The Men of the Mountains

There the Greeks spent a happy night, with plenty to eat, talking about the struggle now past. For they had been seven days passing through the country of the Kurds, fighting all the time, and they had suffered worse things at the hands of the Kurds than all that the King of Persia, and his general, Tissaphernes, could do to them.

--Anabasis of Xenophon

Enemies of the Kurds have always had a hard time of it, from Xenophon and his ten thousand Greeks in 400 B.C., through Persians, Mongols, Turks, Crusaders, Arabs and British, up to this year, when the regime of Iraq's Karim Kassem was bled white by the effort to crush one more uprising of the ever-rebellious Kurds.

Deep Strike. In Baghdad last week, the new Iraqi regime that deposed and killed Kassem in February finally faced up to the issue of peace or continued war with the Kurdish leader, Mustafa Barzani. "The very day of the revolt against Kassem," said an angry Kurdish rebel, "the new Iraqi Revolutionary Command called for Kurdish support. With the revolution, the Iraqi armed forces were totally disorganized, and we could easily have struck deep into Iraq. Instead we accepted their promises and held our fire."

What the Kurds are demanding is regional autonomy with a Kurdish legislature and executive council, a proportionate share for Kurds of all revenues, oil royalties and foreign aid and, finally, special Kurdish army units with the sole right to garrison Kurdistan. The Iraqi government last week stiffly rejected the Kurdish memorandum, offering them instead only local self-government in a restricted mountain area that would have excluded virtually all major Kurdish population centers.

Three Plagues. The Kurdish homeland begins above Biblical Mount Ararat and extends south in a long, mountainous loop to the Persian Gulf (see map). Because of the accidents of history and their own inability to unite, the estimated 6,000,000 Kurds are today divided among five different nations: the Soviet Union.

Turkey, Syria. Iran and Iraq.

Like the Kurdish landscape, the Kurdish character has remained constant for thousands of years. Many Kurds are tall, fair-skinned and blue-eyed. Of life they ask little more than flocks of broad-tailed sheep, a fine horse, a rifle with sufficient cartridge bandoleers, and a woman who can bear strong sons. For generations, the lowland Arab has been terrorized by the mountain Kurd. An Arab proverb says. "There are three plagues in the world: the rat. the locust and the Kurd." The Kurds reply. "A camel is not an animal, and an Arab is not a human being."

Of Iraq's 7,000,000 people, at least 1,500,000 are Kurds. They live in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, and are divided into 22 major and 54 minor tribes. Unlike the Arabs on the river plains, they are hard-working and full of bounce.

Broad-shouldered Mustafa Barzani, 60, has spent most of his adult life fighting for independence. After World War II, with Russian backing, Barzani became military boss of the Soviet-inspired Kurdish People's Republic in Iran and, when it collapsed, was for twelve years in exile in the Soviet Union. The younger brother of the ruling sheik of the Barzan tribe, Barzani denies he is a Communist, but echoes other Kurdish leaders who say that if war breaks out again the Kurds will "accept all the help we can get from anyone"--Russians included.

Shoot on Sight. At week's end, as their delegates still wrangled in Baghdad, both the Kurdish rebels and the Iraqi army prepared for the worst. The government proclaimed a dusk-to-dawn curfew around northern Iraq's oilfields, pump stations, airfields, and military depots, warned that violators would be "shot on sight." Iraqi troops blocked all roads leading into the Zagros Mountains. Nearly three-quarters of the army was busy building concrete pillboxes and fortifications covering the mountain passes.

But during the cease-fire the Kurds were not idle. Food has been stockpiled, arms replenished, and a standing army of 35,000 readied for battle, backed by a reserve of 100,000. The rebels are buttressed by scores of Kurdish officers who deserted from the Iraqi army, and are linked by a network of 100 captured field radio sets. But at week's end, the government called for more negotiations and promised to reconsider Kurdish demands. In turn, the Kurds agreed to hold up hostilities. "We don't want the responsibility for starting the war again," said a Kurdish spokesman, "but we and the government are far apart. It's like the distance from ground to sky."

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