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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.
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.
