General Matthew B. Ridgway flew to Turkey to inspect the easternmost outpost of his NATO command. He conferred with the U.S. military mission in Ankara, inspected units of the tough, well-trained Turkish army, and journeyed to Turkey’s mountain frontier with Russia. There, General Ridgway looked around with the help of a B.C. scope.
The region was well worth a look: the rugged, isolated mountain country spanning the Russian-Turkish border and stretching eastward to the Caspian Sea may be the strategic key to the whole troubled Middle East. This land (see map) is Kurdistan. It is split up among five sovereign nations (Russia, Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq), but in the minds of the 4,000,000 fierce Kurdish tribesmen who live there, it is one country. It lies like a great, clumsy sickle over the Middle East, the handle anchored in the mountains near the Persian Gulf, the top of the blade resting in Russia and the cutting edge facing the oil fields and fertile valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris. U.S. military men rate Kurdistan important for three reasons:
1) Kurds may prove a powerful explosive in any coup the Communists may try in the unstable Middle Eastern nations, particularly Iran and Iraq (last week, in addition to his other troubles, Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh faced a Kurdish uprising protesting against land reforms which the Kurds consider contrary to their tribal system).
2) Kurdistan is Russia’s natural entry into the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, the Middle Eastern Arab states.
3) In case of a Russian attack on Turkey, the best invasion routes lead through Kurdistan, at Maku in Iran and Ruwan-diz in Iraq.
All three possibilities depend on whether the Russians can win the Kurds to their side, or at least secure their neutrality in case the Red army tries to pass through their mountains. After a trip through Kurdistan, TIME Correspondent James Bell reported:
THE Kurds don’t particularly like the Russians. Mothers frighten their babies with the threat: “The Russians will get you.” Nevertheless, the Russians are winning the battle for the Kurds’ allegiance, hands down.
How It Started. Back in the summer of 1950, when the Russian-trained forces of North Korea were poised to jump across the 38th parallel, there was a similar force in the Russian part of Kurdistan, ready to jump, too. It was Russian-trained and Russian-equipped. But it wasn’t Russian. It was entirely Kurdish and led by a Kurd, Mustafa Barzani, a onetime mullah (teacher of Islam) whom the Russians turned into a general.
Barzani’s army stood poised to strike for three months. Then, after it had become amply clear that the U.S. would resist aggression in Korea and elsewhere, the Russians withdrew Barzani from the frontier. But his army still lurks just across the border, poised and ready to strike at a word from the Kremlin. U.S. military observers describe it as a first-class fighting outfit, with its own tactical air group manned by Soviet-trained Kurdish pilots.
Barzani’s army is the result of years of careful, dogged Communist organization among the Kurds, begun almost immediately after the Russian Revolution. On the eve of World War II, G.P.U. agents were busily signing dozens of secret treaties with Kurdish chieftains. In 1942 after the Russians had occupied northern Iran, the Reds went to work on a plan for an “independent” Kurdish nation. They took a group of Kurdish ‘chieftains from Iran and Iraq to Baku for a royal round of banquets and ballets. A Russian agent got wind of a secret patriotic organization called the Committee for Kurdish Youth, and promptly sent two agents, in the guise of horse traders, to offer “help.” The youth organization grew into a full-fledged Communist party and, by the end of 1945, into a Communist puppet regime. At Mehabad, in Persian Kurdistan, the “Kurdish People’s Republic” was proclaimed under the watchful eyes of Red army Tommy gunners.
The puppet state was squashed within a year by the Persian army, which marched into Mehabad and hanged its president to a flagpole. But the “People’s Republic” left several legacies, including General Barzani, who had headed the puppet state’s army and managed to fight his way back to Russia. I asked a Kurdish officer serving in the Iraq army what would happen if Barzani’s men came down across the border, calling on the Kurds to arise and unite. He answered: “Any Kurd—and I am proud to call myself one—would have a hard time resisting such a temptation. I am afraid Mullah Mustafa would be joined by many.”
What They Are Like. In Kurdistan, snow caps the highest mountains all of the year, and the wind whines down the sharp valleys. The Kurds are men to match their forbidding mountains. The sight of a Kurdish horseman plunging down the side of a hill and breaking out on to the valley floor to gallop in a rising cloud of dust is unforgettable. Stop a car along one of the lonely, untraveled roads of Kurdistan, and you’re almost sure to attract such a visitor. He comes thundering down on you as though he were leading a cavalry charge. A tasseled turban flies above his fierce, lean face, and the wind turns his wide, baggy pants into balloons. A rifle is slung across his back, and from the sash about his waist there hangs a great, curved dagger. As he reins up, he scowls ferociously and you murmur “Salaam” or “Marhaba” in greeting. Then, chances are, he will turn without a word or a sign, and gallop back across the valley and up the hill to tell his people, invisible across the ridge, that there is another damn foreigner poking about their land.
The Kurds are big men, simple, brutal, suspicious, proud, undisciplined and able. “The only progress worth recording in Kurdish life,” says one Middle Eastern cynic, “is the change from bows & arrows to guns.” Millions of them today still live as their ancestors did, driving their sheep behind the receding grass line into the hills in summer, returning to the valleys as winter comes. In mud-hut villages and black goatskin tents, they huddle together at night, with sentries posted to scan the darkness for raiders. They have been in their mountains for more than 4,000 years, seeking and respecting no foreign master. I have never seen a Kurd avert his stare or act humble. Above all, I have never seen a Kurdish beggar.
How is it that the Russians are making headway among these independent, intractable people? They have done it by exploiting the Kurds’ very desire for independence. Since 1919, Turkey, Iran and Iraq have had to quell eleven major Kurdish uprisings and hundreds of smaller revolts. Turkey’s Strongman Kemal Ataturk waged a relentless campaign against rebellious Kurds, even used fighter-bombers to strafe and bomb them (one of the planes was flown by Ataturk’s adopted daughter, a crack pilot who, at 39, wants to get to Korea to fly against the Chinese).
But the Kurds’ combativeness has meant not only trouble but leadership for the Middle East. The great Saladin, who matched swords and wits with Richard of the Lion’s Heart, was a Kurd who came out of the mountains to found a 12th century sultanate which extended from the Tigris to the Nile. Syria’s tough, able Dictator Adib Shishekly is half-Kurd. Many of the ablest army officers in the Middle East come from Kurdistan. Syria’s army and police force are full of Kurds. “When a Kurd is unhappy,” say the Syrians, “he becomes an outlaw. When he feels better, he becomes a soldier on a horse.”
What the Reds Are Doing. The Russians manage to use them, happy or unhappy. All over Kurdistan today, Soviet propagandists are working like beavers to make the Kurds look to the Russians as the-liberators who will come one day to unite them in freedom. Their radio broadcasts, pamphlets and throwaways are in idiomatic Kurdish that the people can understand. In Iraqi Kurdistan, Russian-trained dervishes (minstrels) wander from village to village reciting old Kurdish poems and songs. When the crowds they gather are sufficiently warmed up, the dervishes throw in a new song or two, heavily loaded with Communist propaganda. Almost all Kurds, even those who don’t like the Russians at all, know Joseph Stalin by the affectionate nickname, “Father of the Mustaches.”
A typical situation which the Reds exploit masterfully: When the Russians moved into northern Iran in 1941, many Persian landlords fled, leaving the land to their Kurdish tenants. In 1946, when the Russians pulled out and the landlords returned, they demanded five years’ back rent from tenants. The tenants had no choice but to sell, pawn, borrow and pay up. There are no more bitter people in Iran today. That is why a Westerner who has been in the area for 30 years says: “If the Russians came back tomorrow, 95% of the population would stand beside the road and cheer. When the Russians were here they conducted themselves properly. The return of the Persians and the landlords was a great contrast.”
Mehabad, cradle of the short-lived Kurdish Republic, is a rural slum today, thanks to the Teheran government, which punishes Mehabad’s people by refusing to buy their tobacco crop. In a recent election in Mehabad, the Russian-sponsored candidate got 1,600 out of 1,900 votes.
What the West Is Doing. The U.S. and Britain are making some feeble efforts to counteract Russian propaganda. Mobile film units show newsreels and Walt Disney films on how to stay healthy by not drinking dirty water. Britain has a couple of Kurdish-speaking consuls who are running themselves ragged. The U.S. prints a small weekly magazine in Kurdish which few people read. Its question & answer section (“Who invented penicillin?”, “What is television?”) draws about 30 letters a week.
A few Kurds have been to the U.S. and have come back fans of baseball, Xavier Cugat, and the Fifth Avenue girl. But by & large, most Kurds have heard of Americans only vaguely—and over Red radio stations.
“We used to think good of the Americans,” a Kurd told me, “and we still hope they will be our friends. Financial aid would be all right, but it is not enough. You must send us advisers who can help us with education and technical things. The people consider America a useful country. They think the Americans have helped other countries and may some day help them. But the Americans have promised help many times. I think the people now feel the Americans don’t stand by their promises. I think perhaps the Americans don’t care.”
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