Subscribe now

Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule

by Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson & Khaled Salih

Subscribe now

Parts I to IV of the book can be found here (work from the bottom of the list).

Part V — The Dream After 2011

After 2011, the world saw the Kurds more clearly. The question was whether visibility could become protection and protection could become home.

Part V Introduction: The Dream After 2011 // Chapter 15: Rojava and the Syrian Earthquake

Chapter 16: ISIS and the Kurdish Moment

Chapter 17: A Moment of Dignity and the Punishment of Hope

2017 independence referendum, Kirkuk, Baghdad, Iran, Turkey, U.S. ambiguity and Kurdish miscalculation

The 2017 independence referendum was the moment when a morally legitimate Kurdish hope was asked to carry more strategic weight than the political machinery around it could bear.

This chapter argues a limited claim: the 2017 independence referendum was a genuine expression of Kurdish dignity and democratic desire, but dignity without enforceable protection became vulnerable to punishment.

This is plebiscitary anti-fungibility. The voter must not become only a number in a mandate. The flag must not replace the citizen. The map must not replace the villages, towns, disputed cities, minorities, families, workers, women, Pêşmerge, journalists, and young people exposed by the decision. A referendum can reveal the depth of a people’s longing, but it cannot by itself protect the people who carry that longing. Hope becomes responsible only when it refuses to make persons replaceable by the symbolic beauty of the vote.

It did not come from nowhere. It came after Anfal, after Helebje, after the safe haven, after the federal opening, after Article 140 had been delayed and hollowed out, after the Iraqi army collapsed before ISIS, after the Pêşmerge defended Erbil and Kirkuk, after Kurdish forces became indispensable to the anti-ISIS war, and after decades in which every Iraqi promise to the Kurds seemed either broken, postponed, or conditional.

For many Kurds, the referendum was not a reckless invention. It was the answer to a century of waiting.

It was also a one-day Kurdish attempt to experience political normalcy. For one day, Kurds were not asking to be admired as fighters, pitied as victims, managed as a minority, postponed as a problem, or used as a temporary ally. They were answering the state question in their own name. The vote said: we too are a people who wish to stand normally among other peoples, not forever as an exception inside someone else’s sovereignty.

The question placed before voters on 25 September 2017 was direct: did they want the Kurdistan Region and the Kurdistani areas outside the region’s administration to become an independent state? The answer was overwhelming. Results showed more than 92 percent voting “yes.” More than three million people participated. The emotional meaning was clear: after genocide, betrayal, federal ambiguity, Baghdad’s pressure, and the sacrifices of the anti-ISIS war, Kurds wanted the world to hear that their desire for statehood had not died.

But the world heard something different.

That was the tragedy of the normalcy claim. What Kurds experienced as a peaceful democratic answer, surrounding powers translated back into the old vocabulary of threat. A vote became destabilization. A people’s wish to stand normally among other peoples became a regional danger. The act Kurds understood as dignity was received by others as a breach in the cage.

Baghdad heard a challenge to Iraqi “sovereignty.” Iran heard a threat to its regional corridor, its influence in Iraq, and its own Kurdish question. Turkey heard the danger of a Kurdish state on its border, one that might inflame Kurdish aspirations inside Turkey and strengthen wider Kurdish nationalism.

The United States heard a distraction from the anti-ISIS campaign and a destabilizing rupture between two of its own partners: Baghdad and Erbil. Europe heard timing problems, legal concerns, and regional risk. The United Nations urged caution. Almost everyone told the Kurds to postpone.

They voted anyway.

To many Kurds, postponement did not sound like prudence; it sounded like the old language by which every Kurdish opening had been delayed until it disappeared.

This is why the referendum must be understood not only as a political event, but as a psychological event. Kurdish history had taught that postponement usually meant burial. Article 140 had been postponed. Self-rule had been postponed. Recognition had been postponed. Justice for Arabization had been postponed. The Kurdish leadership believed that if it waited for everyone else to approve the right moment, the right moment would never come.

That instinct was historically understandable.

It was also strategically not without serious risks.

Subscribe now

The referendum revealed the gap between Kurdish moral time and international diplomatic time. Kurdish moral time said: we have waited long enough. Diplomatic time said: not now, not like this, not with Kirkuk included, not while ISIS is still unfinished, not while Baghdad is recovering, not while Turkey and Iran are hostile, not without U.S. support, not without internal Kurdish unity, not without a clear plan for the morning after.

The Kurds had the stronger moral argument. Their opponents had the stronger coercive position.

This imbalance doomed the moment.

The inclusion of Kirkuk and other disputed territories made the referendum far more explosive. For Kurds, Kirkuk was not an optional add-on. It was the heart of the unresolved Kurdish question in Iraq: Arabization, oil, displacement, delayed Article 140, and the memory of lands taken by force. Kurdish forces had moved into Kirkuk in 2014 after Iraqi security forces collapsed during the ISIS offensive. From the Kurdish perspective, the Pêşmerge had protected Kirkuk when Baghdad failed. Why should the city be excluded from a vote on Kurdistan’s future?

But for Baghdad, Kirkuk was a red line. For Turkey, it was tied to Turkmen claims, energy routes, and fear of Kurdish statehood. For Iran, it was central to Iraqi balance and regional influence. For many Arabs and Turkmen inside Kirkuk, the referendum was seen as unilateral Kurdish annexation rather than democratic self-determination. The Kirkuk Provincial Council’s decision to participate was boycotted by many Arab and Turkmen members, showing how contested the process was even locally.

Kirkuk transformed the referendum from a vote of Kurdish self-expression into a territorial confrontation.

Read more

***

Please like and share this chapter. Don't let the Kurds disappear like the short-term memory of the West, continually under the unfortunate spell of Sultan Erdogan the Unjust. - Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor, Guerre and Shalom)

Subscribe now

Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule

by Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson & Khaled Salih

Subscribe now

Parts I to IV of the book can be found here (work from the bottom of the list).

Part V — The Dream After 2011

After 2011, the world saw the Kurds more clearly; the question was whether visibility could become protection and protection could become home.

Part V Introduction: The Dream After 2011 // Chapter 15: Rojava and the Syrian Earthquake

Chapter 16: ISIS and the Kurdish Moment

Kobani, Sinjar, Pêşmerge, Yezidis, international legitimacy and moral authority

ISIS forced the Kurds into a terrible kind of visibility.

For decades, Kurdish suffering had been treated as local, tribal, separatist, inconvenient, or secondary to larger state interests. Anfal had been known but insufficiently answered. Helebje had shocked the world but not transformed the world’s treatment of Kurdish rights. The safe haven had protected Kurds in Iraq after catastrophe, but it had not resolved the Kurdish question. Rojava had emerged from Syria’s collapse, but it remained unrecognized. The Kurdistan Region had become a federal reality, but its disputes with Baghdad remained unresolved.

Then ISIS appeared as a force of naked extermination.

This chapter argues a limited claim: ISIS forced the world to see Kurdish courage, sacrifice, and military necessity, but visibility did not become protection unless it was converted into institutions, guarantees, minority safety, Kurdish unity, and accountable power.

This is moral-usefulness fungibility. The Kurdish person becomes visible when useful against a monster: fighter, rescuer, ground partner, woman with a rifle, guardian of minorities, defender of Kobani, witness to Sinjar, symbol of pluralism, or proof that ISIS could be defeated. These forms of visibility were deserved, but they were not enough. A people must not have to become militarily useful or morally photogenic before its rights are taken seriously. Kurdish legitimacy did not begin when the world needed Kurdish fighters; ISIS revealed a legitimacy that already existed.

The Islamic State did not hide its intentions. It enslaved, massacred, raped, beheaded, expelled, and destroyed. It was not merely an insurgency or a terrorist organization. It was a project of total domination: a death-state dressed in religious language, administrative ambition, theatrical cruelty, and genocidal intent. This is not a judgment on Muslim faith as lived by ordinary believers; it is a judgment on a totalitarian movement that turned sacred vocabulary into enslavement, execution, and rule by terror. It targeted Shi‘a, Christians, Yezidis, Kurds, dissenting Sunnis, secular activists, women, journalists, and anyone who resisted its rule. It turned ancient towns into killing grounds and human beings into property.

Subscribe now

The Kurdish Moment

In that darkness, Kurdish and allied forces became one of the main barriers between ISIS and further catastrophe.

This was the brief Kurdish strategic opening.

It did not come because the world finally understood Kurdish history in full. It came because ISIS made one fact impossible to avoid: Kurdish fighters stood between a genocidal movement and further catastrophe. Against ISIS, the Kurds appeared as protectors: Pêşmerge in Kurdistan Region, YPG and YPJ in Syria, PKK-linked fighters in the mountains, local Yezidi defenders, and Kurdish-led forces holding lines where state armies had collapsed. For a brief period, the Kurdish fighter became one of the most recognizable public images of resistance to Jihâdist barbarism.

This was both deserved and dangerous.

Deserved, because the sacrifice was real; dangerous, because admiration can become another temporary use of a stateless people.

The symbol must not consume the person. The Pêşmerge is not only the face of survival. The YPG fighter is not only a ground partner. The YPJ fighter is not only an icon of defiance. The SDF fighter is not only coalition utility. The Yezidi defender is not only proof of rescue. The Kurdish mother, refugee, prisoner, journalist, doctor, and child are not background to the fighter’s image. The brief Kurdish strategic opening becomes dangerous when the world sees Kurds clearly only in the form that makes them useful.

Objection: International admiration was not only cynical. It reflected real gratitude for Kurdish sacrifice and real fear of ISIS.

Correction: True. The criticism is not that admiration was false. The criticism is that admiration remained politically shallow when it did not become durable protection, recognition, justice for vulnerable communities, or enforceable guarantees.

It was deserved because Kurdish forces sacrificed enormously. They fought in Kobani, Sinjar, Makhmur, Kirkuk, Gwêr, Jalawla, Khanaqin, Mosul’s approaches, Raqqa, Manbij, and countless other fronts. They protected cities, opened escape routes, rescued civilians, guarded refugees, and gave the international coalition its most reliable ground partners in crucial areas. Kurdish women fighters, especially in the YPJ, became global icons of defiance against ISIS misogyny. The Pêşmerge became, once again, the face of a people standing between annihilation and survival.

It was dangerous because international admiration often comes without commitment. The world praises stateless fighters when they are useful, then hesitates when those fighters ask for political recognition. The Kurds were celebrated as heroes against ISIS, but heroism did not automatically become sovereignty, security guarantees, or justice for disputed territories. Kurdish and allied sacrifice created moral legitimacy; it did not guarantee rights.

Subscribe now

Kobani: The Symbol of Resistance

Kobani was the first great symbol.

In 2014, ISIS advanced on the Kurdish city of Kobani in northern Syria. The town became surrounded. Many expected it to fall. ISIS had already seized vast territories in Syria and Iraq. It had captured Mosul, humiliated the Iraqi army, taken weapons, resources, and global attention. Its black flag had become a sign of terror. Kobani looked small against that machinery.

But Kobani resisted.

As the previous chapter showed, Kobani also revived the older Mehabad pattern: one part of Kurdistan under existential pressure, another part crossing an imposed border to help hold the line.

The YPG and YPJ fought street by street, under siege, under shelling, under the gaze of the Turkish border, where observers could literally watch the battle unfold. The city became both battlefield and theatre. The world saw Kurdish fighters holding ruins against an enemy that had terrified states. Women fighters became especially powerful symbols: armed Kurdish women resisting a movement that enslaved women and treated female bodies as spoils of war.

Subscribe now

The War of Meanings

This symbolism mattered because war is not only fought with bullets. It is fought with meanings.

ISIS did not merely threaten Kurdish territory. It threatened the possibility of a plural Middle East. Its war was not only against Kurds, Yazidis, Christians, Shiʿa, dissenting Sunnis, women, and secular life. It was against ambiguity itself. It was against life itself. It sought a world in which every person had one authorized identity, every woman one legal status, every believer one permissible interpretation, every outsider one fate. In that sense, the Kurdish front line became more than a military line. It became a line between a closed world and an open one.

ISIS presented itself as inevitable, divinely sanctioned, masculine, apocalyptic, and terrifying. Kobani answered with a different image: ordinary people, including women, defending a town that should have fallen but did not. The Kurdish resistance punctured ISIS’s mythology. It showed that the Islamic State could be resisted, fixed in place, bombed, and defeated. The U.S.-led coalition’s air support was crucial, but airpower needed fighters on the ground. Kobani made the YPG visible as that ground force.

Kobani also exposed the contradictions of Turkey’s position. Turkey watched the rise of a PKK-linked Kurdish force along its border with alarm. For Ankara, the YPG’s success was not simply a victory against ISIS; it was a strategic threat. The Turkish state saw the possibility of a Kurdish-controlled belt in northern Syria connected ideologically to the PKK. This meant that while much of the world saw Kobani as heroic resistance, Turkey saw it through the logic of counterinsurgency and border security.

This contradiction would shape everything that followed. The Kurds could be indispensable to the anti-ISIS war and still be treated by a NATO state as a security enemy. The United States could arm and support Kurdish-led forces against ISIS while trying not to rupture relations with Turkey. Kurdish fighters could become global symbols while remaining diplomatically vulnerable. Kobani created international legitimacy, but not international protection in the full sense.

Objection: Turkey’s fear of a PKK-linked force on its border cannot be dismissed as imaginary.

Correction: Correct. The issue is not whether Turkey has security concerns. The issue is whether those concerns became a doctrine that treated Kurdish-led self-rule itself as intolerable, even when Kurdish forces were central to resisting ISIS.

Sinjar: The Deeper Wound

Subscribe now

Sinjar was the deeper wound.

Sinjar must be treated with special care. The Yezidis are not merely a symbol within Kurdish history; they are a distinct religious community whose genocide, enslavement, displacement, and struggle for agency must not be absorbed into anyone else’s narrative.

This is Yezidi non-fungibility. The Yezidi woman is not only evidence of ISIS cruelty. The survivor is not only testimony. The abducted girl is not only a symbol of Kurdish suffering. The mountain is not only a scene of rescue. Sinjar is not only a Kurdish wound, a party arena, a security file, or a diplomatic problem. Yezidi agency must remain visible inside every narrative that invokes Yezidi catastrophe. To absorb Yezidi suffering into Kurdish legitimacy without protecting Yezidi voices would repeat, in softer form, the reduction the chapter is warning against.

If Kobani became the symbol of resistance, Sinjar became the symbol of abandonment, genocide, and rescue.

Read more

Today, we begin publishing Part V of Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule (Introduction, plus Chapter 15: The Story of Rojava in Syria).

As the narrative approaches the present, the Kurdish story becomes one of extraordinary resilience, painful setbacks and moments that transformed both Kurdistan and the wider Middle East. Today’s published chapters (and those to come) examine not only the struggle for self-rule, but also the political ideas, institutions, and choices that continue to shape the Kurdish future.

If you have not yet joined us, consider subscribing. We have been publishing the complete book in five parts, giving subscribers access to a work that brings together history, political philosophy and firsthand experience to illuminate more than a century of the Kurdish question.

By subscribing to The Kurdish Dream of Self-Rule on Guerre & Shalom, you will also gain access to a growing collection of books, essays and long-form research exploring Kurdistan, the Middle East and the ideas that shape our world.

We thank you for joining us for the final stages of this journey.

• Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor, Guerre and Shalom)

  Subscribe now

Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule

by Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson & Khaled Salih

Subscribe now

Parts I to IV of the book can be found here (work from the bottom of the list).

Part V — The Dream After 2011

After 2011, the world saw the Kurds more clearly; the question was whether visibility could become protection and protection could become home.

Part V Introduction: The Dream After 2011

State weakness, Kurdish visibility, ISIS, Rojava, referendum, punishment and the adapted cage

Part V follows the Kurdish dream into the twenty-first century’s broken order.

The Arab Spring, the Syrian civil war, ISIS, the rise of Rojava, the battle of Kobani, the Yezidi genocide in Sinjar, the U.S.-Kurdish military partnership, the defeat of ISIS’s territorial caliphate, the 2017 independence referendum, the loss of Kirkuk, Turkish expansion, Iranian pressure, Baghdad-Erbil disputes and Syria’s unresolved future reshape the Kurdish question.

This part is not an epilogue. It is the unresolved present.

This introduction argues a limited claim: after 2011, Kurdish politics gained unprecedented visibility and new spaces of self-rule, but visibility did not become protection unless it was joined to strategy, institutions, unity, and enforceable guarantees. The dream entered the global stage, but the cage adapted.

The adapted cage does not always deny Kurdish existence outright. It may recognize Kurdish courage, use Kurdish forces, negotiate with Kurdish leaders, and tolerate limited self-rule while keeping the decisive guarantees of security, territory, economy, and recognition in other hands.

This is visibility-fungibility. The world could see Kurds as brave fighters, secular allies, women with rifles, victims of ISIS, defenders of Kobani, rescuers of Sinjar, referendum voters, democratic experimenters, or useful ground partners. But visibility is not the same as political protection, and admiration is not the same as recognition. A people can become globally visible while still being treated as strategically replaceable. Kurdistanî Azad begins where Kurdish persons are no longer valued only for what they symbolize, suffer, defend or provide to others.

Subscribe now

Openings Without Safety

After 2011, history opens again — but never safely. The same fractures that create Kurdish possibility also invite militias, foreign armies, Jihâdists, regional bargains, and new forms of dependency. In Syria, the weakening of the Ba‘thist state allows Kurds in Rojava to build self-administration after decades of silence, statelessness, Arabization, and repression. The PYD, YPG, YPJ, communes, councils, women’s structures, and the language of democratic self-rule make northern Syria the site of one of the most important Kurdish political experiments of the modern era. It is fragile, contested, ideologically complex, and surrounded by enemies. It must therefore be judged as both achievement and problem: an experiment in self-rule under siege, but also a political order whose own power must remain open to criticism.

Rojava must therefore pass the same anti-fungibility test applied throughout this book. The woman fighter must not become only an image for foreign admiration. The commune must not become only proof of ideology. The YPG and YPJ must not become the people. The PYD must not become Rojava itself. Minorities must not become ornamental evidence of pluralism. The besieged experiment must be defended from annihilation, but it must also remain criticizable by the persons living inside it. Otherwise visibility becomes another cage: beautiful to outsiders, difficult to correct from within.

This proves that Kurdish politics in Syria had not appeared suddenly. It had been compressed for decades, waiting for the state to crack.

The opening was therefore real, but it was not innocent: the collapse of state control made self-rule possible while also exposing Kurdish society to war, siege, ideological monopoly, regional hostility, and foreign bargaining.

Subscribe now

Global Visibility and the Old Question

Then ISIS forces the Kurdish struggle into global visibility.

Kobani becomes a moral image of resistance. Sinjar becomes a wound that exposes the cost of abandonment. The Yezidi catastrophe must be understood not only within Kurdish history, but as an assault on a distinct community whose survival cannot be reduced to anyone else’s symbolism. Kurdish forces — Pêşmerge, YPG, YPJ, and later SDF — become indispensable ground partners against the Islamic State. The world celebrates Kurdish courage. But the old question returns: why are Kurds praised when they fight the enemies of others, yet abandoned when they ask for guarantees of their own political future?

This is strategic-use fungibility. The Kurdish fighter becomes indispensable when fighting ISIS, then negotiable when Kurdish protection becomes diplomatically inconvenient. The Yezidi survivor becomes a moral image for the world, while Sinjar’s political future remains insecure. The woman fighter becomes a global symbol, but women’s freedom depends on institutions that remain after the cameras leave. The ally becomes useful, then expendable. The danger is not only abandonment; it is being admired in precisely the form that makes abandonment easier.

Objection: International military cooperation against ISIS was not nothing. It saved lives, helped defeat ISIS’s territorial caliphate, and gave Kurdish forces unprecedented diplomatic and military visibility.

Correction: True. The criticism is not that cooperation was worthless. The criticism is that military usefulness did not become durable political guarantee. Kurds were indispensable as fighters, but still conditional as political partners.

Objection: Rojava should not be romanticized as pure democratic self-rule. It has been shaped by war, PYD dominance, PKK-linked ideology, security pressures, party control, and restrictions on rivals.

Correction: That objection belongs inside Part V. Rojava matters because it opened Kurdish public life after decades of Syrian denial; but no experiment born under siege should be exempt from criticism simply because it resisted worse enemies.

Subscribe now

2017: The Punishment of Unprotected Hope

The 2017 independence referendum in the Kurdistan Region becomes the punishment of unprotected hope. The vote expressed a deep historical longing for statehood and a refusal to let Kurdish destiny remain permanently postponed. The aftermath exposes strategic vulnerability: Baghdad’s response, Iranian and Turkish pressure, American ambiguity, the loss of Kirkuk, internal Kurdish division, and the limits of symbolic mandate without enforceable power.

Objection: The referendum was a legitimate expression of a people’s right to say that postponed freedom cannot be postponed forever.

Correction: Yes. That is why it must not be dismissed as mere mistake. But a moral mandate becomes vulnerable when it lacks unity, institutional preparation, external guarantees, military coordination, and a realistic plan for the morning after.

The flag is not a strategy. The vote is not a guarantee. The emotion of national dignity is not the same as the institutional protection of citizens. To say this is not to belittle the referendum; it is to take the voters seriously. Their hope deserved more than celebration. It deserved preparation, unity, legal strategy, diplomatic realism, military coordination, minority reassurance, economic planning, and a morning-after architecture strong enough to protect the people who said yes.

The referendum also needs an anti-fungibility rule. The voter is not merely a symbol of longing. The flag is not a strategy. The moral mandate is not a guarantee. Kirkuk is not only a prize inside national memory; it is a lived city of Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen, Christians, and others whose future cannot be reduced to anyone’s slogan. To honor the referendum seriously is to protect the persons and places exposed by its consequences, not merely the emotion it expressed.

The referendum therefore must be read with double discipline: as a genuine expression of Kurdish longing, and as a warning that moral mandate cannot substitute for strategy, unity, institutions, and guarantees.

Subscribe now

The Cage Adapts

After 2017, the Kurdish dream enters a new phase of strategic enclosure. Kurds remain divided among four states. Turkey expands militarily across borders. Iran represses Kurdish opposition and Kurdish civic life. Baghdad and Erbil remain trapped in disputes over oil, salaries, budgets, territories, and constitutional authority. Syria’s future remains unresolved. Rojava survives, but under constant threat. The diaspora speaks, but cannot substitute for power on the ground.

The adapted cage works by making Kurdish life replaceable through many vocabularies at once: counterterrorism, border security, oil dispute, salary dispute, demographic balance, constitutional interpretation, anti-PKK policy, anti-ISIS partnership, regional stability, refugee management, and diplomatic bargaining. The cage no longer needs one form. It adapts by turning Kurds into the category most useful to the surrounding power at that moment. The answer cannot be visibility alone. It must be institutions, unity, strategy, and internal correction strong enough to keep Kurdish persons from being exchanged between other people’s categories.

This enclosure is external, but it also tests the internal Backspace Key: whether Kurdish parties, administrations, armed forces, and movements can correct their own errors before surrounding powers exploit them.

Subscribe now

The Dream Must Become a Home

And yet the dream remains.

Objection: External pressure is so severe that internal criticism can seem like a luxury.

Correction: It is not a luxury. Under strategic enclosure, internal correction becomes more urgent, not less. Divided parties, captured institutions, opaque security forces, and unexamined decisions give surrounding powers exactly the openings they need.

The final chapters ask what the Kurdish dream can still become. They ask not only whether Kurds can obtain greater power, but whether Kurdish power can remain correctable. A free Kurdistan cannot mean one party replacing all parties, one official memory suffocating rival memories, one language imposed over others, or one heroic narrative immune from criticism. If Kurdistan is to be worthy of Azad’s dream, it must become more than a project for acquiring state power. It must become a home where memory is protected, criticism is not treason, minorities are not ornamental, women are not symbols only, institutions can be corrected, and the child is safer than the leader.

That is the difference between a dream that obtains power and a home that disciplines power.

Part V therefore ends where the book began: with Azad’s daughter.

The question is not whether Kurds have suffered. They have.

Not whether Kurds have resisted. They have.

Not whether Kurdistan exists. It does.

The question is whether the dream can become a durable political reality worthy of the people who carried it.

Conceptual Waymark

Key Terms in This Chapter

• Arab Spring

• Syrian civil war

• Rojava

• PYD

• YPG / YPJ

• SDF

• ISIS

• Kobani

• Sinjar

• Yezidi genocide / Yezidi catastrophe

• U.S.-Kurdish military partnership

• Global visibility

• Visibility-fungibility

• 2017 independence referendum

• Loss of Kirkuk

• Punishment of unprotected hope

• Turkish expansion

• Iranian pressure

• Baghdad-Erbil disputes

• Strategic enclosure

• Adapted cage

• Internal Backspace Key

• Strategic-use fungibility

• Home capable of correction

Meaning in This Chapter

Part V Introduction brings the Kurdish dream into the twenty-first century’s broken order. After 2011, state weakness again creates Kurdish openings, especially in Syria and Iraq, but those openings are never safe. The same fractures that allow Rojava, Kobani, Sinjar, the anti-ISIS partnership, and the 2017 referendum to enter world attention also invite Jihâdists, militias, foreign armies, regional bargains, Turkish expansion, Iranian pressure, Baghdad-Erbil disputes, and new dependencies. The chapter’s central claim is that Kurdish visibility after 2011 became unprecedented, but visibility was not the same as protection.

Visibility-fungibility names the danger that Kurds become globally visible only in forms others find useful or moving: fighters, victims, women with rifles, anti-ISIS partners, referendum voters, democratic experimenters, refugees, or symbols of courage. Strategic-use fungibility names the related danger that Kurdish forces, regions, wounds, minorities, and aspirations become valuable when serving external priorities and expendable when Kurdish protection requires enforceable guarantees. Part V asks whether Kurdish visibility can become durable protection, and whether protection can become a home capable of correction.

This Chapter Asks

This chapter asks whether Kurdish politics can turn visibility, sacrifice, self-rule, and moral longing into durable protection. The test is not only whether surrounding states, ISIS, militias, or foreign powers can be resisted. It is also whether Kurdish parties, administrations, armed forces, councils, movements, and leaders can correct their own errors before external powers exploit them. The Part V correction test is therefore double: resist the adapted cage outside, and keep the Backspace Key alive inside.

Chapter Summary

Part V is not an epilogue. It is the unresolved present. Kurdish politics after 2011 gains new visibility and new forms of self-rule through Rojava, Kobani, Sinjar, the anti-ISIS war, and the 2017 referendum, but it also faces ISIS, abandonment, regional pressure, Turkish expansion, Iranian pressure, Baghdad-Erbil disputes, internal division, and the limits of unprotected hope. The chapter prepares the final movement of the book: Kurdistan must become more than survival, symbolism, military usefulness, or strategic bargaining. It must become a home where memory is protected, criticism is not treason, minorities are not ornamental, women are not symbols only, institutions can be corrected, and the child is safer than the leader.

The danger after 2011 is therefore not invisibility alone, but visibility without protection: Kurds may be seen, praised, used, mourned, and abandoned unless visibility becomes enforceable political room and internal correction.

Chapter 15: Rojava and the Syrian Earthquake

Syrian uprising, PYD/YPG, ISIS, U.S. alliance, Turkey and self-rule without recognition

Read more

Chapter Summary:

The Difficult Art of Governing argues that criticism of Kurdish governance should be understood as protection of the dream, not hostility to it. The KRG’s achievements matter: security, public Kurdish culture, education, infrastructure, international visibility, regional institutions, refugee absorption, and a lived experience of Kurdish self-rule. But self-rule must be judged by whether institutions can correct themselves. Party capture, divided Pêşmerge forces, weak courts, pressure on journalists, patronage, gender injustice, minority insecurity, youth frustration, and economic dependency all test whether the dream has become a public home or only a structure controlled by those who delivered it. The mature question is not whether Kurds deserved self-government. They do. The question is whether Kurdish institutions can govern citizens better than the states that denied them.

The difficult art of governing is therefore the art of making Kurdish institutions strong enough to protect persons from the very powers created to serve them.

How do I read the chapter?

By becoming a paid subscriber of Guerre and Shalom. There you can access an ever-expanding list of books and articles on the Middle East, philosophy and the foundations of our shared civilization.

Subscribe now

Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule

by Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson & Khaled Salih

Subscribe now

Parts I to III of the book can be found here (work from the bottom of the list).

Part IV — The Dream Becomes Government

The dream becomes government only when the people remain larger than the institutions built in their name.

Introduction & Chapter 11: The Safe Haven

Chapter 12: The Kurdish Civil War

Chapter 13: A Federal Opening

Chapter 14: The Difficult Art of Governing

KRG institutions, mismanagement, party rule, development, diaspora return, civil society, women and youth

Liberation is easier to imagine than government. A child is not raised by the fact of birth alone. The same is true of self-government.

The safe haven gave Kurdish politics breath. The fall of Saddam gave it constitutional space. Federalism gave it a legal name. Oil gave it revenue. International recognition gave it access. But none of these could substitute for the patient work of raising Kurdistan into a functioning political home.

To raise Kurdistan meant building institutions stronger than parties.

This chapter argues a limited claim: Kurdish self-government is a historic achievement, but it becomes worthy of the dream only when its institutions can correct Kurdish power — party power, family power, security power, economic power, and inherited authority — without treating criticism as betrayal.

This is governance anti-fungibility. The citizen must not become party base. The teacher must not become salary dependency. The journalist must not become enemy. The judge must not become factional instrument. The woman must not become family honor. The minority must not become decoration. The Pêşmerge must not become party inheritance. The young person must not become a future to be postponed. Kurdish government becomes worthy of the dream only when it protects persons from being absorbed by the structures built in their name.

It meant making law stronger than loyalty. It meant making public service more honorable than patronage. It meant making criticism safer than silence. It meant ensuring that the Pêşmerge belonged to the public order, not to partisan inheritance. It meant paying teachers and doctors before distributing public resources through political loyalty. It meant treating women not only as symbols of the nation, but as equal authors of its future. It meant protecting minorities not as decoration, but as co-owners of the homeland.

The dream was not delivered so that any party could possess it.

The old question was whether others would allow Kurds to govern; the new question was whether Kurdish government would allow citizens to correct it.

Kurdish self-rule created Kurdish responsibility. The question is whether Kurdish institutions could build mechanisms for correcting Kurdish power.

The continuity error becomes most dangerous here. A party can say: we fought, we suffered, we buried martyrs, we defended the mountains, we returned from exile, we built institutions, therefore our continuity gives us ownership. But the conclusion does not follow.

Continuity of struggle is not ownership of the homeland. Historical sacrifice deserves honor, memory, and gratitude; it does not create permanent immunity from law, criticism, election, audit, or institutional restraint. The homeland is not the property of the organization that carried it through one phase of danger. It belongs to the citizens whose future the organization claims to protect.

Subscribe now

The Backspace Key Must Become Procedure

The deepest danger for Kurdish self-government is therefore not ordinary error. All governments make mistakes. The danger is that power will weaken the mechanisms by which mistakes can be found, named, criticized, and corrected. A parliament captured by parties, a court afraid of power, a journalist threatened into silence, a Pêşmerge divided by party loyalty, a budget hidden from citizens, a university afraid to think, a civil servant dependent on patronage — these are not separate failures only. They are attacks on the correction system itself. They close the channel through which the dream might repair its own errors. This is why criticism of Kurdish governance should be understood as protection of the dream, not hostility to it.

Each failure also makes someone fungible. The captured parliament makes the voter replaceable by party arithmetic. The frightened court makes the citizen replaceable by power. The silenced journalist makes public truth replaceable by private fear. The divided Pêşmerge makes common defense replaceable by factional command. The hidden budget makes the teacher, doctor, and civil servant replaceable by patronage. The timid university makes thought replaceable by caution. The dependent civil servant makes public service replaceable by loyalty. A government loses its Backspace Key when institutions stop protecting persons and start protecting the structures that use them.

Objection: Public criticism of Kurdish governance can be exploited by hostile states and anti-Kurdish forces that want to deny Kurdish self-rule altogether.

Correction: That danger is real, but silence is more dangerous. Hostile states exploit Kurdish weakness whether Kurds name it or not. The answer is not to hide errors, but to correct them before enemies can weaponize them.

The question is therefore not whether Kurdish institutions will make mistakes. They will. Every institution does. The question is: where does the error go? Can a teacher report failure without losing salary? Can a journalist expose corruption without being threatened? Can a judge rule against power without being punished? Can a citizen complain without needing party protection? Can a parliament investigate what ministers prefer to hide? Can the error reach the top, embarrass authority, and force revision? When the answer is no, decay has already begun.

A young self-government decays fastest when everyone privately knows the error and no institution can safely say it aloud.

The Backspace Key, here, cannot remain a metaphor. It must appear as procedure. A journalist must be able to publish evidence without being treated as an enemy. A court must be able to rule against officials without fear of party revenge. Parliament must be able to investigate budgets, oil contracts, security forces, and public salaries. A citizen must be able to complain without needing party protection. A woman must be able to refuse family or tribal authority without losing the protection of law. A minority village must be able to report abuse without being told to be grateful. A Pêşmerge family must be able to honor sacrifice without surrendering its vote to a party. If criticism cannot travel through institutions, the Backspace Key remains a slogan.

Subscribe now

Fear Before Censorship

Self-rule was delivered so that a people could live.

The test of every Kurdish institution is therefore simple: can it be corrected by the people it claims to serve? One of the quietest dangers is fear before censorship. A society does not need to imprison every critic in order to silence criticism. It only needs to teach people what not to say. The journalist avoids the question.

Read more

From the perspective of the broader intellectual project of Guerre and Shalom in PAX ARABICA and elsewhere, this chapter raises all the familiar questions: a) Are Middle Eastern minorities safe when they are promised federal self-rule short of independence? b) Can Western and regional powers be trusted to enforce legally agreed promises of protection? c) Can minorities rely on the goodwill of others who prioritise stability above all or should they protect themselves? d) What constitutional structures can guarantee the self-determination of non-Arab Middle Easterners? e) Can Arabization be reversed in such a way that represents collective justice for the indigenous peoples all the while respecting the individual rights of Arabs and other newly-settled groups? f) Can newly-empowered minority groups use the opportunities afforded to them to establish truly democratic institutions that respect the individual rights of all inhabitants of all ethnicities? Or will they descend into civil war and infighting?

We are honoured that Khaled and Ann-Catrin are able to pose and respond to these questions in such a way that respects the justice of history, the imperfection of human beings and the rights of those of all ethnicities who are innocent pawns in the process of politics. If Khaled continues to be involved in Kurdish politics and advises its leaders in line with his manifestly liberal democratic philosophy, Kurdistan will surely continue to be a beacon in a very troubled region. - Daniel Clarke-Serret (editor)

What’s the context of the chapter?

This chapter follows the Kurdish passage from protected self-rule into constitutional federalism after 2003. The fall of Saddam Hussein removed the regime that had carried out Anfal, Helebje, Arabization, and village destruction, and it allowed Kurds to enter the making of the new Iraq as constitutional actors rather than rebels outside the state. The Kurdistan Region gained legal standing inside Iraq’s federal order. This was a major historical achievement. But recognition did not resolve the hardest questions: Article 140, Kirkuk, disputed territories, oil, revenue, Pêşmerge status, federal courts, and Baghdad-Erbil trust. The constitution became both shield and battlefield.

The following questions were soon to emerge:

Would Kurds become constitutional partners rather than conditional minorities, rebels, security problems, disputed populations, budget dependents or bargaining chips?

Would federalism become a mechanism to protect Kurdish self-rule through enforceable institutions, namely territory procedures, revenue rules, trusted courts, security arrangements and disputed-territory settlement?

And would there be a shared recognition that Kurdish self-rule is a founding fact, not a temporary concession?

What does the chapter ask?

It asks whether federalism can become a genuine correction mechanism, or whether it becomes another language of postponement. The test is not whether Kurdish self-rule is recognized on paper, but whether constitutional language can protect Kurdish rights when territory, oil, revenue, courts, armed forces, and Baghdad-Erbil power become contested. It also tests the opposite danger: whether the correction of Arabization and disputed-territory policies can be pursued without displacing, subordinating or politically marginalizing Arabs, Turkmens, Assyrians, Yazidis, Shabaks, and other communities living in the same contested spaces.

Chapter Summary:

A Federal Opening shows that 2003 changed the Kurdish question in Iraq without solving it. The fall of Saddam allowed Kurds to help write the rules of the state that had tried to destroy them. The Kurdistan Region entered Iraq’s constitutional architecture with recognized institutions and legal standing. That was an extraordinary achievement. Yet the deepest conflicts remained unresolved: Article 140, Kirkuk, oil, revenue, Pêşmerge command, disputed territories, federal courts, and the limits of Baghdad’s acceptance. Federalism gave Kurdish self-rule its strongest legal form inside Iraq, but law without trusted enforcement left the settlement fragile. The dream had become government; now government had to survive law, oil, territory, ambition, and the return of history.

The federal opening made Kurds constitutional actors; its unfinished danger was that rights without enforcement could still leave Kurdish life vulnerable to postponement, bargaining and recentralization.

How do I read the chapter?

By becoming a paid subscriber of Guerre and Shalom. There you can access an ever-expanding list of books and articles on the Middle East, philosophy and the foundations of our shared civilization. On Friday September 11th, the price of a paid subscription will rise, so sign up today to lock in the current reduced rate. The price paid by existing subscribers will remain as before.

Subscribe now

Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule

by Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson & Khaled Salih

Subscribe now

Parts I to III of the book can be found here (work from the bottom of the list).

Part IV — The Dream Becomes Government

The dream becomes government only when the people remain larger than the institutions built in their name.

Introduction & Chapter 11: The Safe Haven

Chapter 12: The Kurdish Civil War

Chapter 13: A Federal Opening

2003, the fall of Saddam, the Iraqi constitution, Article 140, oil, security and disputed territories

The fall of Saddam Hussein changed the Kurdish position more dramatically than any event since 1991.

For the first time, the regime that had carried out Anfal, gassed Kurdish civilians in Helebje, destroyed villages, Arabized Kurdish lands, and treated Kurdish self-rule as a temporary problem to be crushed was gone. The Iraqi state did not simply weaken, as it had in 1991. Its central dictatorship collapsed. Its army dissolved. Its ruling party was banned. Its fear system broke open. The Ba‘thist state that had haunted Kurdish life for decades was suddenly removed from power.

For Kurds, this was not merely regime change. It was historical reversal.

In this chapter we present a limited claim: after 2003, Kurdish self-rule in Iraq moved from protected fact to constitutional form, but federal recognition remained fragile because the mechanisms needed to enforce it — territory, oil, security, revenue, courts, and trust — were never fully secured.

This is constitutional anti-fungibility. The Kurdish people were no longer to appear only as rebels, victims, mountain fighters, minority petitioners, security problems, or regional exceptions. They entered the new Iraq as constitutional actors. But that achievement could survive only if federalism made Kurdish self-rule a founding fact rather than a temporary concession. A constitution worthy of correction must not make Kurds replaceable by Baghdad’s convenience, American strategy, regional stability, oil disputes, court interpretation or postponed implementation.

But even this reversal took place inside occupation, Iraqi fragmentation, regional suspicion and a state-building process Kurds did not control alone.

From Hunted People to Constitutional Actors

The people once hunted by Baghdad now entered Baghdad as indispensable actors in the making of the new Iraq. Kurdish parties were no longer mountain movements negotiating from weakness. They became central participants in the reconstruction of Iraq. The KDP and PUK, despite the wounds of civil war, understood the strategic opportunity. They moved together enough to secure Kurdish interests in the new Iraqi order. That cooperation should not be minimized; after the civil war, even partial Kurdish coordination was itself a political achievement.

Here lay the great difference between the British-made Iraq of the 1920s and the Iraq remade after 2003. In the first Iraq, Kurds were incorporated into a state whose foundations had not treated them as co-equal partners. In the second, Kurds entered the constitutional process as essential actors. They were not simply pleading for recognition from the mountains. They were helping write the rules of the state itself.

This did not erase Kurdish vulnerability, but it changed the location of the struggle: the Kurdish question had entered the constitutional text.

After 2003, the Kurdish question entered law in a new way. The demand that had so often been treated as rebellion, foreign manipulation, or disorder could now appear as federalism, constitutional recognition, regional government and negotiated authority.

That legal translation mattered because it changed the category through which Kurdish life could be heard. The same demand that had once been punished as disorder could now be spoken as partnership. The same region once treated as rebellious terrain could now appear as a constituent federal region. The same Pêşmerge once treated as an insurgent force could now require constitutional settlement. The same Kurdish language, memory, and administration once treated as sources of danger could now claim institutional standing. Federalism, at its best, is the refusal to make a people fungible with rebellion merely because they demand room to govern themselves.

Federalism as Structural Protection

Federalism opened a real possibility. Iraq might have become something different from the state that had produced Arabization, Anfal, chemical attacks and mass displacement: a federal partnership in which Kurdish self-rule was not tolerated reluctantly, but accepted as one of the foundations of the country. The Kurdish leadership entered the post-2003 process with a clear memory: never again should Kurdish survival depend on Baghdad’s goodwill alone. This was the central lesson of Anfal translated into constitutional politics.

The Kurds did not seek merely cultural rights. They sought structural protection. They wanted recognition of the Kurdistan Region, federalism, Kurdish participation in federal institutions, protection for the Pêşmerge, reversal of Arabization, a process for disputed territories, and authority over internal security. They understood that words without institutions were dangerous. They had lived through too many promises that became traps.

Read more

by Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson & Khaled Salih

Subscribe now

Parts I to III of the book can be found here (work from the bottom of the list).

Part IV — The Dream Becomes Government

The dream becomes government only when the people remain larger than the institutions built in their name.

Introduction & Chapter 11: The Safe Haven

Chapter 12: The Kurdish Civil War

KDP-PUK conflict, internal fracture, external manipulation and the Washington Agreement

The safe haven gave the Kurds space.

The Kurdish civil war showed that space alone was not enough.

This chapter argues a limited claim: the Kurdish civil war did not prove that Kurds were incapable of self-rule; it proved that self-rule born from armed struggle requires institutions stronger than the parties that delivered it.

This is party-war fungibility. The people who had survived Baghdad, Anfal, Helebje, flight, and abandonment were now at risk of becoming interchangeable with armed-party claims. The citizen could become KDP or PUK before becoming public. The region could become party territory before becoming common home. The Pêşmerge could become party inheritance before becoming public defense. The checkpoint could become the border of loyalty. The dream could be divided between those who claimed to have carried it. Civil war is the moment when the people begin to disappear into rival carriers of the people.

After 1991, Kurdistan Region in Iraq had something unprecedented in modern Kurdish history: protection from Baghdad, returning refugees, open political life, Kurdish administration, election, parliament, and the beginnings of government. For a people emerging from Anfal and Helebje, this was extraordinary. The dream had descended from the mountain into institutions. Kurdistan was no longer only a rebellion, a memory, or a forbidden word. It had ministries, parties, flags, checkpoints, media, and elections.

But the same conditions that made self-rule possible also exposed the wounds inside Kurdish politics. The external oppressor had not disappeared, but its immediate reach had been weakened. That meant Kurdish parties now had to confront one another not only as allies against Baghdad, but as competitors for power, territory, revenue, legitimacy, and the right to define the future.

The Kurds had escaped one burning house, but the new house had to be built with hands still shaking from smoke, loss, suspicion, and grief. Protection from Baghdad created space, but it did not create trust. The safe haven offered a foundation. It did not decide who would hold the blueprint, who would control the doors, or whether the rooms would belong to the people or to the parties.

That question — whether public authority would belong to citizens or to armed parties — is the chapter’s central correction test.

The result was one of the most painful episodes in modern Kurdish history: the war between the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan that broke out in 1994.

This war was not simply a quarrel between two leaders. It was the eruption of accumulated structural tensions: geography, ideology, party history, conflicting networks, foreign alliances, economic control, border revenue, personal rivalry, and the difficulty of transforming guerrilla movements into democratic institutions. The KDP and PUK had both sacrificed for Kurdistan. Both had martyrs. Both had prisons in their memory. Both had fought Baghdad. Both had legitimacy. That was precisely what made the conflict so dangerous. It was not a war between Kurdistan and an obvious enemy. It was a war between two Kurdish claims to Kurdistan.

The danger lay in the word claim. Each party could point to sacrifice, memory, territory, leadership, loyalty, martyrs, prisons, and war against Baghdad. Each could say it had carried Kurdistan when others failed. But no carrier of Kurdistan is identical with Kurdistan. The KDP was not Kurdistan. The PUK was not Kurdistan. Their martyrs were not the whole future. Their regions were not private inheritance. Their armed histories did not give either party ownership over the people. The civil war became possible when gratitude for sacrifice failed to become limits on power.

Subscribe now

When Parties Are Stronger Than the Government

The roots went back before 1991. The KDP, associated with the Barzani family and rooted strongly in the Erbil-Duhok-Bahdinan regions, carried the prestige of Mustafa Barzani, the 1961 September Revolution, and the older nationalist struggle against Baghdad. It had tribal, rural, conservative, and nationalist dimensions, though it also contained modern political currents. The PUK, founded in 1975 by Jalal Talabani and others, a breakaway from KDP, after the collapse of the Kurdish revolt, drew more heavily from Suleimani, intellectuals, leftist currents, urban activists, and those who criticized KDP dominance and traditional leadership patterns.

This difference was not absolute. The KDP was not merely tribal. The PUK was not merely ideological. But each party developed its own social world. Each had its own geography, emotional memory, leadership culture, patronage networks, military structures, and foreign contacts. After 1991, these worlds were forced to share one fragile government.

Read more

Today, we are publishing Part IV of Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule (Introduction and Chapter 11). As the narrative approaches the present, the Kurdish story becomes one of extraordinary resilience, painful setbacks, and moments that transformed both Kurdistan and the wider Middle East. These chapters examine not only the struggle for self-rule, but also the political ideas, institutions, and choices that continue to shape the Kurdish future.

If you have not yet joined us, consider subscribing. We are publishing the complete book in five parts, giving subscribers access to a work that brings together history, political philosophy and firsthand experience to illuminate more than a century of the Kurdish question.

By subscribing as paid to The Kurdish Dream of Self-Rule on Guerre & Shalom, you will also gain access to a growing collection of books, essays, and long-form research exploring Kurdistan, the Middle East, and the ideas that shape our world.

If you would like to explore the project first, the Authors’ Prologue and additional introductory material are available free of charge, and Parts I, II and III can be found in our earlier Substack releases on this tab of our website (work from the bottom up).

We hope you will join us for the final stages of this journey. - Daniel CS (editor)

For more on Iraq:

For more on American interventions in the Middle East:

Subscribe now

Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule

by Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson & Khaled Salih

Part IV — The Dream Becomes Government

The dream becomes government only when the people remain larger than the institutions built in their name.

Part IV Introduction

The Dream Becomes Government

Safe haven, self-government, civil war, federalism, and the difficult art of corrigible rule

In the prologue, we described London in 1991: a Kurdish refugee catastrophe, a pregnancy, and a T-shirt saying Kurdistan — Let it be. Ann-Catrin wore that shirt while pregnant; Khaled photographed her and said that one day, if the Kurds survived, the image would make a book cover.

Only later did we fully understand why the image mattered.

The Kurdish dream was like unborn life. It was real before it was secure. It was loved before it had protection. It was carried through fear, memory, and expectation. It belonged to the future, but the future gave no guarantees.

The safe haven after 1991 was therefore not the end of the dream.

It was the birth.

And birth is not completion.

A child who survives delivery must still be raised. The transition from hidden protection into exposed life is dangerous. Breath must begin. The body must adjust. Others must care for the life that has arrived. The child is no longer only an image of hope. It is a responsibility.

So it was with Kurdish self-government.

This introduction argues a limited claim: the birth of Kurdish self-government after 1991 was a historic correction to exposure and genocide, but birth did not complete the dream. It created a new test: whether Kurdish power could become public, accountable, institutional, and corrigible rather than party-owned, militarized, or protected from criticism.

This is where government-fungibility becomes the danger. A people denied authority must acquire authority; but once authority becomes Kurdish, the moral problem changes. The citizen must not become party property. The ministry must not replace the public. The Pêşmerge must not replace law. The budget must not become private inheritance. The court must not become an instrument of faction. The flag must not silence the journalist, the woman, the minority, the young person, the civil servant, or the opposition voice. Government exists to make Kurdish persons more protected, not more replaceable by Kurdish power.

After Anfal and Helebje, after the uprising and the mountain flight, after Operation Provide Comfort and the no-fly zone, the Kurds of Iraq gained something unprecedented in modern Kurdish history: protected space. It was not independence. It was not full sovereignty. It was not a final legal settlement. But it was space — and for a people repeatedly denied political existence, space was the beginning of everything.

It was also wounded space: full of graves, refugees, destroyed villages, armed parties, trauma, poverty, external pressure, and memories of betrayal.

The safe haven was therefore both protection and inheritance: it protected Kurds from Baghdad’s immediate violence, while forcing them to govern the wounds that violence had left behind.

Wounded space must not become possessed space. The graves, refugees, destroyed villages, armed parties, trauma, poverty, and memories of betrayal explain why Kurdish government was born under abnormal pressure. But they do not make the space the private property of those who suffered, fought, administered, or inherited authority first. Protected space becomes a home only when the wounded can speak, the displaced can return, the citizen can criticize, and the institutions built from survival remain answerable to those they govern.

After genocide, even imperfect space can become the first condition of political life.

The Pêşmerge could defend a people from death. But someone now had to organize life.

Defense could prevent disappearance; it could not by itself pay teachers, settle disputes, run hospitals, protect journalists, restrain mismanagement, or make courts independent.

Someone had to build schools, courts, budgets, ministries, roads, hospitals, newspapers, police forces, and procedures. Someone had to transform sacrifice into administration. Yet administration alone was not enough. The deeper task was to transform sacrifice into correction: institutions through which citizens could name failure, restrain power, expose mismanagement, protect minorities, and revise policy without returning to war. Armed parties had to learn that the homeland was not their private inheritance. Someone had to turn survival into government.

Read more

In Chapter 8, “Revolution as a Language of Hope,” we learnt about the dignity of resistance. It showed why revolution can become necessary in a world where ordinary politics is closed. For many Kurds, armed movements were not born from impatience but from accumulated denial. They emerged because states had made peaceful correction nearly impossible.

Then, in Chapter 9, “My Allâh, Your Punishment,” we moved into the moral and psychological terrain of power, humiliation, fear, and revenge. We asked what kind of world is created when domination is not only military or administrative, but also existential: when punishment enters memory, faith, family, and the inner language of survival.

Today, in Chapter 10 (“The Nightmare”), we bring the reader to the darkest consequences of this history. The Kurdish dream was not only opposed by state policy. It was pursued by systems willing to destroy villages, bodies, names, landscapes, and futures. The nightmare is what happens when a state stops seeing a people as citizens to be governed and begins treating them as an obstacle to be removed.

As with all our book serialisations, this one is a benefit for paid subscribers. So click the subscribe button to read more about the Kurdish situation in Iraq. - Daniel CS (editor)

Subscribe now

Khaled and Ann-Catrin get cited here:

Why does The Guerre and Shalom Publishing House need to exist? Read these pieces to find out:

Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule

by Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson & Khaled Salih

Parts I & II can be found here.

Part III — The Age of Armed Movements

Subscribe now

Chapter 8: Revolution as a Language of Hope

Chapter 9: My Allâh, Your Punishment

Chapter 10: The Nightmare

Anfal, Helebje, Arabization, genocide and the destruction of repair

There are moments in a people’s history when ordinary political language fails.

In this chapter we present a limited claim: Anfal and Helebje were not only extreme acts of state violence; they were attacks on the conditions through which Kurdish life could continue, return, remember, testify, and repair itself. The nightmare was therefore not only death. It was the organized destruction of repair.

This is exterminatory fungibility. The Kurdish person is made interchangeable with an enemy category. The village becomes insurgent space. The child becomes future danger. The mother becomes reproduction of the enemy. The field becomes guerrilla support. The language becomes disloyalty. The mountain becomes military terrain. The family becomes a unit to be moved, counted, disappeared, or destroyed. Genocide begins when a state no longer sees persons, homes, villages, and memories as realities to answer, but as replaceable elements inside a category marked for removal.

Repression, discrimination, betrayal, broken promises, forced assimilation — these words still belong to the vocabulary of politics. They describe states that deny rights, crush dissent, manipulate borders, imprison leaders, and silence memory. But Anfal requires a darker vocabulary. It was not merely repression. It was not merely counterinsurgency. It was not merely war against guerrillas. It was the organized attempt by the Iraqi Ba‘thist state to destroy the social, geographic, and biological foundations of Kurdish life in large parts of Kurdistan in Iraq.

Subscribe now

Anfal: Genocide as State Method

Anfal was the moment when Kurdish land and Kurdish life became a killing field.

The name itself was borrowed from Islamic scripture. Anfal is the title of the eighth sura of the Qur’an, often translated as “the spoils of war.” Saddam Hussein’s regime used the name for its campaign against the Kurds in 1988. The choice of name mattered. The regime was secular Ba‘thist in ideology, but it had no hesitation borrowing religious language when useful. The point is not that ordinary Muslim faith led to Anfal, but that the regime instrumentalized sacred vocabulary to moralize state violence. The word gave the operation a civilizational and punitive aura. It suggested that the Kurdish countryside was not merely rebellious territory, but enemy property to be seized, cleansed, redistributed, or destroyed.

Read more

In Chapter 8, “Revolution as a Language of Hope,” we learnt about the dignity of resistance. It showed why revolution can become necessary in a world where ordinary politics is closed. For many Kurds, armed movements were not born from impatience but from accumulated denial. They emerged because states had made peaceful correction nearly impossible.

Today, in Chapter 9, “My Allâh, Your Punishment,” we move into the moral and psychological terrain of power, humiliation, fear, and revenge. We ask what kind of world is created when domination is not only military or administrative, but also existential: when punishment enters memory, faith, family, and the inner language of survival.

As with all our book serialisations, this one is a benefit for paid subscribers. So click the subscribe button to read more about the Kurdish situation in Iran. - Daniel CS (editor)

Subscribe now

Yesterday, the Guerre and Shalom Publishing House published the final chapter of Michelin-Starred Chef Richard Neat’s philosophical memoir. Available for paid subscribers here:

Why does The Guerre and Shalom Publishing House need to exist? Find out my thoughts on “The Cultural Gatekeepers” here:

Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule

by Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson & Khaled Salih

Parts I & II can be found here.

Part III — The Age of Armed Movements

Subscribe now

Chapter 8: Revolution as a Language of Hope

Chapter 9: My Allâh, Your Punishment

In the name of religion, the Islamist regime demanded submission. In the name of survival, the Kurds refused disappearance.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 appeared, for a brief moment, to reopen history.

This chapter is not about private Muslim faith, Kurdish piety, or the ordinary religious life of families. It is about what happens when a state claims sacred authority for itself and turns political disagreement into punishment in the name of Allâh.

This chapter argues a limited claim: after 1979, the Kurdish demand for self-rule in Iran was not merely rejected as a political challenge; it was increasingly moralized as rebellion against revolution, Islam, national unity, and sacred authority. That moralization made correction harder, because disagreement could be punished as impiety, treason, corruption, or a crime against Allâh rather than answered as politics.

The Shah had fallen. The monarchy that had centralized power, suppressed dissent, Persianized the state, and treated Kurdish autonomy as a danger was gone. Prisons opened. Exiles returned. Parties resurfaced. Newspapers multiplied. Students, workers, clerics, liberals, Islamists, Marxists, nationalists, and minorities all believed that a new political order might be possible. For the Kurds of eastern Kurdistan — Rojhelat — this was not merely a change of regime in Tehran. It was the return of an old question: could Iran finally become a state of its peoples rather than a state ruling over its peoples?

Subscribe now

1979 as Opening, Not Yet as State

Why believe this time might be different? Because 1979 first appeared not as a completed state, but as an opening. The Shah had fallen. The army was shaken. Prisons opened. Exiles returned. The new centre had not yet fully armed itself with law, constitution, army, and revolutionary legitimacy. Kurdish leaders were not forgetting Mehabad or earlier betrayals. They were testing whether the revolution could be corrected before it hardened into another centralizing state.

The proof of the chapter lies in what happened as that opening hardened: revolutionary promise became state command, and Kurdish correction was redescribed as sacred danger.

The Islamic Republic was born with a different theory of authority.

It did not replace monarchy with plural democracy. It replaced royal centralization with revolutionary-theocratic centralization. The Shah had claimed the authority of crown, nation, modernization, and Persian state continuity. The Islamist Republic claimed the authority of revolution, Islam, martyrdom, anti-imperialism, and clerical guardianship. The vocabulary changed, but the Kurdish structural position did not. Once again, Kurds faced a center that demanded obedience before recognition.

This is the bitter irony of 1979: a revolution made in the name of the oppressed quickly discovered new internal enemies and became the new oppressor. Its language of justice was not empty to those who had suffered under the Shah, but it became selective when non-Persian and non-Shi‘i peoples asked to share power.

Read more

What is "Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule" by Khaled Salih & Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson? For more than a century the Kurds have been a people without a state, divided among four countries, promised much, denied more, and repeatedly asked to disappear. Yet through empire and republic, revolution and genocide, exile and return, one dream has never died: to have their own affairs in our their hands. - Daniel CS (Editor)

FOREWORD:

The book has so far followed the Kurdish dream before and after the modern states enclosed it. Part I traced the dream before the states: before borders hardened, before sovereignty became a cage, before Kurdish life was forced to appear through the official categories of others. Part II then followed the states against the dream: Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Each tried, in different ways, to turn Kurdish existence into a problem to be managed, assimilated, denied, or crushed.

Part III begins when politics has been blocked for too long.

When a people is denied ordinary political recognition, revolution can become more than strategy. It becomes language. It gives the silenced a grammar of hope. It tells the unseen: you are still here. You can still act. You can still refuse disappearance.

But this part of the book does not romanticize armed struggle. It asks the harder question: what happens when the weapon that makes a people visible also begins to speak in the people’s name? What happens when sacrifice becomes authority, when suffering becomes legitimacy, and when criticism is treated as betrayal of the struggle?

Chapter 8, “Revolution as a Language of Hope” (released today) begins with the dignity of resistance. It shows why revolution can become necessary in a world where ordinary politics is closed. For many Kurds, armed movements were not born from impatience but from accumulated denial. They emerged because states had made peaceful correction nearly impossible.

Chapter 9, “My Allâh, Your Punishment” (coming soon), moves into the moral and psychological terrain of power, humiliation, fear, and revenge. It asks what kind of world is created when domination is not only military or administrative, but also existential: when punishment enters memory, faith, family, and the inner language of survival.

Chapter 10, “The Nightmare” (coming soon), brings the reader to the darkest consequences of this history. The Kurdish dream was not only opposed by state policy. It was pursued by systems willing to destroy villages, bodies, names, landscapes, and futures. The nightmare is what happens when a state stops seeing a people as citizens to be governed and begins treating them as an obstacle to be removed.

Part III is therefore about both necessity and danger.

It understands why Kurdish armed movements emerged. But it also insists that no movement, however heroic its origins, can be allowed to become larger than the people. The Kurdish dream cannot end in the sanctification of the weapon, the party, the commander, or the martyr. A free Kurdistan must remember the courage of resistance without losing the right to criticize those who resist in its name.

This is the central tension of Part III:

When politics is denied, the weapon can make a people visible; when criticism is denied, the weapon can make the people disappear into the movement.

Kurdistanî Azad is not a book against resistance. It is a book against protected error. It asks how a people can survive oppression without making oppression’s logic its own. It asks how Kurds can honor sacrifice without surrendering judgment. It asks how the dream of freedom can pass through revolution, punishment, and nightmare — and still remain a dream of human dignity, not merely victory.

Today’s chapters enter that difficult terrain.

Become a paid subscriber to join the Guerre and Shalom Publishing House and read all our serialised chapters:

Subscribe now

Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule

by Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson & Khaled Salih

Part III — The Age of Armed Movements

When politics is denied, the weapon can make a people visible; when criticism is denied, the weapon can make the people disappear into the movement.

Part III Introduction

When ordinary politics is denied, revolution becomes a language of hope

Part III follows the Kurdish struggle as it enters the age of armed movements: KDP, KDPI, PUK, PKK, Komele, Pêşmerge, guerrillas, underground parties, prisoners, martyrs, exiles, students, women, workers, and diaspora organizers. This is the period in which Kurdish politics becomes modern, ideological, transnational, militarized and unavoidable.

Read more

As I argued in my own book Pax Arabica, the Arabisation of diverse states in the Northern Middle East was an act of criminal imperialism. That wasn’t just rhetoric on my part. As Ann-Catrin and Khaled so masterfully demonstrate, the “unity” of Syria under an Arab (“socialist”) banner was not a description of a reality, but an imposition on an unwilling populace. The denial of Kurdish existence in the public square, the settling of their lands, the stripping of their citizenship, the limiting of their true identity to the home, their reclassification as foreigners — all these methods and more were used to drive Syrian diversity underground so that the world could pretend it was an “Arab State”. And all in the name of decolonisation! - Daniel Clarke-Serret (editor)

Pure Jewish Anger Reviewed:

Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule

by Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson & Khaled Salih

Part II — The States Against the Dream

The modern state did not only divide Kurdistan; it taught Kurdish life to appear through the categories of others.

Chapter 6: Republics, Revolutions and Traps

On Iran, Mehabad, Qazi Muhammad, Simko and the recurring trap of negotiation without protection.

Kurdistan in Iran teaches one of the harshest lessons in modern Kurdish history: a promise without protection is not a promise. It can become an interval before punishment.

This chapter argues a limited claim: in Iran, Kurdish self-rule repeatedly became possible during moments of state weakness, but those openings turned into traps when Kurdish actors lacked guarantees strong enough to survive the recovery of central power.

This is opening-fungibility. The Kurdish claim becomes visible when the center weakens, but it is treated as conditional, temporary, and reversible once the state recovers. Kurdish parties, towns, leaders, schools, publications, and armed formations may briefly appear as political actors; then, when central authority returns, they are reclassified as disorder, separatism, tribal danger, foreign manipulation, or treason. The opening does not fail only because Kurds misjudge it. It fails because the state treats Kurdish political life as a provisional exception rather than a durable right.

In southern Kurdistan under Britain, the Kurdish question was trapped inside the construction of Iraq. In eastern Kurdistan, under Iran, the trap took a different form. Here the Kurds were not absorbed into a newly manufactured state in the same way as Iraq. They were absorbed into an older imperial state that repeatedly reinvented itself: Qajar, constitutional, Pahlavi, revolutionary, Islamist. Each order claimed a new legitimacy. Each promised a new political future. Yet for the Kurds, the central pattern remained familiar: negotiate, mobilize, trust the opening, then face the return of the state once the emergency has passed.

This is why Kurdish history in Iran cannot be read merely as a sequence of failed revolts. It is a history of openings that were never secured. The weakness was not that Kurdish claims were unserious, but that Kurdish actors repeatedly entered openings without guarantees strong enough to survive the return of state power. The state weakens, the Kurds organize, self-rule becomes imaginable, negotiations begin, external powers hover, and then the center returns with the army, the prison, the gallows, or the assassin.

The proof of the chapter lies in the repetition of this structure across different regimes: tribal Iran, wartime Iran, monarchical Iran, and revolutionary Iran were not identical, but each could turn Kurdish political opening into Kurdish exposure.

Simko Shikak: Tribal Power at the Edge of Nationalism

Simko Shikak belongs to the first major phase of this story. Ismail Agha Shikak, known as Simko, was a Kurdish tribal leader from the Shikak confederation in northwestern Iran. His power grew in the chaos of late Qajar weakness, World War I, Ottoman-Russian-Iranian rivalry, and the collapse of old border arrangements. He led repeated armed challenges to Iranian authority in the Urmia-Salmas region and at times created a de facto Kurdish zone of power. His career remains contested: some remember him as an early Kurdish nationalist, others as a tribal warlord whose politics were shaped by local power, survival politics, opportunism, and violence. Both readings contain part of the truth. Simko stood at the border between tribal self-rule and modern nationalism. He should not be judged as if he had inherited the institutions, party structures, and international language that later Kurdish movements would try to build. He was not yet the leader of a disciplined national movement, but he revealed that the Iranian state did not control Kurdistan by consent. It controlled it only when strong enough to impose obedience.

Subscribe now

Read more

Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule

by Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson & Khaled Salih

Part II — The States Against the Dream

Chapter 4: In the Name of Civilisation

Chapter 5: Kings, Mandates and Broken Promises

Iraq under Britain: Sheikh Mahmud, Mosul, Barzani and the first Kurdish self-rule demands.

The First World War did not liberate Kurdistan. It changed the powers that would manage, postpone, and contain Kurdish claims. Ottoman imperial rule collapsed, but the Kurdish lands were not allowed to become the basis of Kurdish sovereignty. Instead, they became bargaining material in the construction of new states: Iraq under British influence, Turkey under Kemalist nationalism, Syria under French mandate, and Iran under renewed centralization. The Kurds were told that the age of empires was over. In practice, empire had learned to speak the language of mandates, treaties, borders, and administrative necessity.

This chapter argues a limited claim: in Iraq, Kurdish claims were not simply ignored. They were recognized when useful, postponed when inconvenient, contained when threatening, and criminalized when they exceeded the role assigned to them.

Nowhere was this contradiction clearer than in southern Kurdistan, especially the Kurdish-majority regions that would be incorporated into the new state of Iraq. Britain occupied Mesopotamia during and after the war, and its primary concern was not Kurdish self-determination. It was the construction of a governable Iraq that served British strategic interests: oil, imperial communication routes, control of the Persian Gulf, and a buffer against Turkish, French, and Russian influence. The Kurdish question was therefore handled not as a question of national right, but as a problem of imperial management.

This is the key to understanding the period. The Kurds were not simply “forgotten.” They were repeatedly acknowledged and then subordinated. Their existence was recognized when useful against the Ottomans, against the Turks, or against instability. Their rights were postponed when they interfered with the Iraq Britain wanted to build.

The proof of the chapter lies in that sequence: Kurdish existence was visible enough to be used, but not protected enough to govern itself.

This is mandate-fungibility. The Kurds could appear as useful evidence, strategic allies, frontier populations, administrative difficulties, minority cases, mountain auxiliaries, or proof against Turkish claims, but not as a people whose will could determine the future of their own land. The mandate system did not make Kurds invisible. It made them visible in the wrong way: visible to be managed, counted, armed, reassured, postponed, or punished, but not protected as political agents.

The problem was not that Kurdish claims lacked moral seriousness; it was that they lacked the enforceable power required to make others pay a cost for breaking promises.

Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji — also rendered Berzinji in some English sources — embodied this contradiction. A religious notable from Suleimani and a figure rooted in the Qadiriyya order, he was initially useful to the British because he could provide local authority in a Kurdish region where direct imperial rule was difficult. After the British occupation, he was appointed governor in the Suleimani area. But Mahmud did not understand his role merely as that of a British intermediary. He saw the collapse of Ottoman authority as an opening for Kurdish rule. He wanted self-rule, and eventually something closer to sovereignty.

In 1919, Sheikh Mahmud revolted against the British, expelled British officials, and asserted authority in the name of Kurdistan. His revolt was defeated, and he was exiled. But the problem he represented did not disappear. The British discovered that Kurdish society could not simply be folded into an Arab-led Iraqi state without resistance. They also discovered that Turkey’s continued claim to Mosul made Kurdish opinion strategically important. So Sheikh Mahmud was brought back, not because Britain had accepted Kurdish nationhood, but because Kurdish unrest and Turkish pressure made Kurdish cooperation useful again.

In 1922, Mahmud declared himself King of Kurdistan. The title mattered. It should not be dismissed as personal vanity or local theater. It was an attempt to translate Kurdish political existence into the idiom of the post-Ottoman world. If Arabs could have kings in Baghdad, Damascus, Amman, and Hijaz, why could Kurds not have a king in Suleimani? If Britain could manufacture monarchies in the ruins of empire, why was Kurdish monarchy treated as rebellion while Arab monarchy was treated as statecraft?

The answer was simple: Kurdish sovereignty did not fit the map Britain wanted.

Objection: Mahmud’s kingdom was limited, local, and dependent on older structures of religious authority, tribal alliance, and personal loyalty. It was not a modern democratic national state.

Correction: That objection is true, but it does not erase the claim. Mahmud’s kingdom matters because it revealed that Kurdish political authority existed and sought recognition inside the new order, even if it had not yet become a unified modern national institution.

The point is not to make Sheikh Mahmud fungible with Kurdistan. His authority was local, religious, personal, and limited. But neither should Kurdistan be made fungible with the absence of a modern state. Mahmud’s claim mattered because it interrupted the mandate’s preferred category: Kurd as local intermediary, useful notable, or manageable governor. By declaring a kingdom, however fragile and imperfect, he forced the question the mandate system wanted to postpone: if Kurdish lands and Kurdish people are politically real, why must their future be administered through someone else’s state?

Mahmud’s project carried the marks of the older Kurdish world. His authority came from religious prestige, tribal alliance, family standing, armed followers, local loyalty, and the ability to negotiate between imperial power and Kurdish society. That was his strength. It was also his limit. These tools could defend Suleimani and challenge Britain, but they could not bind all Kurdish regions into one disciplined national movement.

This did not make the Kurdish claim artificial. It showed the central difficulty of Kurdish nationalism: Kurdishness was socially deep before it was institutionally unified.

Subscribe now

Air Control: Empire Through the Sky

The map was enforced from the air. In the early 1920s, Britain turned Iraq into the laboratory of a new imperial technique: “air control.” The phrase sounded administrative, almost bloodless. In practice, it meant that villages, houses, crops, animals, and civilians could be made vulnerable to aircraft whenever the state wished to teach obedience without sending large ground forces into the mountains. The RAF promised economy, precision, and order. For Kurds around Suleimani, it meant the arrival of empire through the sky.

Sheikh Mahmud’s revolt therefore faced not only British officers and Iraqi auxiliaries, but a new technology of imperial punishment. Aircraft could reach valleys that infantry found costly. They could bomb a house, scatter a village, destroy stores, frighten livestock, and return to base before those below had any meaningful way to answer. The asymmetry was part of the doctrine. Arthur Harris, later known as “Bomber” Harris, wrote of the lesson taught to “the Arab and Kurd”: they now knew what “real bombing” meant, because a full-sized village could be practically wiped out within forty-five minutes, with a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by a handful of machines against which they had no real target and no effective means of escape.

Read more

Kurdistanî Azad: Available exclusively in Summer 2026 on Guerre and Shalom. Sign up as paid to read the work in full. (Chapters on Iraq, Iran and Syria coming out later this week.) It also allows you access to other published works including “Pure Jewish Anger. - Daniel Clarke-Serret (editor)

Subscribe now

Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule

by Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson & Khaled Salih

Part II — The States Against the Dream

The modern state did not only divide Kurdistan; it taught Kurdish life to appear through the categories of others.

Part II Introduction

Chapter 4: In the Name of Civilization

Turkey: The Republic as Denial

The new republic did not arrive in Kurdistan as an invitation.

It arrived as an order.

The order was not only political. It was civilizational.

By civilizational, we mean more than modernization. It means a claim that one form of language, history, citizenship, schooling, law, and public memory represents progress, while other inherited forms of life must be disciplined, renamed, assimilated, or removed.

We argue that the Turkish republic turned Kurdish difference into a test of civilization: not by asking whether the new state could become plural, but by treating Kurdish language, memory, authority, and self-rule as backwardness to be corrected by force.

The men who built the Republic of Turkey did not imagine themselves as ordinary rulers inheriting what remained of a broken empire. They imagined themselves as founders of a new world. They would replace the old with the modern, the religious with the secular, the local with the “national,” the plural with the unified, the backward with the “civilized.”

In Istanbul and Ankara, this sounded like progress.

In Kurdistan, it often sounded like a warning.

The republic’s founding project aimed to produce a new people. It wanted citizens who spoke Turkish, learned Turkish history, served in the Turkish army, obeyed Turkish law, and imagined themselves as members of one Turkish nation. The old Ottoman world of overlapping identities, religious communities, local authorities, and imperial bargains was to be swept away, violently. The republic would no longer negotiate with difference in the old manner. It would transform difference, discipline it, or destroy it.

For Kurds, this was the first great collision with the modern state.

Read more

Subscribe now

Part 1 followed the Kurdish dream before the modern states: a lived world of mountains, villages, languages, memories, religious networks, principalities, and imperfect forms of self-rule. It ended with the irreversible passage from empire to state, when Sèvres briefly opened a door, Lausanne closed it, and Kurdish life was divided among recognized sovereignties.

Part II asks what happened next. The dream did not disappear. It was enclosed. Turkey answered it in the name of civilization and national homogenization. Iraq answered it through mandates, monarchy, broken promises, and later Arab nationalism. Iran answered it through openings that became traps when the center recovered. Syria answered it through silence, statelessness, Arabization, and administrative invisibility.

The chapters in this part are: Part II Introduction; The States Against the Dream; In the Name of Civilization; Kings, Mandates, and Broken Promises; Republics, Revolutions, and Traps; and Syria: Silence, Denial, and Survival.

The methods differed. The structure repeated: Kurdish self-rule was renamed as rebellion, backwardness, separatism, disorder, or danger. Part II follows that state vocabulary, not to flatten four histories into one, but to show how different states protected different maps by making Kurdish correction appear as a threat.

Subscribe now

Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule

by Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson & Khaled Salih

Part II — The States Against the Dream

The modern state did not only divide Kurdistan; it taught Kurdish life to appear through the categories of others.

Part II Introduction

This introduction has one task: to state the comparative claim of Part II without flattening four different states into one identical story.

Once the modern Middle East had been drawn into states, the Kurdish dream did not disappear. It was enclosed inside states that claimed the right to define its limits.

Part II follows that enclosure.

The given is the postwar state system established in Part I: Kurdish life was now divided among recognized states whose sovereignty converted Kurdish self-rule from a frontier question into an internal problem.

The same Kurdish demand — to live with dignity, language, memory, security, and some form of self-rule — was forced through four different state systems, each with its own ideology, fears, institutions, and methods of control. Turkey answered through homogenizing nationalism and the language of civilization. Iraq answered through mandate construction, Arab monarchy — later socialist Arab nationalism — and the unresolved contradiction of a state built over Kurdish land without Kurdish consent. Iran answered through recurring openings and traps: negotiate when the center is weak, punish when the center returns. Syria answered more quietly, through administrative erasure, statelessness, Arabization, silence, and the slow violence of non-recognition.

These are not four illustrations of the same regime. They are four tests of one comparative proposition: different states can protect different maps through the same move of treating Kurdish demands for error-correction as disorder.

This is the state-vocabulary form of false fungibility. Each state made Kurds appear through the category most useful to its own map. In Turkey, Kurdishness could be redescribed as backwardness, rebellion, or a defect in civilization. In Iraq, Kurdish self-rule could become a minority problem inside a state-building project. In Iran, Kurdish openings could become temporary disturbances to be contained once the center recovered. In Syria, Kurdish existence could be made administratively faint: counted, denied, silenced, or left without public standing. The methods differed, but the reduction was similar: the Kurdish person was made legible through the state’s need before being heard as a political subject.

Read more

Today we are releasing Part I — The Dream Before the States from Kurdistanî Azad, a long awaited book on the Kurdish dream of self-rule. It’s a seminal work from two distinguished and expert authors on a oft-ignored topic.

The authors have requested an accelerated serialization process which means that the book will be released one part at a time. So for example, this opening part includes the Part I Introduction and three chapters: • Chapter One: The Dream Called Kurdistan • Chapter Two: Beside the Empires • Chapter Three: The Irreversible Passage. (Note: The Author’s Prologue, Acknowledgments, and Abbreviations were already shared freely with everyone.) The consequence of this is that the posting is very long and most readers will not be able to consume it in one sitting.

This isn’t a problem because the Guerre and Shalom website is now divided into sections with each of the published books having its own dedicated tab. This means that you can dip into each and every book, including Kurdistanî Azad, at your leisure.

This does mean, however, that we are working against the algorithm. Readers will not have the drive to “like” the article because they (likely) won’t have read it in one go. The authors and editor therefore request that you “like” and share IN ADVANCE, then read at your own pace via the Guerre and Shalom website or this email. This is vital if the Kurdish cause is to be brought to the fore. Thank you for supporting this deeper, long-form project.

Part I begins from a guiding proposition: that the Kurdish dream did not begin as a modern border dispute. It began from older, imperfect forms of lived self-rule that the modern state system later narrowed, hardened, and politicized. Before Kurdistan became a question for diplomats, border commissions, armies, and ministries, it was already a lived world — in mountains, villages, routes, dialects, religious networks, principalities, tribal confederations, cities, memories, and frontier bargains. Kurdistanî Azad begins with a name that carries both intimacy and politics: a child named Kurdistan by a father named Azad.

Subscribe now

*****

A note on the authors:

Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson earned her PhD in Peace and Development Research at the University of Gothenburg in 2005 with a dissertation on Kurdish political institutions in the diaspora. She was a visiting researcher at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom in 2007 and 2008. Her ongoing research concerns the opportunities available to Kurdish entrepreneurs in the diaspora to contribute to development in the Kurdistan Region. On this theme, she has previously published “Should We Return, Stay, or Commute?” in Global Families: Transnational Migration and Kinship (eds. Eastmond & Åkesson, Gidlunds Publishing, 2007).

Khaled Salih earned his PhD in Political Science at the University of Gothenburg in 1996 with a dissertation on state- and nation-building in Iraq. He worked as a lecturer at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Southern Denmark between 1997 and 2003. Between 2003 and 2010, he served as an adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government. In the spring of 2011, he was a visiting researcher in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He was Vice-Chancellor for the University of Kurdistan-Hewlêr, 2012-2016. Among his publications is The Future of Kurdistan in Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), co-authored with B. O’Leary and J. McGarry.

Together, they co-authored, Drömmen om Kurdistan (Dreaming of Kurdistan) in 2012 (in Swedish)

Subscribe now

******

Why you should subscribe to Guerre & Shalom to read Kurdistanî Azad?

Subscribe now

Because Kurdistan is too often treated as a footnote to other people’s histories: a border problem, a security problem, a tribal problem, a regional complication. Kurdistanî Azad begins from a different premise: that the Kurdish question is one of the great unfinished moral and political questions of the modern Middle East.

This is not only a story about betrayal, borders, uprisings, exile, self-rule, war, and hope. It is a story about what happens when a people are denied the ordinary right to shape their own future — and yet continue to imagine freedom.

Subscribe and read because this project does not offer slogans. It asks harder questions. Why have Kurdish victories so often remained fragile? Why does hope keep returning after punishment? What kind of freedom can survive between four states, rival parties, foreign powers, and the memory of repeated abandonment? And what would it mean to build a Kurdistan capable not only of resisting oppression, but of correcting its own errors?

Kurdistanî Azad is written for Kurds, for friends of Kurdistan, and for anyone who wants to understand how dignity survives without a state, how memory becomes politics, and how the dream of self-rule can remain alive without becoming blind to its own difficulties.

Subscribe if you believe the Kurdish story deserves to be read not as a tragedy alone, but as a warning, a possibility, and a living argument about freedom, about human dignity, about the Kurds as Universal Explainers (human beings capable of building institutions, correcting errors, creating knowledge, governing themselves, criticizing their leaders, and shaping a future).

Subscribe now

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Authors’ Prologue

Acknowledgments

Abbreviation List for Quick Reference

Part I — The Dream Before the States

Part I Introduction

Chapter 1: The Dream Called Kurdistan

Chapter 2: Beside the Empires

Chapter 3: The Irreversible Passage

Part II — The States Against the Dream

Part II Introduction

In the Name of Civilization

Kings, Mandates, and Broken Promises

Republics, Revolutions, and Traps

Syria: Silence, Denial, and Survival

Part III — The Age of Armed Movements

Part III Introduction

Revolution as a Language of Hope

My Allāh, Your Punishment

The Nightmare

Part IV — The Dream Becomes Government

Part IV Introduction

The Safe Haven

The Kurdish Civil War

A Federal Opening

The Difficult Art of Governing

Part V — The Dream After 2011

Part V Introduction

Rojava and the Syrian Earthquake

ISIS and the Kurdish Moment

A Moment of Dignity and the Punishment of Hope

The Cage Has Adapted

The Dream in the Twenty-First Century

Kurdistan as Warning and Possibility

Recommended Reading

Subscribe now

Kurdistanî Azad: The Long Dream of Kurdish Self-Rule

by Ann-Catrin Emanuelsson & Khaled Salih

Part I — The Dream Before the States

Part I Introduction

The Dream Before the States

Guiding proposition: The Kurdish dream did not begin as a modern border dispute. It began from older, imperfect forms of lived self-rule that the modern state system narrowed, hardened, and politicized.

Before Kurdistan became a question for diplomats, border commissions, armies, and ministries, it was already a lived world.

This introduction has one task: to show that the Kurdish dream preceded the states that later enclosed it, without turning the older Kurdish world into a myth of innocence.

It existed in mountains, villages, routes, dialects, religious networks, principalities, tribal confederations, cities, memories, and frontier bargains. It did not yet exist as a modern state. It did not have one parliament, one capital, one recognized border, or one seat among the nations. But it was not nothing. That is the given from which Part I begins. It was not an empty space waiting to be named by others. Kurdish life had forms of authority, belonging, protection, rivalry, and self-rule long before modern nationalism arrived.

This first part begins with a name: Kurdistanî Azad.

A child is named Kurdistan by a father named Azad. The phrase means both “Kurdistan of Azad” and “Free Kurdistan.” Because the Kurdistan in question is also Azad’s daughter, the title carries the book’s emotional and political key. Kurdistan is not introduced first as a map, a grievance, or a geopolitical problem. It is introduced as a daughter, a memory, a promise, and a question: under what conditions can a people have their affairs in their own hands?

To answer that question, we must begin before the modern states that now divide Kurdistan. We must look at the older Kurdish world beside the Ottoman and Persian empires, where self-rule was not yet a nationalist program, but often meant practical room for Kurdish rulers, sheikhs, tribes, and communities to survive through negotiation, distance, loyalty, rebellion, and local authority. That world was not democratic or innocent. It was often unequal, patriarchal, periodically violent, and fragmented. It should not be romanticized, but neither should it be judged as if it had been allowed the long, protected development of a modern constitutional order. Yet it contained something the modern states would later weaken, absorb, suppress, or destroy: Kurdish society’s capacity to govern parts of its own life through its own institutions, languages, memories, and authorities.

This is not a search for a Kurdish essence. It is not a claim that all Kurds shared one consciousness, one institution, one dialect, one class position, or one political program before modernity. It is a search for the historical conditions under which Kurdish life could govern parts of itself, lose that room, recover it, misuse it, and perhaps turn it into institutions worthy of a home.

Part I follows the passage from that older world into the modern one.

This post is for paid subscribers. Upgrade now to continue reading Part I and future book installments. Thank you for supporting this long-form project.

Subscribe now

Read more