Free Kurdistan (Kurdistan, an ideal ally of US and Israel in the Middle East)

Recent nuances and nudges in government policy as well as tacit support for the most obscene anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism by the ruling political party of Turkey ought to cause the United States to begin to rethink its comprehensive policy toward Asia in general and toward one non-Arab minority in Iraq in particular: the Kurds.

What, today, is the most intractable political problem in Iraq? It is the very real political and religious aims of Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish regions of the nation. Since the inception of Operation Iraqi Freedom, President Bush has maintained that the unity of the nation of Iraq was non-negotiable. In politics and in war, however, nothing should be non-negotiable.

Iraq is not a nation in any real sense, but it was rather three separate concentration camps each with differing degrees of oppression. The Sunnis, the smallest group in the economically and landlocked center of Iraq, had the most to gain by making peace quickly and joining a unity government. Coalition forces have supported the ungrateful Sunnis by opposing a partition of Iraq. Now President Bush should embrace such a division.

This would divide Iraq into three separate nations: a relatively unimportant Bagdad Iraq of Sunnis, a Basra Iraq of Shiites who could govern themselves without the need for Iranian support, and an Mosul Iraq which would be the first true homeland for Kurds in many centuries, an oil rich area that is well able to defend itself and has shown the most gratitude to America of the three nations of Iraq.

Why has America shied away from this approach? The principal reason is that Kurds are a dispossessed people whose natural homeland stretches across much of the Middle East. A substantial number of Kurds live in Iran, which is as close to a mortal enemy of the United States as there is in the world today. American support for reclaiming those colonial possession of Teheran and the incorporation of those lands into Kurdistan would roughly double the area of the Iraqi Kurds.

A significant, but smaller, number of Kurds live in Syria, an enemy of America and a supporter both of the Iraqi insurgency and of international terrorism. If the Baathist regime did not give up its Kurdish lands, then the Kurds, with American military support, should smash the Syrian Army and force as humiliating a peace treaty as possible on Damascus.

The majority of the thirty million or so Kurds, however, live in Turkey – almost one quarter of the population of Turkey. That, more than anything else, has stayed our hand so far. Kurdistan with the southeast quarter of Turkey, is a fairly large nation. Traditionally, Turkey has been an ally of America, but that has been changing fast and Turkish support for American policies has always been based entirely on cynical self-interest. We owe Turkey – neutral in World War Two and our enemy in World War One – nothing.

Our support for Turkey costs us the goodwill of Greeks, Armenians and other European nations that suffered through centuries of Turkish oppression. It also has cost of much of the goodwill of Kurds, who would otherwise welcome the presence of a superpower that was not intolerant, not Arab, and sought nothing but friendly relations with it.

Another important reason for supporting a true Kurdistan is that the Kurds are a genuinely diverse people. Although they were forced to covert to Islam, today only about seventy percent of the Kurds are Moslem, and many of those only nominally, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians (or a faith much akin to that) and Bahai have lived within the long-persecuted Kurdish community with their first allegiance as Kurds, and there is no single branch of Islam that clearly dominates the Kurdish community.

Kurdistan could then be a democracy with an Islamic majority that was genuinely inclusive of all faiths, both needing the support of all Kurds to survive (much like Israel) and also because of centuries of living largely underground, tolerant of all Kurds. There is little doubt that it would become an affluent nation as capable of defending itself as Israel is today, and that along with the establishment of a truly free and democratic Lebanon, would create three strong, free and prosperous democracies which would naturally become allies or at least friends.

The dismemberment of Iran, which would lose ten percent of its population, and the humiliation of Syria, which would be forced into a very precarious position, would be great peripheral benefits. The downside has always been the impact on Turkey, but a Turkey which continues to deny its Armenian holocaust and is rapidly moving toward denial of HaShoah as it embraces vicious anti-Semitism, should increasingly lose our concern about its interests.

The Genetic Bonds Between Kurds and Jews"

by Kevin Alan Brook

Kurds are the Closest Relatives of Jews

In 2001, a team of Israeli, German, and Indian scientists discovered that the majority of Jews around the world are closely related to the Kurdish people -- more closely than they are to the Semitic-speaking Arabs or any other population that was tested. The researchers sampled a total of 526 Y-chromosomes from 6 populations (Kurdish Jews, Kurdish Muslims, Palestinian Arabs, Sephardic Jews, Ashkenazic Jews, and Bedouin from southern Israel) and added extra data on 1321 persons from 12 populations (including Russians, Belarusians, Poles, Berbers, Portuguese, Spaniards, Arabs, Armenians, and Anatolian Turks). Most of the 95 Kurdish Muslim test subjects came from northern Iraq. Ashkenazic Jews have ancestors who lived in central and eastern Europe, while Sephardic Jews have ancestors from southwestern Europe, northern Africa, and the Middle East. The Kurdish Jews and Sephardic Jews were found to be very close to each other. Both of these Jewish populations differed somewhat from Ashkenazic Jews, who mixed with European peoples during their diaspora. The researchers suggested that the approximately 12.7 percent of Ashkenazic Jews who have the Eu 19 chromosomes -- which are found among between 54 and 60 percent of Eastern European Christians -- descend paternally from eastern Europeans (such as Slavs) or Khazars. But the majority of Ashkenazic Jews, who possess Eu 9 and other chromosomes, descend paternally from Judeans who lived in Israel two thousand years ago. In the article in the November 2001 issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics, Ariella Oppenheim of the Hebrew University of Israel wrote that this new study revealed that Jews have a closer genetic relationship to populations in the northern Mediterranean (Kurds, Anatolian Turks, and Armenians) than to populations in the southern Mediterranean (Arabs and Bedouins).

A previous study by Ariella Oppenheim and her colleagues, published in Human Genetics in December 2000, showed that about 70 percent of Jewish paternal ancestries and about 82 percent of Palestinian Arabs share the same chromosomal pool. The geneticists asserted that this might support the claim that Palestinian Arabs descend in part from Judeans who converted to Islam. With their closer relationship to Jews, the Palestinian Arabs are distinctive from other Arab groups, such as Syrians, Lebanese, Saudis, and Iraqis, who have less of a connection to Jews.

A study by Michael Hammer et al., published in PNAS in June 2000, had identified a genetic connection between Arabs (especially Syrians and Palestinians) and Jews, but had not tested Kurds, so it was less complete.

Many Kurds have the "Jewish" Cohen Modal Haplotype

In the 1990s, a team of scientists (including the geneticist Michael Hammer, the nephrologist Karl Skorecki, and their colleagues in England) discovered the existence of a haplotype which they termed the "Cohen modal haplotype" (abbreviated as CMH). Cohen is the Hebrew word for "priest", and designates descendants of Judean priests from two thousand years ago. Initial research indicated that while only about 3 percent of general Jews have this haplotype, 45 percent of Ashkenazic Cohens have it, while 56 percent of Sephardic Cohens have it. David Goldstein, an evolutionary geneticist at Oxford University, said: "It looks like this chromosomal type was a constituent of the ancestral Hebrew population." Some Jewish rabbis used the Cohen study to argue that all Cohens with the CMH had descended from Aaron, a High Priest who lived about 3500 years ago, as the Torah claimed. Shortly after, it was determined that 53 percent of the Buba clan of the Lemba people of southern Africa have the CMH, compared to 9 percent of non-Buba Lembas. The Lembas claim descent from ancient Israelites, and they follow certain Jewish practices such as circumcision and refraining from eating pork, and for many geneticists and historians the genetic evidence seemed to verify their claim.

However, it soon became apparent that the CMH is not specific to Jews or descendants of Jews. In a 1998 article in Science News, Dr. Skorecki indicated (in an interview) that some non-Jews also possess the Cohen markers, and that the markers are therefore not "unique or special". The CMH is very common among Iraqi Kurds, according to a 1999 study by C. Brinkmann et al. And in her 2001 article, Oppenheim wrote: "The dominant haplotype of the Muslim Kurds (haplotype 114) was only one microsatellite-mutation step apart from the CMH..." (Oppenheim 2001, page 1100). Furthermore, the CMH is also found among some Armenians, according to Dr. Levon Yepiskoposyan (Head of the Institute of Man in Yerevan, Armenia), who has studied genetics for many years. Dr. Avshalom Zoossmann-Diskin wrote: "The suggestion that the 'Cohen modal haplotype' is a signature haplotype for the ancient Hebrew population is also not supported by data from other populations." (Zoossmann-Diskin 2000, page 156).

In short, the CMH is a genetic marker from the northern Middle East which is not unique to Jews. However, its existence among many Kurds and Armenians, as well as some Italians and Hungarians, would seem to support the overall contention that Kurds and Armenians are the close relatives of modern Jews and that the majority of today's Jews have paternal ancestry from the northeastern Mediterranean region.

The Kurds are a living witness to arab hypocrisy. Every time an arab opens his mouth about the need for a palestinian homeland, just remember the Kurds. No arab on earth will speak up for a Kurdish homeland.

If Iraq collapses, the Kurds will almost certainly declare independence. They have several points in their favor, they have oil, and they have a competent militia, and they have been operating as essentially an independent country for a decade now.

The problem is that they live in a very tough neighborhood. They will find it hard to live without the support and protection of some other power. It is possible to be sovereign and still be closely aligned with another power, and their situation would require it. Either they would align themselves with the sunni arabs (not likely), or with Iran (possible) or with Turkey (the more likely outcome). While Turkey panics at the thought of an independent Kurdistan, they are the Kurds' primary route to market, and probably their primary business partners.

Our preference must be "anyone except Iran".

Whatever happens, we should be prepared to maintain a presence in Kurdistan or else we risk seeing them fall under Iranian influence. Iran hopes, I believe, to divide and conquer in Iraq, and it could happen.

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