Yazidism, a religion also called Sharfadin by Yazidis a Kurdish minority, is local to northern Syria, Turkey and Iraq, reaching Armenia and Georgia. A monotheistic religion which has elements of Ancient Mesopotamian religions, and similarities with Abrahamic religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam. As a strictly autonomous creed, the Yazidis are bound in marriage with other Yazidi, and through the limitation of transition in Yazidis identity across subsequent foreign-generations. Yezidis honor sacred trees. Women must not cut their hair. Marriage is forbidden in April. Reverence of angels and particularly a peacock-angel relates to Assyrian belief and bird-worship. Yazidis believe in reincarnation, sacrifice bulls, practice baptism, pray towards the sun, and relish mystical Islam. Similarly to the Judaic religion, they harbor specialized rituals and beliefs, curtailing outside influence (except of inter-generational advance of Jewish females alone), which also can incite contempt in the form of exclusion or worse yet alienation. Both religions have been heavily endangered hence under extreme persecution. Along with branches of Christianity and Islam all of these denominations were targeted by ISIS for which world powers have intervened on the middle-east and until the return of Yazidis to their homelands of Mosul in 2019.
In 1414 Kurds initially attacked the Yazidis in the mountains of Hakkari destroying the holy temple Lalish and desecrating the tomb of Sheikh Adi. In 1585, another attack followed in the Sinjar Mountains under orders of Ali Saidi Beg from Bohtan totaling 600 casualties. In 1832, Kurdish troops under emir Mohammed Pasha Rawanduz (Mire Kor, the blind prince) massacred Yazidis in Khatarah. Subsequently, the Yazidis in Shekhan were largely eradicated. On the next attempt his troops occupied over 300 Yazidis villages and then following, kidnapped over 10,000 Yazidis mostly all of whom were forced into conversion to the Islamic creed. In 1832, emir Bedir Khan Beg (Bedirxan Beg, the prince of Bohtan) with his troops committed a massacre of the Yazidis in Shekhan. Kurds there killed almost the whole Yazidis population but some escaped to Sinjar. In the next year, 1833, the Aqrah region was struck by the Kurdish emir Mohammed Pasha Rawanduz and his soldiers. 500 Yazidis causalities followed in the upper Zab before another attack on Yazidis succeeded in Sinjar. In 1915-1923, Yazidis and Armenians faced genocide by Kurds with the tally of 300,000 Yazidis lives.
British forces in defeat of the Ottomans occupied Iraq and imposed direct colonial rule for several years (with the exception of Kirkuk). In recognition of Greater Kurdistan, Southern Kurdistan and Iraq were distinct and regarded for unmolested autonomous development. Contrary to colonial rule in November 1918, Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji of the Qadiriyah Sufi family and the Barzanji clan, city of Sulaymaniyah, assumed power in rebellion and with military force from October 1918 until June 1919, creating his national flag, stamps and replacing the official-state Turkish language with Kurdish, the official language of Kurdistan. Charged and sentenced for the insurgence, the British not only granted him clemency, but whence invited back from exile, was assisted to assume control of Kurdistan as it's King. The international treaties set originally at the League of Nations by Woodrow Wilson for self-determination, then Sharif Pasha at Paris (Versailles) Peace Conference 1919, would of course fail to be implemented. Without official recognition by firstly the British Crown, at the Treaty of Lausanne, between Turkey and the victorious Allies in 1923, in superseding the Treaty of Sèvres, no specific reference to the Kurds was asserted; instead a promise for abiding tolerances for minorities in general. The shift resulted in a new mandate for colonial power over an incorporated Kurdistan into the political, economic and cultural realm of Iraq. Against resistance British forces eliminated the Kurdish national movement with a series of bombings, destroying Sheikh Mahmud's government and annexing Kurdistan to Iraq.
As most Kurdish people of Iraq lived in the mountainous terrain of the Mosul Vilayet, central rule from Baghdad wasn't realistic, yet it was upon the discovery of oil in northern Iraq, that the British were unwilling to relinquish the area, nor grant autonomy and economic exclusivity to an ethnic state.
The Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) hence took on, known prior to 1929 as the Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC). Between 1925 and 1961 the company had a virtual monopoly on all oil exploration and production in Iraq. Today, it is jointly owned by some of the world's largest oil companies and headquartered in London, England. TPC had obtained concession to explore for oil in 1925 from the new Iraqi government, in return for a promise that the Iraqi government would receive a royalty for every ton of oil extracted, but this was linked to the oil companies' profits and not payable for the first 20 years. On 31 July 1928 the shareholders signed a formal partnership agreement to include the Near East Development Corporation (NEDC), an American consortium of five large US oil companies. By 1934, the NEDC comprised only two shareholders, Standard Oil of New Jersey and Socony, which had merged with the Vacuum Oil Company to form Socony-Vacuum in 1931.
During the Hashemite Monarchy (1932–58), there were no serious issues between the IPC and the Iraqi government as the Hashemites were extremely pro-west. In fact, they had been installed by the British and so retained loyalty. They were dependent on the British militarily and had essentially pledged allegiance to them through the Baghdad Pact. The Hashemites' main disputes centered on increasing the amount of crude oil extracted, getting more Iraqis involved in the process of producing the oil and getting more royalties. In 1952, terms that were more generous to the Iraqi government were negotiated. These terms were largely based on the far more lucrative terms of the Saudi-Aramco "50/50" agreement of December 1950. One could argue that a determinant in these negotiations was the friendly atmosphere in which they were conducted.
This soon soured however, and Abd al-Karim Qasim, a nationalist Iraqi Army general seized power in a 1958 coup d'état two years after Kurdistan's original King died. The Iraqi Hashemite monarchy established by King Faisal I in 1921, led by King Faisal II, Prince 'Abd al-Ilah, and Prime Minister Nuri al-Said was trumped, with both killed during the uprising. The General ruled the country as Prime Minister until his downfall and death in 1963, but not before his Iraqi government enacted Law No. 80, which expropriated 99.5 per cent of the IPC group's concession areas without compensation and put an immediate stop on oil exploration. Before the coup, Abd al-Karim Qasim had incited support over just this, that the IPC's interests lay with western nations counter to Iraqi sovereignty. A subsequent military coup called the Ramadan Revolution was executed by the Ba'ath Party and the National Council of the Revolutionary Command which overthrew and executed Abd al-Karim Qasim's communist government in 1963 after two days of heavy combat between the 8th and 10th of February 1963. By June 1 1972, nationalized IPC operations had been fully assumed for control by the Iraq National Oil Company.
Kurdistan remains a parliamentary democracy with its own regional Parliament consisting of 111 seats at the capital, Erbil. The new Constitution of Iraq defines the Kurdistan Region as a federal entity of Iraq, and establishes Kurdish and Arabic as Iraq's joint official languages. Kurdistan's struggle for sovereignty so maintained by the Peshmerga and abridged by the March 1970 autonomy agreement between the Kurdish opposition and the Iraqi government was set up after the Aylul revolts; two successive Kurdish-Iraqi civil wars, and prior to Saddam Hussein's Presidency of the Ba'ath Party. His maintenance of rule with the Iron Fist saw by 1991 and the end of the Gulf war, Saddam, acting to suppress internal revolt with Iranian aligned Marsh Arabs. Relations severely deteriorated with an assassination attempt on POTUS in Kuwait, and expulsion of UN Inspectors. A major four-day bombing campaign on Iraqi targets called Operation Desert Fox took effect from 16 December 1998, to 19 December 1998, by the United States and the United Kingdom. The contemporaneous justification for the strikes was Iraq's failure to comply with United Nations Security Council resolutions and its interference with United Nations Special Commission inspectors. In 2003 thus, the USA led a coalition force to dispose the Ba'ath Party, imprisoning Saddam on charges of war crimes against the Iraqi Shi'a for which he was executed in 2005.
Written by Jason Steven Jowett. Sourced from historical fact. This blog may not be reproduced in whole without the author's express permission. Copyright © 2024. greatbrittania.blogspot.com