'Military report on Iraq. Area 9 (Central Kurdistan)' [‎9r] (22/394)

CHAPTER I
HISTORY.
General.
Towards the middle of the 19th century the Ottoman Govern
ment began a serious attempt to establish its rule over the Kurds,
the most independent as well as the most turbulent element of
the empire. The Turks rightly diagnosed the root of the difficulty
to be the power of the tribal chieftains, who combined a ruthless
mediaeval authority with a plentiful supply of rifles. The Turks
proceeded to deal with them after Turkish fashion, using one to
undermine the power of his neighbours, laying stealthy hands on
another, subsidising a third till his power waxed and called for
correction. In this manner they scattered over the empire the
Baban family of Sulaimani in southern Kurdistan, while in the
north they brought the Badr Khans of Jazirat-ibn-Omar to
Constantinople, subjected Abdul Qadir, the head of the ruling
house of Shemsdinan, to intermittent exile, favoured Ibrahim
Pasha An Ottoman title used after the names of certain provincial governors, high-ranking officials and military commanders. , of the Milli, east of Aleppo, and then encouraged his rivals
to fall upon him and destroy him. A systematic attempt to
exterminate the Armenians, begun in Abdul Hamid’s time and
continued by the Committee of Union and Progress, added
official persecution to the other forms of disorder which wracked
Anatolia Peninsula that forms most of modern-day Turkey. . The Kurds were used as agents of destruction. The
war brought the Armenian policy to a climax. The massacres
of 1896 and 1909 were not comparable to the slaughter carried out
with the tacit encouragement of the Germans in 1915 and the
succeeding years. The Kurds inherited the villages and lands
of the dead Armenians, but they did not go entirely unpunished.
Armenian refugees and Armenians of the Russian Caucasus
joined the Russian army, and they took occasion to retaliate on
the Kurds, doing as they had been done by. The Kurds affirm
that their losses were 400,000 as against a million or more
Armenians. At Rowanduz in 1916 the Russian and Armenian
forces, when they retreated, left the town and district a desolation
from which it has never recovered.
The Turkish Nestorians, or, as they prefer to be called,
Assyrians, had not been comprehensively massacred, but a neigh
bouring Kurdish Agha, Simko, chief of the Shikak tribe, murdered
their Patriarch in 1916. In revenge they attacked him, and,
when too hard pressed, migrated in a body and joined their
co-religionists in the Urumieh plain, where they put up a stout
resistance to the Turks and Kurds until 1918, when the whole
community—men, women, children, and cattle and such household
goods as they could carry—abandoned the position and marched