Dr. Jack Wheeler: © September 29, 2006,
The “civil war” is taking place in the Sunni and Shia regions of tripartite Iraq. It is the third part, Kurdish Iraq, that is holding Iraq together. The Kurds are already the key to keeping Iraq intact. When is it going to dawn on Washington that they are the key to solving the Middle East’s other intractable problems?
It won’t until it somehow acquires the wisdom to support Kurds in Iran – there are twice as many Kurds in Iran as in Iraq – struggling to liberate Eastern (Iranian) Kurdistan from the nightmare tyranny of the Mullacracy in Tehran. Kurds like Hussein Yazdanpanah, leader of the Revolutionary Union of Kurdistan (RUK) whose guerrilla fighters have been conducting anti-mullacracy activities for a generation.
Among the most fascinating folks in the world are people known as the Kurds. They are older than history. The Land of Kurda is mentioned in Sumerian clay tablets – the world’s oldest writing – over 5,000 years ago. The Land of Kurda – Kurdistan – was ancient five millennia ago.
The Kurds had been living there for thousands of years before 3,000 BC – and they are still living there today, in the mountains of what is now northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, and southeastern Turkey.
They number in the tens of millions – five million in Iraq, ten million in Iran, three million in Syria, between twenty and thirty million in Turkey. They are by far the largest ethnic group on earth without their own country.
This has always made them a threat to the countries that divide up their homeland of Kurdistan. Always. The Kurds have been fighting the Persians for 2,500 years, the Arabs for 1,300 years, the Turks for 500 years. Western governments look upon the Kurds as a problem which threatens to break apart the fragile map of the Middle East into chaotic pieces:
Now at last, the time has arrived to look upon the Kurds as an opportunity rather than a threat, not as a problem but a solution. The emerging reality is that the Kurds are the key to peace, freedom, and democracy throughout the entire Middle East. CONTINUE
