the kurds of damascus in the 1930s: development of a politics of ethnicity
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The Kurds of Damascus in the 1930s:Development of a Politics of EthnicityBenjamin Thomas WhitePublished online: 13 Dec 2010.
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The Kurds of Damascus in the 1930s:Development of a Politics of Ethnicity
BENJAMIN THOMAS WHITE
In June 1939, the French security services in Damascus reported that there was secretactivity taking place in the city’s Kurdish circles, aiming to have petitions issued‘supporting the demands of the Kurds of the Jazira for a special regime placing themunder French authority.’1
Such demands were controversial. Syria had been created as a nation-state barelytwo decades earlier, and its existence as such was tenuous. Before the First WorldWar, the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the Levant and Mesopotamiahad held out better than almost any other part of the empire against the combinedencroachments of European powers and indigenous separatist movements, main-taining their territorial integrity (and their loyalty to Istanbul) more or less intact.But since the empire’s destruction, they had been divided and subdivided: detachedfrom the empire by the victorious Allies, divided into British and French zones at theexpense of a short-lived nationalist government in Damascus, divided again intothree smaller state units under British control and two under French control. TheFrench zone shrank still further when the resurgent Turkish nationalist movementdrove French forces out of Cilicia, the northern part of the zone. In 1918–20,supporters of the nascent nationalist movement in the cities and towns of the ArabLevant had called for a Syria independent within its supposedly ‘natural’ boundaries:from the Taurus mountains in the north to the Arabian desert in the south; from theMediterranean in the west to the Euphrates in the east.2 The nominally independentSyria that had emerged under French control by 1922 (Syrian ‘independence’ andFrench control both sanctioned by a mandate from the new League of Nations) wasbarely a third of that size. Its unity, moreover, was in doubt: apart from thepermanent detachment of an enlarged Lebanon, the ‘State of Syria’ itself was subjectto multiple further divisions. The regions of Aleppo and Damascus (the two largestcities) were briefly turned into separate states within a ‘Syrian confederation’ in theearly 1920s; while they were reunited from 1925, the statelets built around the cAlawiand Druze communities (in the west and south of Syria respectively) remainedseparate. Special administrative regimes also existed for the region of Alexandrettaand the Bedouin populations of the desert.
The period in which Syrian Arab nationalism emerged as an ideology focused onthe creation of a Syrian Arab nation-state, then, witnessed a constant shrinkage ofthe actual state of Syria. And there was no guarantee that further permanentdivisions and amputations would not occur: at the outset of the mandate, a senior
Middle Eastern Studies,Vol. 46, No. 6, 901–917, November 2010
ISSN 0026-3206 Print/1743-7881 Online/10/060901-17 ª 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2010.520413
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French official had proposed dividing the state of Syria into eight or nine statelets.3
In 1936, when the French government finally agreed to negotiate a treaty supposedlyleading to Syrian independence with a delegation of nationalists, Damascene controlover the cAlawi and Druze states was therefore a sine qua non for the Syrian side. Butafter the treaty was signed, when the National Bloc formed the Syrian government,French officers and officials continued to manipulate anti-Damascus sentiment andcalls for direct French control in rural areas across Syria. These sentiments, afamiliar symptom of the resistance generated in any state by the establishment ofcentralized control, were strongest in the cAlawi and Druze regions and amongChristian and Kurdish populations in the Jazira, the far north-east of Syria. At thesame time, France also negotiated the cession, to Turkey, of the sanjak ofAlexandretta in the north-west of Syria. For adherents of a nationalist ideology thathoped to inherit a viable Syrian nation-state, therefore, any mobilization thatthreatened to hive off yet more of the territory of the existing state was anathema.
This brings us back to the subject of petitions circulated in the capital of that statewhich seemed to signal exactly such a threat, and the first of two questions that thisarticle will investigate: given the powerful hostility in Damascus to any suchmobilization, why did some Damascene Kurds (many of whom were, as we shall see,both thoroughly Arabized and thoroughly integrated into the city’s political andsocial structures) mobilize in support of the territorial aspirations of Kurds living inthe rough, remote territories of the region that was then in the process of beingbisected by the border between the new states of Turkey and Syria?
In the boxes of material specifically relating to the Kurds of the mandateterritories held in the archives of the French High Commission for Lebanon andSyria, it is in fact rare to find references to the Kurdish quarter of Damascus. Almostall of the material they contain is about the border zone – or, for that matter, aboutKurdish residents of regions across the new border, in the territory of the newTurkish Republic. Many of Syria’s Kurds in this period, though by no means all ofthem, were refugees fleeing the repression of uprisings against the imposition of theRepublic’s authority in southern and eastern Anatolia. The archives give theimpression that from the French point of view, the Kurds collectively speaking wereless important as a Syrian community than as a factor (potentially useful, potentiallydangerous) in the High Commission’s relations with neighbouring states, especiallyTurkey. Hence the second question that this article seeks to answer: why did theHigh Commission’s intelligence services take a sudden (and exceptional) interestin the residents of Hayy al-Akrad, the Kurdish quarter of Damascus, in the later1930s – as is evidenced by a single slim folder of documents among the much morevoluminous documentation on Kurds in Syria’s border regions and in neighbouringstates? By investigating these two questions, I hope to offer an insight into thedevelopment of a ‘politics of ethnicity’ in the context of a new nation-state underimperial domination – and to show how the construction of the archive itself mayhave served to set an ‘ethnic’ spin on the historical record.
The Kurds resident in Hayy al-Akrad – a settlement established since the MiddleAges – were far more integrated into the settled and citied population of the Syrianinterior than the Kurdish population of the northern borderlands. Their integrationwas not total: continuing immigration of Kurds from other areas, the Ottoman
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tradition of recruiting gendarmes and soldiers from the quarter to police the city andthe surrounding countryside, and the semi-detached geographical situation of thequarter all contributed to a continued sense of a distinct ‘Kurdish’ identity there; so,perhaps most importantly, did the persistence of clan structures.4 Nevertheless, itwould be wrong to understate the degree of integration. Many of the quarter’sinhabitants were entirely Arabized in language.5 They had also long been integratedinto local social, political and economic structures, and not only through thegendarmerie. Like residents of other areas on the fringes of the city, as well asfarming for the urban market close at hand, they became involved in the trade inagricultural products from a larger hinterland.6 Michael Provence has pointed outthe importance of such economic links (in his case, between the Maydan quarter andsouthern Syria) in laying a foundation for the development of nationalism under themandate.7
Perhaps best-integrated of all were the notables of the quarter. Like others inDamascus, they took advantage of Ottoman reforms in the Tanzimat period toacquire landed estates and positions in the local administration. The quarter’s twoleading families, the al-Yusufs and Shamdins, dominated the important office ofcommander of the pilgrimage to Mecca in late Ottoman times.8 During thenineteenth century, they and other prominent families from Hayy al-Akrad joinedthe trend among notable families of the Old City when they moved to morecomfortable accommodation in Suq Saruja – while maintaining their patronagenetworks in their quarter of origin.9
If Hayy al-Akrad stood a couple of kilometres north of the walls of the OldCity, meanwhile, the city’s expansion since the Mamluk period had largely beeninto the area between the two (see Figure 1). The quarter had been integrated intothe administrative structure of Damascus proper by the 1830s, as part of the thumn(literally ‘eighth’) of al-Salihiyya, which brought together the northern settlementson the slopes of Mount Qasyun.10 From 1908, Damascus’s first tramway linkedthis area with the centre of the ‘new’ city at Marjah square, where importantinstitutions of the late Ottoman state were concentrated: a map in the 1912 editionof Baedeker’s Palestine and Syria Handbook for Travellers shows the tramwayrunning through what it calls place du Serail, close to the post and telegraph office,the city hall, the Saray (governor’s residence), the criminal court, and a number ofmilitary buildings (see Figure 2).11 In the mandate period, the quarter’s physicalintegration increased with the construction of a boulevard between it and the cityproper.12
Given this social, political, and geographical integration, the continued existencein the post-Ottoman period of a distinct sense of Kurdish identity among thequarter’s residents should not be taken for granted – any more than the continuedexistence of, say, a sense of Gaelic identity (and Gaelic language) among migrantsfrom the Scottish highlands and islands in nineteenth or early twentieth-centuryGlasgow. Still less should we take for granted that any such sense of identity wouldserve as a basis for collective political action.
The French sources, though, do take these things for granted. In February 1939,the High Commission’s intelligence services reported that ‘certain Kurdish notablesof Damascus’ were circulating a petition, written in French and supposedly in thename of the ‘young people, tradesmen, and notables of the Kurdish quarter’, stating
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Figure 1. A map of Damascus in the mandate period, showing the Kurdish quarter.Source: Nelida Fuccaro, ‘Ethnicity and the City: The Kurdish Quarter of Damascus betweenOttoman and French Rule, c.1724–1946’, Urban History Vol.30, No.2 (2003), ª CambridgeUniversity Press. Reprinted by permission. Adapted from KHOURY, PHILIP S.: SYRIAAND THE FRENCH MANDATE. ª 1987 Princeton University Press. Reprinted bypermission of Princeton University Press.
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that ‘the current government does not assure our rights, which are cast underfoot,and pays no heed to our demands’. The government in question was that of theNational Bloc, in power since 1936. The petition called for a new government undera continuing French mandate.13 Again, in March, ‘The Kurds of Damascus’ were‘unhappy with the government, which is not according them the posts [les fonctions]to which they claim they have a right’. They were reported to be cooperating withKurds elsewhere in Syria, from the cities of Hama and Aleppo to the Jazira, wheremuch of Syria’s Kurdish population was concentrated. In Damascus, they had madetheir discontent visible by raising a Kurdish flag alongside the French and Syrianflags on a monument in the quarter.14 In June a ‘Kurdish delegation’ that seems tohave been made up of figures active in the Jazira raised demands with the Frenchauthorities for Kurdish participation in the Syrian government, the establishment ofan autonomous Kurdish zone, and official-language status for Kurdish.15 It was alsoat this time that the intelligence services reported on the plans mentioned at thebeginning of this article, to circulate petitions in support of Kurds in the Jazira, whilethe city’s ‘Kurdish notables’ elected cUmar Agha Shamdin ‘leader of the DamasceneKurds’.16 Later in the summer Shamdin hosted a meeting at which the ‘Kurds of theAkrad quarter’ requested that he insist on getting a response to such demands fromthe High Commissioner.17
Figure 2. A map of central Damascus in 1912.Source: Website of the Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection of the University of Texas atAustin, available at http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/damascus2_1912.jpg (accessed7 May 2009). Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas atAustin.
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As all of this shows, for the French intelligence services there was a virtually self-evident link between Damascene ‘Kurds’, the ‘Kurdish quarter’, and what might becalled ‘Kurdist’18 (cultural) political mobilizations not just at the level of the city, butacross Syria. How, then, are we to account for such political mobilizations? Why dida notable like Shamdin, whose family was emblematic of the integration of a wholegroup of Kurdish notables into the highest levels of the city’s social, economic, andpolitical life, now act as leader of a Kurdist movement in Damascus – and not onlythat, but one which supported Kurdist aims hundreds of miles away – in the face ofboth growing Arab nationalist sentiment in the city and, at this point, an Arabnationalist government? A simple sense of Kurdish identity may have played a part;the French sources, as we have seen, are happy to make such a simple link between‘Kurdishness’ and Kurdist politics. Other evidence, though, hints at a somewhatmore complex explanation – starting with the date of this flurry of reports. TheInformations referred to here are almost the only material on Damascene Kurds thatI have found in several voluminous boxes of documents relating specifically to theKurds in Syria in the archives of the High Commission; and they all date from theperiod of National Bloc government in 1936–39. There may have been similarmobilizations in Hayy al-Akrad at other points during the mandate, but the Frenchintelligence services seem, understandably, to have paid particular attention to themat just the moment when an anti-nationalist movement in Damascus itself would bemost useful to the French. For lack of hard evidence, this is speculation – though thedating of the documents makes it plausible speculation.
More evidence is available, however, on the relationship between the NationalBloc and the Kurdish notables of Damascus (and the inhabitants of Hayy al-Akradmore generally) – a relationship that was rather tense in the late 1930s. A long-running feud between inhabitants of the Kurdish quarter and the cAkkash familyof the village of Dummar, near Damascus, had flared up again – to the point ofgunfire – in the summer of both 1937 and 1938.19 The origins of the feud went backover a decade, to the 1925–27 revolt that shook French authority in much of Syria,including the area immediately surrounding Damascus (and, indeed, the city itself).20
At some point during the revolt, according to these intelligence reports, members ofthe cAkkash family murdered several Kurds.
Whether those killings were linked to ‘ethnic’ ill feeling between Arabs and Kurdsis unclear. To go back to that period for a moment, French records from the time ofthe revolt mention Kurdish involvement on both sides: taking only one example,when cUmar Agha Shamdin led an armed group from the Kurdish quarter againstrebels who had attacked the police post there in December 1925, his opponents wereled by ‘the famous Kurdish rebel’ Sacid Hadi.21 The French certainly did not take theloyalty of Hayy al-Akrad for granted: rather, they were agitated by the fear of losingthis (strategically located) quarter to the rebels. At one point at the height of therevolt in late 1925, the intelligence services worriedly noted a ‘[w]avering [flottement]in the Kurdish quarter. A ‘‘descent’’ from the Kurdish quarter would carryeverything away, and the Consulates and foreign colonies would be the firstthreatened. Great danger from this side.’22
A little later, another information bulletin reported that ‘[o]ur political action onthat side is intensifying, given the grave danger that would result from a collusionbetween the Kurds and the rebels’.23 These bulletins, which give information on the
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situation across Syria – some of it destined for only the most senior French officials –are more than usually explicit about the means whereby the quarter’s loyalty wasensured. One report speaks of ‘personal action upon the principal chiefs’; anotherspeaks of ‘distributions in kind and in money . . . made in a discreet and hithertoeffective manner’.24 The prominent notable Husayn Ibish, who along with Shamdinprovided forces to support the French,25 was made a Chevalier de la Legiond’Honneur. The same report that mentioned this added that the quarter’sinhabitants displayed ‘a marked gratitude for the efforts we are making to improvetheir well-being and their moral situation (Distribution of money, of provisions;improvement of roads, of schools; satisfaction of amour-propre, etc.)’.26
The involvement of some Kurds in the revolt, and the frank purchasing of loyaltyby France that kept others on side, underline the risk of assuming that Syria’s Kurdswere automatically hostile to the developing nationalist movement during theviolence of the 1920s, or that the loyalty of some (not all) Kurds to France emanatedfrom an ethnic minority’s mistrust of a majority nationalism. Neither minority normajority identities were so clearly defined at the time. So when we consider the long-standing enmity between the cAkkash family and residents of Hayy al-Akrad thatdated back to the revolt, we should not assume a priori an ethnic dimension.
What we can say more concretely is that the cAkkash family had been involved onthe rebel side,27 and later developed links with the National Bloc, which emergedafter the revolt to head the nationalist opposition to French rule. In 1936–39,following its negotiation of a Franco-Syria treaty, the Bloc was in government.Therefore, when fighting broke out between the cAkkash and residents of theKurdish quarter, the apparatus of the Syrian state moved to protect the cAkkashbrothers. This is how the French intelligence services described the events followingone incident in August 1938:
The cAkkash being partisans of the government, the latter had numerous arrestsmade [fit proceder a de nombreuses arrestations] in the Kurdish quarter.
The souk of this quarter began by closing as a sign of protest.But the abuses committed by the police upon the inhabitants of this quarter
and several arrests, judged unjustified and vexatory, of qabadays [local toughs],have incited the indignation of the Kurds.
The instruments of the state itself thus became a target for discontent resulting fromwhat had originally been a local feud. On the evening of 11 August 1938 a group ofinhabitants of the quarter assembled to attack the local police post: its personnelwere put to flight, a van bringing reinforcements was stoned ‘and its occupantsmistreated’. Gunshots were also fired by the protesters, who ‘demand the liberationof their friends and the recovery of the weapons provided to the cAkkash by theGovernment’.28 Despite the attempted mediation of a senior member of the Bloc,Nasib al-Bakri, tempers in the quarter remained high. In September, French sourcesreported that money was being collected to place a bounty on Sacid cAkkash’shead.29
The cAkkash feud, like the question of access to government jobs, might have beensettled somewhat differently if the notables of the Hayy al-Akrad had had betterrelations with the Bloc – as a number of Kurds did. The point is not to deny that
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there might have been an ‘ethnic’ element to this feud, but rather to question whetherpatterns in local micropolitics (and the state’s intrusion on them) resulted fromidentitarian feeling, or whether the causative connection might run at least partly inthe other direction, with local micropolitics giving some inhabitants of the Kurdishquarter reasons to make cultural identity an aspect of their political identity. Therewere certainly plenty of such reasons. One of them was the French presence; otherswere to be found in Hayy al-Akrad itself.
To start with the latter, the mandate period – especially its second decade – sawthe development of new forms of political engagement in Syria. If the adept factionalpoliticians of the National Bloc, with their old style of notable politics, just aboutmanaged to stay at the helm of the nationalist movement into the independenceperiod, a more ideological politics no longer based on patronage was alreadydeveloping; indeed, willy-nilly the Bloc contributed to this by attempting to channelpopular sentiment.30 For example, the Communist Party of Syria and Lebanon wasfounded in 1924; it became more prominent under the leadership of Khalid Bakdash,a Kurd, in the 1930s. The communists were hostile to French imperialism and itsdivisive strategies, and suspicious of Kurdish notables. Thus, a French intelligencereport noting the development of ‘propaganda in favour of a Kurdish autonomy’ ata club in the Kurdish quarter added that ‘[t]he communist members inhabiting thisquarter, for their part, are leading active measures to check the development of thisidea, saying that the movement’s promoters are in the pay of the French’.31
Likewise, when Bakdash attempted to set up a ‘so-called Boxing Club [Club sportifde Boxe]’ he ran into bitter opposition from a Kurdish nationalist – I use the termadvisedly here – from the Jazira, cUthman Sabri, founder of a Kurdish-languageschool. The latter, ‘in agreement with certain notables of this quarter’, sought topersuade the French authorities to prevent the Interior Ministry from authorizingBakdash’s request. Sabri and Bakdash were already in conflict: Sabri’s anti-communist propaganda among young Kurds had led many to abandon theCommunist Party. ‘He is thus very violently attacked by Bakdash and his friendswho openly accuse him of being a spy in the pay of the ‘‘French’’.’32 Sabri’spropaganda had not only harmed the communists: it had also drawn young Kurdsaway from the League of National Action, a Syrian Arab nationalist formation moreradical and youthful than the Bloc.33 But it is telling that such activism was necessaryto keep (some) young Kurds away from an Arab nationalist organization. It wouldbe wrong to assume that Kurds would automatically gravitate towards Kurdistpolitical formations rather than other ideologies such as communism, or even Arabnationalism. Syrian Arab nationalism has not, historically, been a racialist,exclusionary nationalism;34 it was clearly the most dynamic political force in Syria’scities at this point (if not, perhaps, in rural areas such as the Jazira).
Within the Kurdish quarter, then, it is not surprising that a Kurdish nationalistsuch as Sabri should feel obliged to propagandize against the dynamic ideologies ofcommunism, on the one hand, and on the other the Arab nationalism thatincreasingly dominated Damascene and Syrian politics. Nor is it surprising that‘certain notables’ in the quarter much preferred a developing Kurdist movement overeither Arab nationalism or Bakdash’s communism (the latter being fairly supportiveto Syrian nationalism both as a force opposing imperialism and as an historicalnecessity35). It might indeed have been the case, as the French intelligence report
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cited above claimed, that the ‘Kurdish notables of Damascus’ unanimouslyconsidered cUmar Agha Shamdin as their leader – but that does not mean that allresidents of Hayy al-Akrad automatically followed their lead. Some of them wereevidently tempted by these other possibilities; and in these circumstances, Kurdismoffered a means for notables to maintain their own dominance in the quarter. Thefact that Bakdash’s own education and political career received support from one ofthem, cAli Agha Zilfu, merely adds a further layer to an already complex picture.36
There is an evident paradox here: the notables, after all, were the most integratedof all Damascus’s Kurds into the city’s political and economic structure. But likeother prominent notables in the city – including the leaders of the Nationalist Bloc –the leading families of Hayy al-Akrad were seeking to secure their own position insociety and politics, relative to other prominent figures, other social groups, theSyrian state, and the French High Commission. In this contest, for an cUmar Aghato adopt Kurdist rhetoric might have been more a tactical choice determined bypolitical circumstances than the expression of an essentialized sense of Kurdishidentity.
The presence of the French is particularly relevant here. The notion of ‘divide andrule’ should not be too simplistically applied: Syrian society was not neatly dividedinto taxonomized ethnolinguistic and ethnoreligious groups waiting to be picked upand set spinning against each other by the French authorities. Such an analysisoverlooks the agency of Syrians in constituting their own political identities. But it iscertainly the case that the French in Syria were keen to see such cultural divisionswherever they could find them. The ability to call upon some cultural factor settingone apart from either Sunni Muslim or Arab identity was thus a useful way ofgaining access to French patronage, as the example of many a Christian churchmanshows. This point is particularly pertinent for the period 1936–39, with the NationalBloc in power and the French authorities doing their best to undermine it. It wouldhardly be surprising for certain notables outside the Bloc government to rediscovertheir Kurdish identity in such circumstances. And, as I mentioned above, this suddenflurry of reports about the Kurds of Damascus, a cluster of documents within asingle folder amongst boxes of material on Kurds in the border zone, comes from theyears of the National Bloc government. This contextual information is not hidden inthe archives, but it is nowhere explicit.
Thus, when we encounter evidence of such mobilizations in the archives, weshould be aware of how the archive might be working to give them greaterprominence than they had in reality – even at the level of the construction of thearchive itself. To consider a similar example, the French authorities systematicallydownplayed anti-French, pro-nationalist voices among the Christian communities(because those were not the voices the French wanted to hear),37 only consideringpro-French voices to be ‘Christian’. This bias is reproduced in the archives, wherepolitical correspondence with (and about) Syria’s Christians is overwhelminglydominated by the church hierarchies – whether because the High Commission onlyconsidered clerics worth speaking to, or only systematically filed correspondencefrom favoured interlocutors. In the same way, the High Commission archivessystematically maximize Kurdist mobilizations (described simply as Kurdishmobilizations) among Syria’s Kurds. Communist organization among Kurds, forexample, only comes into these (bulky) files when it comes into conflict with the
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Kurdist movement. Without claiming statistical significance, it is worth noting – as Isomewhat heavy-handedly tried to do above – that the reports quoted here verylargely attribute any kind of Kurdist political mobilization to ‘Kurdish circles’, ‘theinhabitants of the Kurdish quarter’, ‘Kurdish notables’ or just ‘the Kurds’ (with nofurther distinction made within these categories), while communist mobilizations areattributed to Bakdash by name or to ‘communist members resident in [the] quarter’ –not to ‘Kurds’. The neutral language of the archival inventory – with box and dossiertitles such as Les Kurdes en Syrie or Affaires kurdes –masks the fact that in the Frencharchives, Kurdish political activities that are not Kurdist are not Kurdish either.
The preceding sections have explored why certain Kurds in Damascus, especiallynotables, might have adopted a politics emphasizing their Kurdish identity assomething distinct from Arab identity, without making the assumption – which eventhe ‘loaded’ records of the French administration implicitly disprove – that onlyKurdist politics appealed to Damascene Kurds. They have also rooted thatunderstanding in local political concerns and the active choices of individuals,avoiding both an essentialized conception of the link between identity and politicsand a vision of an undifferentiated Kurdish community being used as a passive toolby the French authorities to hack away at the tree of Arab nationalism. So far,though, we have not answered the specific question of why some Damascene Kurdsbegan to adopt and defend the idea of a Kurdish autonomy in the Jazira – a rathermore distant aspiration than getting access to state jobs in the capital. In this casetoo, however, there are explanations. They require us to take into account thedevelopment of the nation-state form in Syria.
The Jazira lies beyond the desert in the far north-east of Syria: its name, meaning‘island’, refers to its position between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris (the farthestcorner of Syria just touches the west bank of the Tigris). Inasmuch as it looked toany urban centres, before the First World War this peripheral and little-developedregion of the Ottoman Empire had more ties with Diyarbakir and Mosul thanAleppo or (still less) Damascus. But the new borders of the post-war Levant placed itwithin a new state structure, Syria, whose capital was Damascus.
At the outset of the 1920s, the border was contested by force between the Turkishnationalist movement and the French in Syria. The Ankara Accord of 1921 endedthat military conflict and brought about mutual recognition between the newTurkish state and the mandatory power, after which the precise delineation of theborder was carried out by diplomatic means. But it passed through areas which hadnever been subject to the sort of permanent, uniform, centralized authority – theauthority of a modern state – and both the Republican government and the HighCommission now intended to bring to all areas under their control.38 The Ankaragovernment was quicker to extend its authority in the direction of the new frontierthan the mandatory authorities in Syria, and this created resistance among the local,largely Kurdish populations of south-eastern Anatolia. At several points between1925 and 1938 this resistance flared up into armed revolt, which provoked militaryrepression – that is, an ever more intense state presence – which in turn pushed wavesof refugees over the border into the mandate territories.
In 1925, French authority had barely touched the Jazira; and in that year theFrench were more concerned with facing the serious challenge posed by the revolt to
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their control in the parts of Syria where they did have a presence than in extendingtheir presence to new areas. Their slow push into the north-east over the next decadewas to a large extent impelled from the Turkish side: the French needed to asserttheir own authority in the zones that were nominally under their control. They alsoneeded to impose order on the (armed) refugees, both for their own reasons andbecause they were under constant diplomatic pressure to do so from Ankara.39
One of the results of this diplomatic pressure was an agreement with Turkey on thecreation of an exclusion zone in the vicinity of the frontier, running at times to 50km,within which refugee insurgents were forbidden to settle. This affected Hayyal-Akrad, because in some cases Kurdish activists were moved not only outside the‘exclusion zone’, but to Beirut or Damascus. cUthman Sabri, whose encounter withKhalid Bakdash has already been mentioned, was one of these;40 at one time oranother, so were most of the prominent leaders of the Kurdish movement in theJazira – the Badr Khan brothers, Hajo Agha, and more.41 Others settled in Syriancities voluntarily. The example of Sabri shows how active such figures were, not onlyin the field of high politics (with their frequent petitions to the French authorities), butalso in the field of cultural production. Thus Sabri ran a Kurdish-language school,while Jaladat Bey Badr Khan developed the Latin script for writing Kurdish andpublished a review in the Kirmanji dialect of the language while resident inDamascus.42 His brother Kamran cAli Badr Khan also published a review, and in the1940s would broadcast in Kurdish on Radio Levant and successfully lobby the HighCommission for funding to send Kurdish students to study in France.43 Earlier, in 1924,a Kurdish writer from Iraq resident in Aleppo had requested a French subsidy towardspublishing a history of the Kurds, written – in Arabic script this time – in Kurdish.44
And in 1936 the High Commissioner banned the entry, sale, circulation, usage orpublication in Syria ‘of the Kurdish phonographic disks no. 507/11 and 508/11 put onsale by the ‘Societe Orientale Sodwa’ of Aleppo and sung in Kurdish by Said AghaJisraoui’ at the request of the Turkish Consul General, who closely monitored anyKurdish activities in the mandate territories, whether political or cultural.45
There is thus some evidence to suggest that the activities of Kurdish nationalistsfrom elsewhere in residence (often obligatory) in Damascus contributed to a greatersense of Kurdish identity – and a more politicized understanding of that identity –among Kurds there. Certainly this was the intention of Jaladat Bey Badr Khan whenin late 1931 the intelligence services reported that he was in Damascus, ‘where he iscanvassing [travaille, literally ‘working’] Kurdish circles, in favour of cooperationwith the fatherland’.46 As this demonstrates, the new state form of Syria madeDamascus and other Syrian cities into important centres within a single field ofpolitical action with the north-east while cutting the region off from centres that werecloser – certainly geographically, perhaps culturally, and in the past politically – suchas Mosul or Diyarbakir (not to mention the old imperial centre of Istanbul). Thiswas the case as soon as the border was drawn, in fact: hence two leaders of the firstgreat Kurdish revolt against the Turkish Republic, in exile in the Jazira in the 1920s,receiving permission to visit Damascus ‘to collect the subsidies of the local Kurdishcommunity there’.47
There is also plenty of evidence of cooperation between nationalist activists fromthe Jazira and Kurdish notables in the city, in both cultural and political domains.Indeed, the two are hard to separate. In 1937 Kurdish notables from both Damascus
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and the Jazira planned to found an association whose aim, according to Frenchreports, was ‘to preserve Kurdish language and traditions in order to avoid theabsorption of the race by the Arabs or Turks’.48 Such an association would naturallyhave been viewed as politically suspicious by the Arab nationalist movement in Syria(or the nationalist government in Turkey), especially when its leaders included notedinsurgents like Hajo Agha.
When they first began arriving in Damascus, these activists from the Jazira – whoseorigins, property, and ultimate political aspirations mostly lay across the border inTurkey – were obviously much less integrated into Syrian political structures (whetherthose of the mandate, or older ones dating from the Ottoman era) than the notables ofHayy al-Akrad. But the new political realities of a Syrian nation-state under Frenchmandate meant that in order to advance their political claims they were drawntowards Damascus, regardless of whether they were in obligatory residence there ornot. This was the case when Kurds who had left Turkey sought to be integrated in theSyrian security forces: to do so they requested the help of the Kurdish deputy to theSyrian parliament, Mustafa Shahin Bey.49 For all Shahin Bey’s own Kurdishnationalism, they thus became implicated (like him) in Syrian political structurescentred on Damascus. Even the structures of the mandatory administrationreinforced this, being centred – at the level of the ‘Etat de Syrie’ – on Damascusrather than Beirut. The simple fact of being under the authority of the Syriangovernment and the French mandate therefore created a powerful potential linkbetween Kurds in all areas of Syria – as it created potential links between allthose living under that authority. And in this context, one potential field forpolitical cooperation was provided by cultural identity (religious, linguistic, orother). In the case of Kurds from the Jazira and Damascus, I would argue thatthat cooperation is what gave rise to the adoption by some Kurds in Damascusof Kurdist aspirations to autonomy focused on the north-east of Syria.
The not entirely voluntary way in which Kurds across Syria were brought togetherby the unpredictable dynamics of state construction is revealed by an example from1930, when a group of Kurdish notables sent a petition to the High Commissionrequesting that the Syrian state bureaucracy in the Jazira employ more Kurds.Although this request was intended to offset the centralizing power of the state, andalthough the French were sympathetic to this desire insofar as it permitted them totreat the Kurds as a distinct population, their response shows how the options opento both Kurds and French were governed by Syrian state structures. The FrenchAssistant Delegate for the Sanjak of Dayr al-Zur, to which the Jazira thenbelonged,50 noted that seven of the 19 signatories were refugees who had ‘not yet lostTurkish nationality’ – Kurds had to be Syrian nationals to be considered foremployment in the Syrian administration. The means contrived to accommodate thepetition’s wishes, meanwhile, show how the Syrian state form itself created linksbetween all Kurds within Syria: the official agreed with his superior’s suggestion thatin the absence of suitably qualified candidates (that is, sufficiently educated andSyrian nationals) in the region itself, a DamasceneKurd should be appointed to headthe still rudimentary local bureaucracy. ‘[A]nd when the administration is definitivelyestablished, we might investigate if among the Kurdish population of Syriannationality in the Haute-Djezireh there are a few individuals apt to be admitted tosubaltern positions.’51
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This new dynamic, in which the Jazira had become a peripheral zone of a Syriannation-state politically centred on Damascus, is also visible in the case of oneYunis Agha, ‘Kurdish notable of the Haute-Djezireh’. At the start of September1937, he was in Damascus, where he had ‘come to make contact with the notablesof the Kurdish quarter’ – with the purpose, the intelligence services reported, of‘obtain[ing] a post as Muhafiz [provincial governor] in the Kurdish regions. Hisintervention with his compatriots in Damascus has no other aim than to solicittheir support.’52 Yunis Agha’s aim was to secure a post, on the periphery, as anofficial of a central state based in Damascus. Kurdish identity provided him with ameans of achieving this aim by creating a potential link between him and figures atthe centre who had some leverage there as influential actors in the city or(particularly) as favoured interlocutors of the French. But it was the new stateform of Syria that gave him a reason to seek those figures out by bringing him toDamascus in the first place.
In the context of a state structure centred on Damascus, cultural identity was notthe only foundation on which political alliances could be built between actors fromdifferent parts of the territory: a politicized ‘Kurdishness’ was the choice of some,but not all Kurds. Khalid Bakdash, as a communist, based his political action on arather different conception of Syrian society; while in this same period, Kurdishleaders in the highlands of the Kurd Dagh, near the western end of the Syrian–Turkish frontier, were claiming a Turkish identity and requesting their region’sincorporation into Turkey.53 Among the population more generally, meanwhile,political interaction between the centre and the periphery might be based on manyother things: kinship; shared geographical origin (an actor from the peripheryseeking support in the capital among migrants from the same region); clientelism (anurban-dwelling absentee landlord arranging for a client to be appointed to a statepost in the region of his land holdings); or even democratic representation. Suchordinary forms of interaction are, evidently, not unique to Syria.
What marks out alliances based on a supposedly shared cultural identity asparticularly significant is not that they express, in themselves, a more ‘authentic’underlying political reality, but their political implications in a nation-state contextwhere cultural identity is already politicized. Actors who have little in common insocial or economic terms, but who have a political interest in forming an alliance,can express their cooperation in cultural terms. If this is true for minority groups itis true a fortiori for the ‘majority’. An equivalent of the Yunis Agha case involvingthe mainstream nationalist movement would be the cooperation between theNational Bloc’s leaders at the centre and the chiefs of Arab Bedouin tribes, notablyin the very Jazira that was the object of Kurdist aspirations. That cooperation,expressed in the idiom of nationalism, permitted urban Arab nationalists tobuttress their claim that the Jazira was ‘Arab’ (and not Kurdish, Armenian, orTurkish). An example of this is the language used by the nationalist newspaperal-Ayyam to contest Kurdist claims, a few years before Yunis Agha’s visit toDamascus. While proclaiming its support for the aims of Kurdish nationalism, thenewspaper wrote that
we want them to build their independence in their homeland [diyarihim]‘Kurdistan’, not in the Arab Jazira, the birthplace [mawtin] of Shammar,
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cAnaza, Tayy, al-Jabbur, and other great Arab tribes. The Jazira was the cradleof Arabness [mahd al-curuba] before the Islamic conquest . . .
That a people should work to amputate an essentially Arab part [juz’ carabisamim] from their fatherland for the sake of a hundred Kurdish villages in thenorth of the Jazira that were and remain grazing lands for the flocks and horsesof the Arabs – this is a grave matter, that all the Arab lands will shake over[hadha amr jalal tahtazz lahu al-aqtar al-carabiyya jamicuha].54
Here, a nationalist uses cultural identity to establish a link between centre andperiphery, thus asserting a territorial claim to that periphery on behalf of the state.Although the residence there of members of a ‘non-national’ group is recognized, theirrights to the territory are explicitly denied. The article demonstrates why, when suchpolitical mobilization occurs in a nation-state on the basis of a cultural identity otherthan that of the ‘nation’(-state), tension is created; the state and ‘its’ nationalists aremore likely to see the mobilization as a threat in itself – as automatically tendingtowards the creation of another nation-state. Hence the article’s headline andsubheading, ‘The Kurdish movement in Syria. Kurdish refugees are working to createa Kurdish homeland.’ As this suggests, if the development of a new nation-state inSyria favoured the development of a politics of ethnicity, it simultaneously raised thestakes involved. The presence of a foreign imperial power keen to exploit, reinforce,and at need invent ethnic divisions only made things worse.
Notes
The author would like to thank Thomas Pierret and Tony Gorman for discussing this article with him, and
the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland for funding the research on which it is based. It was
written during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World,
University of Edinburgh.
1. Archives diplomatiques, Nantes, fonds Syrie-Liban (henceforward AD-SL) Box 572, untitled dossier
(material released under 60-year rule), subdossier Les Kurdes en Syrie – Informations. Information
No.5057, 15 June 1939. NB – Unless otherwise stated, all ‘Informations’ (brief fact-sheets containing
information about a single event) quoted here were issued by the French High Commission’s
Direction de la Surete generale in Beirut. This one was based on a report sent by the Damascus Surete
the previous day.
2. J.L. Gelvin, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (London:
University of California Press, 1998), pp.150–68.
3. In a policy document reprinted in G.D. Khoury, Une tutelle coloniale: le mandat francais en Syrie et au
Liban. Ecrits politiques de Robert de Caix (Paris: Editions Belin, 2006), pp.248–70.
4. This and other factual information on Hayy al-Akrad in this paragraph is drawn from the following:
P.S. Khoury, ‘Syrian Urban Politics in Transition: The Quarters of Damascus during the French
Mandate’, in A. Hourani et al. (eds.), The Modern Middle East: A Reader (London: I.B. Tauris, 1993
[reproduction of 1984 article]), pp.436–7; D. McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, 3rd revised
edition (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), pp.466–8; J. Tejel Gorgas, ‘Le mouvement kurde de Turquie en
exil. Continuites et discontinuites du nationalisme kurde sous le mandat francais en Syrie et au Liban
(1925–1946)’ (PhD thesis, Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris/Universite de Fribourg,
n.d. [2003]), p.112; N. Fuccaro, ‘Ethnicity and the City: The Kurdish Quarter of Damascus between
Ottoman and French Rule, c. 1724–1946’, Urban History, Vol.30 (2003), pp.206–24. For a more
general overview of the quarters of Damascus in the mandate period, see Khoury, ‘Syrian Urban
Politics in Transition’.
5. McDowall (A Modern History of the Kurds, p.467) estimates that some 40% of its inhabitants were
‘entirely Arabicized’ by 1920. Tejel Gorgas (‘Le mouvement Kurde de Turquie en exil’, p.112), citing
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but not referencing a British diplomatic source, states that the quarter was divided into three sections,
one largely kurdophone, one largely arabophone, and one where neither language predominated.
6. Fuccaro, ‘Ethnicity and the City’, p.211.
7. Michael Provence, The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2005), pp.13 and 35.
8. Fuccaro, ‘Ethnicity and the City’, p.216.
9. Tejel Gorgas, ‘Le mouvement Kurde de Turquie en exil’, p.112; cAbd al-Razzaq Moaz, ‘The Urban
Fabric of an Extramural Quarter in 19th-century Damascus’, in T. Philipp and B. Schaebler (eds.),
The Syrian Land: Processes of Integration and Fragmentation. Bilad al-Sham from the 18th to the 20th
Century (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998), pp.165–83; P.S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab
Nationalism. The Politics of Damascus 1860–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
p.40, and ‘Syrian Urban Politics in Transition’, p.437; Fuccaro, ‘Ethnicity and the City’, p.217.
Khoury (Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism, pp.39–40) gives details of the rise to prominence of
these two families through Ottoman political structures and land ownership in the nineteenth century,
and of relations between them. The first floor of the Yusuf house in Suq Saruja had a surface area of
2,070m2 (Moaz, ‘The Urban Fabric of an Extramural Quarter’, p.169).
10. Fuccaro, ‘Ethnicity and the City’, p.211.
11. This map is available online through the website of the Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection of
the University of Texas at Austin. http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/damascus2_1912.jpg
(accessed 7 May 2009).
12. D. Sack, ‘The Historic Fabric of Damascus and its Changes in the 19th and at the beginning of the
20th century’, in Philipp and Schaebler (eds.), The Syrian Land, p.192; Tejel Gorgas, ‘Le mouvement
Kurde de Turquie en exil’, p.112.
13. AD-SL Box 572, untitled dossier (material released under 60-year rule), subdossier Les Kurdes en
Syrie – Informations. Information No.1156 (15 Feb. 1939). NB – The French intelligence services
described this petition, and others, as being circulated by Kurdish leaders ‘amongst their
coreligionists’ (meaning ‘among other Kurds’) – a lapse indicative of the primary importance given
to religion in the French vision of Syrian society. Access to state jobs was, understandably, a
constant concern of Syrians of all communities in this period of an expanding state apparatus. In
this, Syria was in no way exceptional.
14. AD-SL Box 572, same dossier and subdossier. Information No.110/S (6 March 1939).
15. AD-SL Box 572, same dossier and subdossier. Unsigned Note pour M. le Chef du Cabinet Politique ([?]
June 1939). Three of the five delegates were certainly from the border zone or Anatolia: Jaladat Badr
Khan, Kamran Badr Khan, and Hajo Agha. I lack information on the other two.
16. AD-SL Box 572, same dossier and subdossier. Information No.5185 (21 June 1939).
17. AD-SL Box 572, same dossier and subdossier. Information No.6062 (5 Aug. 1939).
18. I am using this term to denote political mobilizations around the sense of Kurdish cultural identity,
without accepting the nationalist claim that all such mobilizations are Kurdish nationalist. Future
instances will be without inverted commas.
19. AD-SL Box 572, untitled dossier (material released under 60-year rule), subdossier Les Kurdes en
Syrie – Informations. Informations Nos.4779 (11 Sept. 1937) and 4884 (16 Sept. 1937); Damascus
Surete, Information No.281/S (12 Aug. 1938). These terms – the cAkkash family on one side, ‘the
Kurds’ or ‘the inhabitants of the Kurdish quarter on the other’ – are those used in this documentation:
see e.g. Information No.4779.
20. For the Revolt, see P.S. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism,
1920–1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1987), Chs.6–9; L. Bokova, La confrontation franco-syrienne a
l’epoque du mandat 1925–1927 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1991); and Provence, The Great Syrian Revolt.
The French officer responsible for quelling the revolt in the region of Damascus left his own account,
including details of the elaborate fortifications the French had to put in place: C. Andrea, La revolte
druze et l’insurrection de Damas 1925–1926 (Paris: Payot, 1937).
21. AD-SL Box 1704, Bulletin de renseignements 250 (14 Dec. 1925), second part. Hadi is here spelled
‘Ade’. NB – These reports were compiled, daily during the revolt, in Damascus by what was then
called the Service des Renseignements (later the Surete).
22. AD-SL Box 1704, Bulletin de renseignements 229 (23 Nov. 1925).
23. AD-SL Box 1704, Bulletin de renseignements 239 (3 Dec. 1925).
24. AD-SL Box 1704, Bulletin de renseignements 229 (23 Nov. 1925) and 243 (7 Dec. 1925).
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25. Fuccaro, ‘Ethnicity and the City’, p.219. Fuccaro notes here that by this stage Ibish was ‘the richest
landowner in the province of Damascus’.
26. AD-SL Box 1704, Bulletin de renseignements 248 (12 Dec. 1925).
27. They are mentioned several times in the intelligence bulletins, for example operating a roadblock on the
Damascus-Duma road with the famous rebel leader Hassan al-Kharrat and his band at the village of
Harasta a short distance from Damascus, in late November 1925: AD-SL Box 1704, Bulletin de
renseignements 233 (27 Nov. 1925). This report mentions the band killing two Kurds and two Christians.
28. This and preceding quotations from AD-SL Box 572, untitled dossier (material released under 60-year
rule), subdossier Les Kurdes en Syrie – Informations. Damascus Surete, Information No.281/S (12
Aug. 1938).
29. AD-SL Box 572, same dossier and subdossier. Informations Nos.4620 (24 Aug. 1938) for government
mediation, 4765 (31 Aug. 1938) and 4900 (7 Sept. 1938) for bounty.
30. On ‘patrons, clients, and quarters’, see Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, Ch.11, of which
pp.316–17 discuss the emergence of a new kind of politics. See also pp. 621, 626–8.
31. This and the preceding quote from AD-SL Box 572, untitled dossier (material released under 60-year
rule), subdossier Les Kurdes en Syrie – Informations. Information No.5411 (3 July 1939).
32. This and preceding quotations from AD-SL Box 572, same folder and subdossier, Damascus Surete
Information No.404/S (23 June 1939). NB – The quotation marks around the word ‘French’ are
pencilled in on this document.
33. On the League see P.S. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, passim, especially pp.400–434 for its
origins and composition.
34. For Arab nationalist ideologues linked to the Bloc such as Edmond Rabbath, ‘Arabness’ was the
product of history, not of biology, and there was no reason why Arabized Kurds should not subscribe
to it. One of the most prominent Syrian Arab nationalist intellectuals of the period, Muhammad KurdcAli, was the son of a Kurd and a Circassian.
35. Indeed, Bakdash had accompanied the Bloc’s delegation to Paris as an advisor. Khoury, Syria and the
French Mandate, p.464.
36. Fuccaro, ‘Ethnicity and the City’, p.222.
37. Compare Kais Firro’s observation that the French authorities in Lebanon excluded from the
‘established Lebanese political strata’ any Christians who ‘situated themselves within either’ secular
Arabism or Syrianism. K. Firro, Inventing Lebanon: Nationalism and the State under the Mandate
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), p.30.
38. On the definition of the border and its relationship to the transformation of the state, see S. Altu�g and
B.T. White, ‘Frontieres et pouvoir d’Etat. La frontiere turco-syrienne dans les annees 1920 et 30’,
Vingtieme siecle. Revue d’histoire, Vol. 2009/3, No.103 (2009), pp. 91–104.
39. B.T. White, ‘The Nation-state Form and the Emergence of ‘‘Minorities’’ in French Mandate Syria,
1919–39’ (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2008), Ch.4.
40. AD-SL Box 572, untitled dossier (material released under 60-year rule), subdossier Les Kurdes en
Syrie – Informations. Damascus Surete, Information No.404/S (23 June 1939).
41. See McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds for more on these figures within not just Syrian but
wider Kurdish politics.
42. McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, p.468.
43. AD-SL (Series B) Box 33, dossier 1053: Docteur Kameran Bey BEDER KHAN. Note: Docteur
Kamouran Beder Khan (27 April 1944). It seems likely that the review in question was the same as that
published by Jaladat Bey. However, this source gives its place of publication as Beirut, while
McDowall (A Modern History of the Kurds, p.468) gives Damascus for Jaladat Bey’s.
44. AD-SL Box 1054, dossier Kurdes 1924. Compte-Rendu, Aleppo SR (24 Sept. 1924).
45. AD-SL Box 571, dossier Requete du Consul General de Turquie a/s disques de propagande prokurde mis
en circulation a Alep. Decision du Haut-Commissaire N8 343. The Consul-General’s request is also
included in this dossier (in fact just a slender paper folder).
46. AD-SL Box 572, dossier Menees Armeno-Kurdes. Information N8 4401 (24/11/1931). The phrase in
French is actually ‘la mere patrie’, the ‘mother fatherland’ (patrie being feminine). That Kurdistan was
the ‘fatherland’ of the residents of Hayy al-Akrad in this romantic nationalist sense is itself a
nationalist assumption.
47. AD-SL Box 1055, dossier Mouvement Kurde (1928), subdossier Question Kurde – Immigrants –
Refugies Kurdes. High Commissioner’s delegate to State of Syria to HC (27 March 1928). The
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subsidies were to support destitute refugees (though the Turks suspected, probably not without
reason, that they were used to fund military activities too).
48. AD-SL Box 572, untitled dossier (material released under 60-year rule), subdossier Les Kurdes en
Syrie – Informations. Information No.3164 (21 June 1937).
49. AD-SL Box 572, same dossier and subdossier. Information No.2273 (11 May 1932).
50. The Jazira was later detached from the sanjak of Dayr al-Zur and had its administrative status
upgraded, partly as a result of the expansion of its population due to Kurdish and Christian
immigration from Turkey and Iraq and partly because of the French desire to distance these
populations from the Syrian mainstream.
51. This and preceding quotes from AD-SL Box 572, dossier Passage en Syrie de populations Kurdes ou
chretiennes ou de deserteurs Turcs. Assistant Delegate (delegue adjoint) for Sanjak of Dayr al-Zur to
Delegate for State of Syria (5 Aug. 1930). He also suggested that the whole petition had been inspired
by the Badr Khans in order to ‘give cohesion to their Kurdish brothers’.
52. This and preceding quotes from AD-SL Box 572, untitled dossier (material released under 60-year
rule), subdossier Les Kurdes en Syrie – Informations. Information No.4532 (2 Sept. 1937). In this
document his name appears as Younes.
53. During the Alexandretta crisis, for example (see documents in AD-SL Box 571, dossier La question des
Kurdes en Syrie. Correspondance. Les Comites Kurds).
54. In Arabic, ‘al-haraka al-kurdiyya fi Suriyya. laji’u al-kurd yascun li-ta’sis watan kurdi’. Al-Ayyam, 11
July 1932. This article does not refer to Damascene Kurds, however, and nor do others I found
regarding the ‘Kurdish question’.
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