In my travels I interact with a lot of people on a daily basis , but yesterday I ran into my first Iraqi Kurd.
The gentleman works next to an ATM I had to service and I have said hello to him before. He started off the conversation with some remark about immigration. He came here legally about 10 years ago and is upset about the illegal immigration problem, primarily because he went through channels and the illegals haven't.
I then asked him where he was from and was suprised to hear he was from Iraq. He also went on to divulge he was Kurdish. So I had to ask him what he thought of the Iraq war and got what I thought was an unusual answer.
He believes that getting rid of Saddam was okay because Saddam was not good to his people (now that's an understatement!) but Saddam will eventually be replaced by an Arab (his word for the Sunni's and Shiites) who will be just as bad. Whether the replacement will be a religious figure or not he didn't know. He went on to describe the oil the Kurds are in control of, and because of that oil, the Iraqi government will never let the Kurds be free. He likened the situation to something along the lines of apartheid on South Africa.
In the conversation, he often spoke of Turkey. I got the impression he would rather have Saddam than the Turks.
He then stated the only way the Kurds will be free is for them to have their own homeland. Due to the false borders setup by the English after WWI, the Kurds are now scattered in several countries; Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. He said the Americans should have come to the Kurds first when establishing an Iraqi government, because they, as a people, have had a functioning form of democracy for years.
Unfortunately, about this time, he had to take care of one of his customers and I had to do my job. Afterwards he came out to my van with a piece of paper that refer to two books that describe the plight and history of the Kurds. I have not yet had a chance to read the two.
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Kurd, Turk, & Arab by J. Edmonds (supposedly on page 296 is a picture of his grandfather who was a Kurdish big-wig in the days after WWI.)
The Heart of the Middle East by Richard
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Overall, my impression was of a man who cared deeply for his people, but was not trusting of anyone who wanted to decide the Kurd's fate for them. Whether this was the "Arabs" in Baghdad, Americans, Turks, or Iranians, they are all the same to him and none worth trusting.
Note: Any factual errors are either his or in my typing out the conversation 24hours after it occurred. Political opinions are his, not mine. I am also not taking sides on the rightness or wrongness of his opinions because I'm mostly ignorant of the facts he described.
Thorby