Kurds
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The Kurds are the stateless people of the Iraq,Syria,Turkey,Iran borderlands and, in John Kiriakou's telling, America's most reliable, and most casually insulted, friends in the region.

"Pro-American for generations"

The Kurds are a different issue from every other faction in Syria, Kiriakou says: the U.S. has long-standing relations with Kurds in both Syria and Iraq, and they have been generally pro-American for decades, for generations. As a young officer he saw that relationship up close, Kurdish delegations came to Washington for high-level meetings all the time, with Kiriakou often the notetaker or escort. What he remembers is a senior official who "always talked to them like they had half a brain", insulting, with mocking terms for the Kurds that struck him as racist.

Under Saddam

Inside Saddam Hussein's Iraq, opposition meant a bullet, except among the Kurds, who in Kiriakou's paraphrase wanted no part of the exile schemes: "We're not working with any of these people. We're going to make Kurdistan and we're going to live happily ever after, and that's where the oil is anyway." Saddam had used chemical weapons against them, for Kiriakou, the unambiguous part of the WMD record. After the Gulf War, the no-fly zones established to protect the Kurds in the north and the Shia in the south carried a lethal flaw: they banned fixed-wing aircraft and said nothing about helicopters. Sanctions, meanwhile, crushed Kurds, Shia, women, and children while Saddam's clan and power structure suffered nothing.

Of the entire CIA-funded opposition circus, he notes, only the Kurds ever amounted to anything: Jalal Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, ended up president of Iraq. In the 1990s the U.S. worked with them in the autonomous north, and when Jordan refused overflight clearance for supplying them, flights had to cross Israel and loop out over the Mediterranean to get there.

The Turkey problem

Kiriakou's explanation for Turkey's strange passivity toward ISIS: the Turks had no inherent beef with the group, which had never attacked Turkey, what they shared was a common enemy in the Kurds. His humanitarian bottom line, even while opposing the wars: he would hate to simply abandon the region's innocents, "the Kurds desperately need some help, even if it's just medicine and food aid."

See also

- ISIS
- Saddam Hussein
- Ahmed Chalabi
