Iraq - The North: The Kurds

Only a few days after the Gulf War ended, major insurrections broke out in both the south of Iraq and particularly in the northern Kurdish provinces, where Kurd rebels seized large areas of territory by the first week of March 1991. Iraq's "elite" Republican Guards used repugnant brutality in suppressing the Kurdish rebellion. Kurd refugees fleeing the wrath of the Republican Guard numbered 2 million or more along Iraq's borders with both Turkey and Iran. The U.S. and Great Britain dispatched troops to northern Iraq in an effort to entice the Kurds to return home and force the Iraqi army to leave the northern region.

When the Iraqi army pulled out of the north they left a political vacuum which was filled by the two main rival Kurdish groups, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which continue to administer different parts of the region.

The U.S.-protected area is called Kurdistan. Of the 19.2 million people in Iraq, 21.6 percent are Kurds (73.5 percent are Arabs). There is a legitimate argument for the state of Kurdistan since the Kurds were left out of any postcolonial country carving. The Iraqi army has been doing bad things to the Kurds away from the scrutiny of the world. They have used a variety of methods to exterminate the Kurds, including bombing, starvation and chemical weapons. One major problem the Kurds have had is that no Iraqi government wants to let them control the oil fields in the Kirkuk area, which the Kurds claim as theirs. (See "Kurdistan.")

http://www.kdp.pp.se

http://www.puk.org