McKiernan, Kevin, The Kurds, A People in Search of Their Homeland, St. Martin’s Press, 2006
The Kurds, A People in Search of Their Homeland followed journalist Kevin McKiernan as he travelled through Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran from 1991-2005 meeting various Kurds. There’s history thrown in for background but most of it is about the friendships he formed and the events he witnessed.
The author first went to Turkey in 1991 to witness the refugee crisis following the Gulf War and Kurdish uprising. That would start his travels to the region that would continue into the U.S. occupation of Iraq. He met various Kurdish leaders such as Massoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), Jalal Talabani and Barham Salih of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and others. He went to Halabja in Iraq which was hit with poison gas by Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War. He was with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in southern Turkey. He traveled to Kirkuk right after the 2003 invasion. He talked with Kurds who fled Saddam in Iraq and Ankara in Turkey.
McKiernan came away with two main observations. The first was that repression of the Kurds was supported by the international community. In the 1990s Turkey for example emptied hundreds of Kurdish villages, banned the Kurdish language, ran death squads against Kurdish notables, and more and this was all backed by the United States that armed Ankara and denied there was any real human rights abuses going on because it was part of NATO. Saddam was supported by France and America during the Iran-Iraq War and said nothing about the gassing of Halabja when it happened. He wondered if these powerful countries had made objections maybe the Kurds wouldn’t have been mistreated so much.
A second thing was how divided the Kurds were. The author witnessed the KDP and PUK fighting each other in the 1990s with the PKK backing the latter. The KDP worked against the PKK as a result. Ansar al-Islam which was an Islamist party went to war with the PUK in the 2000s. This allowed foreign countries to play the Kurds off against each other with Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey all backing one group or another to keep them weak and to use them against their rivals. That left the Kurds to become pawns in larger regional power struggles.
The best part of The Kurds however is the stories about the people the author met. One was a former PUK bodyguard who’d almost been killed in an assassination attempt against a party leader. He could barely walk or use his hands as a result. McKiernan was able to get him to the U.S. where he underwent a series of surgeries to fix the extensive damage to his body. Another time he employed a member of the Socialist Democratic Party as a fixer and became friends with him. After 2003 he was expelled from the party for being a Baathist sympathizer. His side of the story was that he was a secret envoy between the party and Baghdad and all the other parties did the same thing.
The Kurds, A People in Search of Their Homeland is not an academic work or a history. It’s more like a travel journal following McKiernan as he meets Kurds from different countries. It does provide background information but the heart of the narrative is the relationships McKiernan made and his observations about Kurdish refugees, political parties, the first two years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and more. Most importantly, the author was a good storyteller and that’s the main draw.
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