A Modern History of the Kurds

This book is over 500 pages and uses a very small type face so you get a lot of reading.It is the definitive modern Kurdish History Book covering all of Kudristan that is occupied by Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran.Kurdish History is very complex. None of the occupiers want to see an independent Kurdistan in the territory they occupy or in another part of Kurdistan occupied by a different power and the different occupiers have worked together to prevent this.The Kurdish Leadership have failed in uniting the Kurdish people to achieve an independent Kurdistan.My heart goes out to the Kurdish people who have been gassed, murdered, raped, ethnically cleansed and brutalised by their occupiers.They have been denied the use of their language and even their very existence has been denied.This book gives a lot of history on these important topics.Some day I hope this large national group will get their own country `Kurdistan' and live in peace and prosperity.Regards, Ian.

I like it the book and it is useful to know about Kurdish in Iraq . It is worth reading

Bought this to reinforce my A-Level history course work, really well written. For me the most useful part is that it documents the sources really well, which made writing the course work far easier. What I have read of it is certainly very good, only four stars because I have not had a chance to read the whole thing and so can only comment on the small part that I have used. Would recommend for everything from mild interest in the subject to producing A-Level coursework perhaps even more serious work from this.

The book is fair and illuminating in giving us a Kurdish side of Turkish, Iraqi and Iranian history. It's an important story, full of significant sub-plots. For just one example, McDowall explains that after Saddam nationalized Iraq's oil in 1972, Kurdish rebels like Mulla Mustafa feared that "Kurdish oil would be turned into Arab oil". They still wanted 2/3rds of all oil revenue reserved for the Kurdish community, and now they sought support from the United States. As the Pike Papers revealed in 1976, Henry Kissinger argued that "a new regime might let us back into the oilfields". In 1973 Mulla Mustafa threw secrecy to the winds by announcing in the Washington Post,"We are ready to act according to US policy if the US will protect us from the wolves. In the event of sufficient support we should be able to control the Kirkuk oilfields and confer exploitation rights on an American company."

I'm struggling with this book,I lived seven years in Turkey,traveled extensively in the Kurdish areas in the east and some of my best friends are Kurdish but this is information overload.I've struggled to read the first one hundred pages and feel I am at the point of conceding defeat and picking up something more interesting from my library ie.Freya Stark,Gertrude Bell,Burckhardt,T.E. Lawrence etc.(Yes I do read history!)

good value for money, thanks for speedy delivery

Good book and good service... thanks

This was a very informative, well researched book, and even though the history ends quite a few years before the time of this review, the parallels to 2019 world news are inevitable. The Kurdish question may have its ups and downs, but it doesn't seem it'll go away anytime soon, and this book is a great explainer on an important topic.I'm not sure if I'd call the book enjoyable, and this isn't just because of the subject matter. For someone with limited knowledge, many specifics (dates, locations, names, movements/parties, etc) can become confusing, especially as history repeats itself. Not first as tragedy and then as farce, as the saying goes, but in this case, first as tragedy and then as tragedy again. Will I remember something from the book that I could explain or name-drop in a (hypothetical) conversation? Probably not. But you get a lot from it, even if the insight is intangible, a sense of history as it meanders capriciously and without mercy through myriad alleyways, byways, crossroads and toll roads.As always, there's the question of bias in politically divisive topics. I thought the book was neutral, as serious books should be, simultaneously sympathetic and critical. The Kurds come across sometimes as disorganized opportunists, other times as hypocritical sell-outs, occasionally as bloodthirsty pillagers, usually as amateur political operators. But the countries that the Kurds are up against come across ten times worse. Anyway, many nations had a similar tribal or feudal culture that they overcame, it's a great injustice that the Kurds were dealt with an especially difficult hand and couldn't do the same.Speaking of which sides come off worse, some general thoughts, which perhaps pertain a bit to the so-called current culture wars between universalists/globalists and nationalists/localists... Is it such an obvious truth that reading history broadens the mind? Normally, I'd say yes, but then again, there are some books that have the potential for the opposite effect, especially when they examine topics which directly or indirectly allow for the question to be considered: are history's countless ignoble (or noble) episodes spread in a reasonably even distribution among cultures or countries? It's perhaps inevitable that as one reads more history, book after book, no matter (or perhaps especially) if the information is neutral, concrete and well researched, the more rigorously this question is tested. You go from being a tourist/traveller (superficially observing behaviours, habits and mannerisms) to being a distant semi local (understanding how the charming/quaint/ethnic appearances interconnect and how they're tied to deeper attitudes and non-public behaviours). And if you think you've got a bit of the essence of a culture/country, you may consider its positives (offerings to the world, science, culture, art, etc) and its negatives (the wrong, shameful or immoral episodes), and perhaps also the opportunities it had for either of the two. And if it happens that you believe that the former are meagre and the latter are recurrent, compared to your own (or others') culture or history, well... A bias is born. Familiarity can bring contempt, not just in one-to-one situations, perhaps.Of course, the counter argument is that patterns form by statistical flukes when you've got a large sample. Take a few hundred regions/nations/cultures, inevitably some histories will appear more ignoble/noble, only due to pure luck. The wheel's still in spin, give it a few hundred years, and there's no telling what it'll be naming (to paraphrase). But will the first one now later be last or the loser now later to win? Perhaps. One could argue that even with the well meaning, open-minded assumption, that there's no inherent root cause behind some things, it's still logical to claim that once certain patterns form, they sometimes tend to be self-perpetuating. At any rate, even this mild, moderate determinism, no matter its veracity, doesn't exactly lead to a more open mind.