. When the US invaded Iraq, they made a point of assuring the Turks they would not partition Iraq into Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish states, regardless of how eminently practical that would have been and how much easier it would have made the occupation.
It’s debatable whether or not this arrangement is still worth the cost. Turkey’s current leader is leaning awfully hard on western tolerance even as he gets uncomfortably friendly with Putin. The time may soon come to cut Turkey out of the alliance, or at least threaten to do so. The bad behavior that gets tolerated is getting harder to ignore and the benefits of the arrangement are not as relevant as they once were.
Excellent points all, very well said. Perhaps an opening salvo would be to simply raise the possibility of NATO ditching the unanimous consent requirement for membership. Just talking about it might help chill out Erdogan a bit regarding Sweden.
What a pity that all the1000s of people who took to the streets in their misplaced support of the Palestinians are not out supporting the Kurdish cause instead. But for some unknown reason, the Kurds obviously aren’t ranked anywhere on the left wing list of oppressed minorities. Possibly because they don’t act like victims or call on Islamist terrorists to fight for them.
They can’t stand the Kurds as their most loyal supporter has always been Israel
The question is this: Does Kurdistan have “the right to exist”? If not, why not. If yes, then the British Foreign office or some similar outfit should declare it in writing, find their old Middle East maps and resurrect their practice of drawing lines on them and assigning territories to people. It worked out so well in the past!