The Sons of the Maidens

The cantankerous Kurds* were raising hell again. As the tribesmen swooped down from the mountains astride their well-kept horses, shooting and shouting rebellion, the worried citizens of Turkey and adjoining lands were not quite sure whether to blame it all on King Solomon the Wise, or on another great ruler of men--Joseph Stalin.

The Kurds' own legend explains that once upon a time, when the world was much younger and its men much stronger than today, Solomon grew tired of his 700 wives and 300 concubines. He sent his servants out toward the rising sun, with orders to bring back 400 beautiful maidens. The servants did his bidding, but on their way home through the Anti-Taurus Mountains a band of devils ambushed them. The devils killed all the men and raped the maidens. From this hasty and violent union sprang the proud race of the Kurds. Its women were of such comely form and feature that, in defiance of Mohamed's commandment, they never took the veil; but its men were hot-tempered, like the devils that had sired them.

The less romantic chronicles of contemporary history explain that Joseph Stalin had seized on the conveniently warlike Kurds as an instrument to put pressure on Russia's Middle Eastern neighbors. Eight hundred thousand of them live in Iraq, where their territory embraces rich oil deposits. Seven hundred thousand of them live in Iran, where they gave the Iranians a good scare when they attacked their western garrisons during the recent crisis. Even though that crisis was now "settled," the Kurds' usefulness had not ended. The focus of Middle Eastern politics had shifted to Turkey--and Turkey has 1,500,000 restless Kurds within her borders.

Some 20,000 more Kurds who had spilled over into the Russian Caucasus were encouraged by Moscow to develop their national traditions. Many of them served in the Red Army. Early this year, Moscow helped Mohamed, the Qazi of Saujbulagh (a distinguished Kurd and one of the few who ever abandoned shotguns and horses for the subtler and faster means of law and politics) to found an "Autonomous Kurdish Republic." Last week came reports that this new "state" had been expanded into a Greater Kurdistan to include all the Kurdish national factions, similar to the state promised, but never created, by the Treaty of Sevres in 1920. At its head, together with Mohamed, was a Kurdish leader named Mustapha Mullah Barzani, who, after an unsuccessful revolt against Iraq, had been adopted by the Russians. An unidentified Kurdish chieftain told the Associated Press that the Russians were furnishing arms and technicians to train the tribesmen for "a general drive for a free Kurdistan."

The Kurds of Iran, Iraq and Turkey are apt to exaggerate Russian support, because it gives them a potent bargaining threat against their governments. Turkey's Premier Sukru Saracoglu declared last week that the Russians' attitude toward the Kurds was "correct," and that they were destroying surplus equipment as they moved out of the Kurds's territories in Iran. But he added grimly that, in any attack on Turkey's northeastern provinces (which Russia claims), "We will fight, even if Britain and America take the side of aggression." Turkey still nervously watched the Kurds' black tents in their dark and barren mountains near the Russian border. There might yet be trouble from the sons of the maidens.

* Rhymes with gourds, despite Hilaire Belloc's observation: "The Dromedary is a cheerful bird: I cannot say the same about the Kurd."

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