Kurdish dreams of a homeland are always dashed

THE TREATY OF SEVRES, signed in 1920, carved the carcass of the Ottoman Empire into a number of nation states, including a “Kurdish State of the Kurds…east of the Euphrates, south of the southern boundary of Armenia as it may be hereafter determined, and north of the frontier of Turkey with Syria and Mesopotamia.” It would, said Winston Churchill, Britain’s minister of colonies, be “a friendly buffer state” between Turks and Arabs.

Three years later, the Treaty of Lausanne ditched the idea. Britain was too spent by the first world war to fight another battle with Turkey, resurgent under Kemal Mustafa Ataturk. Iraq’s new Hashemite king needed the Kurds, who were Sunnis, to dilute his Shia majority. And some of the Kurds, who were new to the idea of nationalism, rebelled, demanding the restoration of Ottoman rule. That led to bombings by the newly formed Royal Air Force.