The Kurds are being written out of history once again

[TomSea]

The Kurds are being written out of history once again

Britain carved its chunk of the Middle East at the end of the first world war, meet the Britons trying to redraw the lines

By Oli Dugmore

An ethnic group of 50 million stateless people live in the Middle East. Split across Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey, the Kurds have fought countless battles for their lands.

Left with no nation of their own by Britain and France in 1916, as the first world war’s victors pre-emptively divvied up Middle Eastern lands, the Kurds have since been fighting in all four parts of the land they feel is Kurdistan. Nations have concurrently tried to terminate Kurdish autonomy through ethnic cleansing; be it banning their language, stripping their citizenship or even conducting the largest ever chemical weapons attack on a civilian population, as Saddam Hussein did in the Kurdish city of Halabja in Iraq in 1988.

When the Islamic State conquered parts of Syria and Iraq in 2014, with their militant hard-line fascist interpretation of Islam, the Kurdish militia forces of Northern Syria (Rojava to the Kurds) saw an opportunity and stepped up to fight them. Promoting secular values and democratic autonomy against fundamentalism and murderous extremism, these forces, known as the People’s Protection Units (the YPG), began accepting international volunteers from around the world to join their fight.

Read more at: https://www.joe.co.uk/politics/kurds-rojava-afrin-175005

Sad shame.