Today we read of two more States that, in their own distinct ways, stood against the dream of a Free Kurdistan: Iran and Syria. Whilst the Iran chapter is fascinating, especially in its telling of the lost Kurdish State of Mehabad, it is the Syrian experience that will lead you to tears.
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.
