cover image No Friends But the Mountains: The Tragic History of the Kurds

No Friends But the Mountains: The Tragic History of the Kurds

John Bulloch, Harvey Morris. Oxford University Press, USA, $30 (264pp) ISBN 978-0-19-508075-9

Numbering more than 20 million, the Kurds--the world's largest minority without a state--live in an area the size of France, united by a common culture and a distinct language but divided by the frontiers of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and Russia. When the Kurds of Iraq rebelled against Saddam Hussein during the Gulf war, they were led to expect aid from the West; but Saddam launched a campaign of vengeance that included unrestrained use of chemical weapons while the international community looked on in virtual silence. In this well-researched, accessible study, Bullock and Morris, coauthors of Saddam's War , show how--but not why--Kurdish history has been dominated since antiquity by political betrayal and that the Kurds have often been victims of their own squabbles. The closest the disputatious tribespeople have come to a unified action, according to the authors, was during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s when the Kurds of Turkey, Iran and Iraq rose up briefly against the governing powers. Nor is a pan-Kurdish political movement likely, they add, in the foreseeable future. Photos. (Sept.)