This is a thread about Kurdish involvement in Genocide, more specifically the genocide of Armenians. If you have any questions about sources Let me know. This is more directed at Kurds who do not know their own history and regurgitate nationalist Kurdish and Turkish propaganda.

Generally Kurds were not motivated by hatred for Armenians, they were not motivated by ideology like Turks. Political ideology hardly played a role; Kurdish nationalism was not highly developed, and it was in the interest of Kurdish nationalists to collaborate with Armenians.

There was no unity within the Kurdish political movement: while some Kurds joined the Young Turks, others treated the regime with suspicion. Remarkably, one of the chief Young Turk ideologists, Ziya Gökalp, was an ethnic Kurd. Tribal mechanisms were evidently at work as well.

In the southeastern Xerzan and Tur Abdin districts, a single individual Kurd could be accountable for murder at one time and for illegal rescue at another. It would be incorrect to assume that Kurdish chieftains were acting on a nationalist agenda or out of ethnic resentment.

Religious hatred was not a major factor; Kurdish sheikhs were known to have disapproved of the massacres. Whatever their views as Sunni Muslims on the supposed inferiority of Christians, they certainly did not preach destruction of Armenians or other Christians for the most part.

Some Kurdish rank-and-file killers, however, were incited by the quasi-Islamic rhetoric that promised a reward to anyone who had killed an Armenian. Many illiterate villagers acted upon this religiously inspired hate speech to go and massacre Armenians in the name of Islam.

The 2006 PBS documentary The Armenian Genocide included remarkable footage of elderly Kurds speaking about the genocide. One of the men recalled his father telling him that Ottomans had urged religious leaders to preach that killing Armenians would secure them a place in heaven.

So then what were they acting on? Opportunity to seize land, property, valuables but also to kidnap women and children. Rape and enslavement were ubiquitous in the region in 1915. for the “Special Organization” which worked with Kurdish Hamidiye Brigades in massacring Armenians.

These two groups were official and part of Ottoman Army. A majority of the Kurds who murdered Armenians did so either upon government orders, or because of the promise of impunity, or both. Young Turk dictatorship managed to drive a wedge between Armenian and Kurd communities.

Typically, Young Turk officials initiated the persecution, segregation, and dispossession of Armenians, and Kurds who were on retainer and given the task of killing the victims. Turks offered bribes to Kurds to denounce Armenians in hiding or guide gov forces to their hideouts.

American missionary Grisell Mclaren living in Bitlis reported: “One group of seven hundred men was taken out to a place about two hours from the city and lined up on either side of trenches already prepared. Kurds then came upon them, killing them.”

Government officials offered direct payments in foodstuffs or offered the opportunity to plunder the victims’ possessions. Gendarmes, who were supposed to protect the deported Armenians, sometimes delivered or sold entire convoys to mounted Kurds for pillage and murder.

Some Kurds blackmailed Armenians, threatening to report them to the local Ottoman Turk authorities, if they did not hand over money and other valuables (sometimes they reported them anyway, once the savings of the destitute Armenians had been exhausted and their property taken).

By the end of the war, some 2,900 Armenian settlements (villages, towns, and neighborhoods) were depopulated, the majority of their inhabitants annihilated or deported and these areas were resettled mostly by Kurds. Many acted out in Banditry mostly in compliance with Ottomans.

Kurds were to be found among both executioners of operations and the most insidious groups of bandits that had historically caused much hardship for Armenians and Turks. Now and since the Hamidiye, put simply, the state did not clash with bandits but recruited them.

The publication of the biography of Emînê Perîxanê, chieftain of the Kurdish Raman tribe, sheds additional light on Kurdish collaboration. In the summer of 1914, following a notorious campaign of plunder and provocation, the government issued an arrest warrant for Perîxanê’s

infamous brother, Ömer, who escaped prosecution and retreated into the Xerzan region as an outlaw. Emînê, on the other hand, organized a paramilitary unit and, in the winter of 1914, joined the Ottoman army. The governor of Diyarbekir, Young Turk nationalist Dr. Mehmed Reshid

summoned Ömer for a secret mission that would bring him riches and earn him an amnesty. Reshid persuaded Ömer and his men escort convoys of Armenians down the Tigris River on a raft and ultimately murder them; in return, they would receive half of Armenian valuables and property.

Seduced by the prospect of wealth, Ömer gave his consent and the plan was set in motion. By the end of May of 1915, Reshid had imprisoned the entire Armenian elite of Diyarbekir (some died under torture). On Sunday, May 30, Kurdish militia handcuffed 636 local elites.

Armenians were loaded on rafts with the pretext of relocating to Mosul. Kurds accompanied the Armenians on rafts as they sailed down to the Raman gorge. The victims were robbed of a total of 6,000 Turkish pounds, stripped of their clothes and valuables, and massacred by Ömer.

To the dismay of Walter Holstein, the German vice-consul at Mosul, the rafts arrived a week later, empty. Holstein later learned that the men in the convoys had been “completely slaughtered.” He wrote, “For several days, corpses and human limbs have been floating down the river.”

After the massacre, Ömer’s tribesmen were invited to the governor’s house, where they celebrated. Reshid congratulated them for their “bravery, patriotism, and services to the state" and rewarded the brothers and their men with money and medals for their performance.

Subsequently, the brothers destroyed three other convoys. Having made them complicit in crime, however, Reshid did not trust them to remain loyal, and so he ordered their execution. The brothers were set upon by his agents and killed in their sleep in the summer of 1915.

I've reached the Limit, so I will continue this thread and post it in Reply after I have finished it.