Kurdish Culture During Post-WW1

The Kurdish political culture during Post-WWI did not prompt much Kurdish nationalism because the movement was neither powerful, nor compelling, but rather underdeveloped and new. During this time, the Kurds withstood “tribal fragmentation”, as well as “the absence of a hegemonic Kurdish dialect and the slow development of the written language due to the historical dominance of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian; and a relative detachment from direct modern Western influences”. Although there was uprisings after the failure of the treaty, “these uprisings and revolts were fragmented because of the tribal or religious leadership on one hand, and the underdeveloped and rural structure of Kurdish society on the other”. The Kurdish people of this time
The term pan-Arabism, or Arab nationalism, describes the drive for unification of countries with majority of Arabic speaking populations to join as one single nation or federation. Pan-Arabism aimed to “unify the segmented entity, and to bring it back to its natural condition”. While Pan-Arabism intended to consolidate the Arab people of the region, it also isolated the Kurdish people whom shared the same religion. The provisional Iraqi constitution of 1952 even claimed, “Iraq constitutes a part of the Arab nation”. This statement itself infuriated the Kurdish people and further detached them from the Iraqi government,, which led to stronger support behind the Kurdish nationalist movement. The Iraqi government still believed in the unification of all the people in the country behind this term, despite the inaccurate definition of the country of Iraq. However, “the Kurds in the mountainous north of Iraq were impossible to bring in under the umbrella of “the Arab nation”, because they considered themselves ethnically distinct from the Arabs”. The Kurdish attitudes towards the Iraqi government prior to pan-Arabism was not unconditional acceptance, but toleration despite their strong differentiating self-identification. Meanwhile, the rise of pan-Arabism threatened the identity and power of the Kurds in Iraq. Pan-Arabism risked making Iraq part of a greater
The Kurdish people being minority, have always faced persecution and oppression from the Arab leaders in which they have been subjects to. However, once Saddam Hussein came into power in 1979 as the President of Iraq, the Kurds faced a new evil enemy that operated as a dictator. Hussein recognized the problem that Kurdish autonomy would pose to his country and his regime. Saddam knew that “approximately two-third of the oil production and reserves as much of the fertile land were located in the Kurdish area… secession would strike at the economic heart of the state”. In addition, Kurdish sovereignty risked setting a precedent for other groups like the Shiites to seek independence, whom were “some 60 percent of the population”. This would “threaten the very future of the Iraqi state” by diminishing the population and territory. Hussein began to be challenged by the Kurds during the Iran-Iraq war due to independent kurdish militias supporting the Iranians while rebelling against the Iraqi government. In 1988, Hussein recognized the Kurds as an eminent threat to the legitimacy of his regime, and responded by crushing the forms of resistance through waging a counterinsurgency campaign called “Al Anfal”. Hussein’s offensive against the Kurds resulted in the bloody massacre of thousands of innocent Kurds across small towns and