After reading this article today, I had some time to collect my thoughts on it after my initial outrage. Persecuted groups in the region continue to struggle precisely because history is warped to fit modern political agendas like this, so no lessons are learned.

Thread: https://twitter.com/newlinesmag/status/1381577363830546435
The history of this region (former Ottoman Empire) is both hard to understand without a lot of multi-disciplinary research and is shaped mostly by narratives reflecting modern power hierarchies. Overall, the Empire served its main constituents extremely well: Sunni Muslim groups.
The reason why that is important to register first is because that feature was at the core of Ottoman bureaucracy and its identity based tier system of rulers and subjects. Kurds were below the ruling Turks in this power hierarchy, but firmly above all non-Sunni Muslim groups.
Admittedly, there has yet been a focused, serious and detailed literary analysis of the relationship between Ottoman Turks and Kurds that hasn't been flavoured by some kind of political agenda or another. But the information does exist beyond these small windows into history.
To understand the end of the Ottoman Empire and the role Kurds played in the genocide of its Christian subjects, one has to understand the foundation of the power hierarchy - the beginning - which enabled Kurdish tribes to benefit from the devastation of entire populations.
One of the most overlooked but pivotal moments in earlier Ottoman history is the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514 (Ottomans vs Safavids in NW Iran). The Ottomans won. At the time, the vast majority of Kurdish tribes were aligned with the Safavids, but changed sides after their defeat.
This change of allegiance also brought about the beginnings of major shifts related to demographics and power within the newly forged empire the Ottomans were building. The Ottomans began empowering these Kurdish tribes to be the stewards of their eastern territories.
This process lasted centuries, but it was not until the 19th C, after hundreds of years of semi-independence, stockpiles of wealth and arms all which came with privileges provided by the Ottomans, did these tribes begin rebelling autonomously and vying for more power/wealth.
What began as Kurdish tribes essentially maintaining garrisons against threats from the east while the Ottomans pursued campaigns west became emirates, Kurdish chieftains became princes, and so on. All of this happened fully under the auspices of the Ottoman authorities.
Kurdish tribes benefited tremendously during these centuries, but the greatest benefit came in joining the call to jihad against the Ottoman's Christian subjects in the early 20th C. Prior to this, periodic massacres/regular extortion was the norm, but this was the main event.
Given all of that context, the argument put forward by the article, namely that Kurds are somehow naturally "less susceptible to extremist ideas", severely undercuts one of the deadliest ideas many major Kurdish tribes bought into in the bloodbath of the early 20th Century.
To assert that "the tribal configuration that prevails today in Syria and Iraq is a result of this period of unrest between 1790 and 1850" again discounts the profound almost incalculable impact the genocide had not only on the demographics of the entire region, but its economy.
Its absolutely outrageous to claim, as the author does here, that the Yazidi rejection of a Kurdish identity can be singularly attributed to "experiences at ISIS' hands", or even a calculated decision made by the KDP to abandon Yazidis to genocide. Centuries of violence - gone!
Is it blissful ignorance tempered by a romantic and idealistic nationalism? Or a disingenuous characterisation of a phenomenon as old as the Ottoman Empire itself? Perhaps both? Either way, it reduces important (and very bloody) history to nationalist play-doh and fable-making.
And so the "first kind" of hero the author refers to almost perfectly corresponds to the second kind despite the strange distinction made. The Persian epic Shahnameh served as the basis for Kurdish figures like Kawa the Blacksmith (Kaveh), while stories about Darwish do the same.
To use the author's own terminology: this mythos was "stripped". These stories became an important part of galvanising a modern Kurdish resistance movement that was cross-border, but unitary in purpose: realising a Greater Kurdistan alongside the nation-states of the world today.
E.g. the mythologies around Newroz construct an ethnogenesis as a response to ongoing political persecution. These myths have utility for groups like the PKK. But this mythologising is deeply problematic for non-Kurds (spoiler: its at their expense) https://twitter.com/DeadmanMax/status/976185221593870337
When you move away from these myths, you can learn the [omitted] third kind of hero: the campaigns of Bedr Khan Beg in Hakkari, Muhammad Pasha (or Mire Kor) of Rawanduz. And that's just the 19th C. These are leaders who commanded the swords and guns of tens of thousands of men.
And these leaders, all the way up to the birth of the PKK movement and the foundation of modern Kurdish nationalism which rehabilitates them, exalted in triumphs over non-Muslim groups upon their refusal to convert, pay tributes (jizya), or subjugate themselves to their will.
Sanitising this only serves to "strip" the histories which underpin and inflame grievances, not remedy them. If there was any honesty, any feel-good stories would be portrayed as rare and exceptional to give the enduring effects of genocide and persecution its proper platform.
Instead, the author acrobatically weaves a thread linking today's SDF in Syria to the multi-ethnic, Kurdish-led Milan tribal confederacy in Ottoman Syria. Akin to a sleight of hand, we are thus encouraged to laud the SDF as being a modern manifestation of... Ottoman statecraft..?
We are afforded glimpses into real world "unrest" while the focus remains on this repurposed mythology. "The secularism of Kurdish resistance" is explained by the political climate in which Kurdish parties find themselves trying to advance their nationalist objectives right now.
For centuries prior the birth of the nation-state, Kurdish politics was defined by Islamism and alignment with empire. Resistance truly began when those arrangements ended. The capacity to "resist" itself is rooted in the genocide of non-Muslims throughout the Ottoman Empire.
Throughout history, Kurds were never Arab enough, Persian enough, or Turkish enough, but they have certainly been Muslim enough to coordinate together with these groups the military campaigns which created the foundations and capabilities of their modern, secular resistance.
Any analysis of the "secularism" of Kurdish resistance is useless without discussing its secularisation. The very ability to resist was built on the backs of all of those non-Kurds who were murdered in the region. And why were they murdered? Who gained? And how? Start with that.
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