No Friend But The Mountains

[0] Christian nationalists want to turn America into a theocracy, a government under biblical rule.

[1] If they gain more power, it could mean fewer rights for you.

[2] I'm Heath Drusen, and on the new season of Extremely American, I'll take you inside the movement.

[3] Listen to Extremely American from Boise State Public Radio, part of the NPR network.

[4] Hello.

[5] Hello?

[6] Hello.

[7] There we go.

[8] Okay, excellent.

[9] Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.

[10] Yeah, of course.

[11] Before we go further, can you just tell us how to pronounce your name?

[12] We just want to make sure we're pronouncing it correctly.

[13] It's pronounced Schwann Zudy.

[14] And is that, what is that?

[15] Is that Arabic or Kurdish or Farsi?

[16] It means shepherd and Kurdish.

[17] Kurdish.

[18] All right, wow.

[19] And where are you based?

[20] What do you do if I can ask?

[21] I live in San Francisco and I'm an architect.

[22] Oh, cool.

[23] You mentioned that your name.

[24] is Kurdish, and the pitch that you sent in is relating to the Kurds.

[25] We got a lot of listeners, including you, who were really interested in knowing more about Kurdish history.

[26] What is your pitch, and why did you send it in?

[27] I send it in because, you know, the story of the Kurds itself is really remarkable.

[28] My family came here escaping from Saddam's reigns.

[29] And when you find out all the genocides that they went through, all the prejudice and how that translate to the Kurds of today, especially the Kurds in Syria.

[30] And I feel like the story and the history of how they got there today is worth sharing, you know, to the world.

[31] When you have to fight for your survival, you ally with anyone that reached out to you.

[32] If we were given our own country and if we had an independent state, things would be a lot different.

[33] Kurds would not easily ally with this country or that.

[34] You abandon a people to the mercy of wolves, then they will work with whoever can give them some assistance and protect them, even briefly.

[35] History has often been unkind to the Kurds, a cycle of repeated.

[36] betrayals.

[37] The American troops who were alongside them have moved out and their enemy Turkey is set to attack.

[38] 11 ,000 Kurdish men and women gave their lives to destroy the caliphate.

[39] And in the Syrian town of Kermishli, they reminded the world of that.

[40] Kurds were key allies of the US in defeating Islamic State and they say that they've been betrayed.

[41] You're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

[42] to understand the present.

[43] Hey, I'm Ramtin Arab -Lou.

[44] I'm Rand Abdel -Fattah.

[45] And on this episode, the Kurds.

[46] Over the past month, we've seen a lot of stories in the headlines about the Kurds, following President Trump's abrupt withdrawal of U .S. forces from northern Syria.

[47] And we went there, and we said we want to pause.

[48] And the Kurds have been terrific.

[49] They're going to move back a little bit.

[50] We're going to keep ISIS all nice and locked up.

[51] His decision raised the usual concerns.

[52] about politics in the region, about the role of Turkey and Russia and ISIS.

[53] Sometimes you have to let them fight.

[54] It's like two kids in a lot.

[55] You've got to let them fight and then you pull them apart.

[56] By withdrawing troops, the Kurds were left on their own to fight against the much bigger Turkish military.

[57] And many Kurds viewed the withdrawal as a betrayal of the decades -old relationship they developed with the U .S., which brought up a few questions for us.

[58] Who are the Kurds?

[59] How do they develop this relationship with the U .S.?

[60] And what, if anything, does the United States owe them?

[61] Kurds have been in the Middle East for millennia, stretching back to ancient times.

[62] But defining what it means to be a Kurd is complicated.

[63] Kurds are hard to really categorize.

[64] It's easier to say what they are not.

[65] They are not Iranian, not Persians.

[66] They are not Arabs.

[67] And they are not Turks.

[68] This is Quill Lawrence.

[69] And I am an NPR correspondent.

[70] I cover veterans issues in the VA.

[71] I covered Iraq for 10 years.

[72] And he wrote a book about the history of the Kurds called Invisible Nation.

[73] Kurdistan, what Kurds would call Kurdistan, even though no country on earth recognizes that as a state.

[74] It takes up a chunk of Syria and Turkey and Iran and Iraq, just sort of going clockwise around that region.

[75] So in Kurdistan, you will come across.

[76] all kinds of ethnic, religious, and other kinds of groups, basically, that live here, different sects of Islam, you have different sects of Christianity.

[77] We have Kurds that are not Muslims, khakis, everything.

[78] So basically, everyone is tolerated among the Kurds.

[79] This is Ayub Nouri.

[80] I am the author of a book, Being Kurdish in a Hostile World.

[81] Ayub is a Kurdish journalist.

[82] He was born and raised in a town called Halabja.

[83] in northern Iraq.

[84] What I have noticed among my own people is that the most important thing to the Kurds is the land.

[85] There are estimated to be more than 20 million Kurds in the Middle East.

[86] And Ayyub says what unifies them is their identity as residents of...

[87] A nation, a nation that has been living on a specific land for thousands of years that is in the heart of the Middle East.

[88] I mean, they've been in that same area for millennia And because they've been left out of statehood, they just don't have that sort of fame that you get by having your name on a map somewhere.

[89] That's why you define their borders like I just did by the countries that they've been forced to live in through the centuries.

[90] So even though there was never a country called Kurdistan in the past, we all think it has been a country divided.

[91] Before, there were no borders, so it was okay not to have a country.

[92] Because Kurds in Iraq could walk across the border and meet their families in Iran.

[93] It was okay.

[94] But once countries were formed after the First World War, Kurds didn't get one.

[95] Then we feel Kurdistan was divided.

[96] Coming up, how the war to end all wars won and lost the Kurds a homeland.

[97] This is Kendra Tyler, calling from Chico, California.

[98] and you're listening to Threline from NPR.

[99] Support for this podcast and the following message come from Wise, the app that makes managing your money in different currencies easy.

[100] With Wise, you can send and spend money internationally at the mid -market exchange rate, no guesswork, and no hidden fees.

[101] Learn more about how Wise could work for you at wise .com.

[102] As World War I dragged on, two allied powers, France and England, started to plan what the new Middle East might look like after the war.

[103] In particular, who would control the region if the Ottoman Empire collapsed?

[104] They outlined it all in a treaty called Sykes -Picot.

[105] Sykes -Picot was a Britishman and a Frenchman sitting down with a map and a ruler cutting up the region and it just, you see all of these things set in motion by someone from outside deciding where these lines should be drawn.

[106] Even though Sykes -Picot didn't recognize Kurdistan, it did not.

[107] let them know that people were thinking about how to redraw lines in the Middle East.

[108] The impending fall of the Ottoman Empire inspired Kurdish nationalism and hope for a state.

[109] And with the Treaty of Severa, their hopes of an independent country seemed to be materializing.

[110] The Kurds had thought that they'd come out of World War I in a great spot because the Treaty of Severa in 1920 was signed by the defeated Ottoman government.

[111] And it includes a provision for Kurdish independence.

[112] And it gave the Kurds living in the north of Iraq an option to join this future Kurdish state.

[113] So the Kurds thought that they had finally gotten their peace.

[114] The idea of autonomy and freedom come from the U .S. President Woodrow Wilson, who came to Paris and said, these people were occupied by the Ottomans for hundreds of years.

[115] Now they should not be ruled by anyone else, but themselves.

[116] The Kurdish rebel leader at the time, who's known as Sheikh Mahmoud, his name is Mahmoud Barzengi, and he's this amazing character, all the pictures of him.

[117] He's got this enormous walrus mustache and usually a ceremonial dagger, and he's got this, you know, just piercing eyes in the photos.

[118] You know, he was a rebelist whole life fighting against anyone who would deny the Kurds a homeland.

[119] And Woodrow Wilson's 14 points of self -determination and his League of Nations was something that really caught the Kurdish imagination.

[120] And the legend is that Sheikh Mahmoud Barzhenji used to carry those 14 points on his arm, along with verses from the Quran, like a talisman.

[121] It was sort of like, this is my ticket to the international community.

[122] This is this brave new world, this new enlightened world order where a nation like us, the Kurds, are not going to be denied our chance at our own homeland.

[123] And, you know, Woodrow Wilson's ideas are what's going to protect us.

[124] So they thought they had it made, but they didn't count on what the remnants of the Ottoman Empire were going to do.

[125] And that is the brute of all the trouble.

[126] In 1923, Kamal Ataturk, the great Turkish nationalist, won international recognition for the Turkish Republic with the...

[127] Treaty of Lusanne.

[128] The Treaty of Lusanne superseded the earlier treaty, and after a few years of lobbying by new powers like Turkey, the Kurds found that they'd been outmaneuvered.

[129] A Kurdish state was missing from the agreement.

[130] The West betrayed the Kurds by not granting for our own country after the First World War.

[131] The modern state of Turkey saw that it couldn't really exist if it was going to give half its territory to a Kurdish homeland.

[132] They listened to the representatives and leaders of the countries that they were creating.

[133] The Kurds were unfortunately, historically, isolated, lived in the mountains, were not on the same level as the Arabs of the Gulf, for example, or Turkish leaders who went and spoke for themselves.

[134] So we were betrayed by the Western powers and these representatives who went and made all kinds of promises that they will create a modern state, everyone will have their own rights, religious, cultural, linguistic, whatever rights.

[135] Then they came home, created the country, and they became regressive regimes.

[136] In the intervening decades, there have been many promises to the Kurds, oh, we'll give you autonomy if you help us out with this.

[137] Of course, they never do.

[138] Fast forward to the 1970s.

[139] The Kurds were still dreaming of independence.

[140] And for the first time since World War I, the Kurds and the U .S. had shared interests.

[141] The Kurdish leader, Mullah Mustafa Barzani, who's one of the famous guerrilla warriors, is aligned with Iran, who's a staunch U .S. ally.

[142] The Shah of Iran needs the Kurds to make trouble in Iraq because he's in dispute with Baghdad.

[143] The dispute with Baghdad was actually with a new leader in Iraq, Saddam Hussein.

[144] At the time, it appeared as though he was going to become allied with the Soviet Union, which led the U .S. to reinforce its support for Iran.

[145] And no one is sure quite what to make of him yet.

[146] He could go towards the Soviets or he could lean towards the Americans.

[147] Those are the two suitors in this worldwide Cold War.

[148] So the U .S. is willing to help the Shah help the Iraqi Kurds.

[149] That's why the United States, I think, took any interest in the Kurds in the first place.

[150] They were fighting the enemy of their enemy.

[151] The U .S. found a way to get weapons and financial support to the Kurds in Iraq.

[152] And all the while, you know, the Kurds, they know the game.

[153] You know, they keep on trying to get assurance from the Americans.

[154] You guys aren't going to hold the rug out, right?

[155] And they're, no, no, we're, you know, we'll support you.

[156] What we can say is the second betrayal was in 1975.

[157] In 1975, Iran and Iraq sign the Algiers Accord, which ends their hostilities.

[158] And the Shah of Iran basically doesn't need the Kurds to mess around in Iraq.

[159] Iraq anymore.

[160] So the Kurdish uprising has its legs cut out.

[161] Overnight, the U .S. abandoned the Kurds.

[162] And now the reason that that sticks out is because Henry Kissinger had been sending reassurance to the Kurds.

[163] And so he kept on telling him, you're doing great, you're doing great, and it made it that much harder for them to escape.

[164] Then the Kurds were given a choice.

[165] Either lay down your arms and go and hand yourself over to the Iraqi authorities or go and become refugees in Iran.

[166] The leadership managed to get over the mountains and into Iran.

[167] But, of course, you know, many Kurdish fighters, they were caught out.

[168] They were fighting.

[169] They thought they had support that they didn't.

[170] They were just slaughtered.

[171] When the Kurds say that the Kurds were betrayed, the main point is that America betrays itself.

[172] That's what many Kurds say.

[173] The United States betrays its own values and ideal.

[174] in the first place, before they even betrays the Kurds.

[175] When I was writing my book, I interviewed Brent Skokroft, who had been Kissinger's Deputy National Security Advisor when this happened.

[176] And he was very frank.

[177] He said we had a key ally in the region, the Shah of Iran.

[178] And when he made peace with Iraq, well, they weren't useful to us anymore.

[179] And they're not a major player for us.

[180] It was striking me when in 2003 I was in northern Iraq waiting for the U .S. invasion.

[181] and I went around a schoolyard asking them, you know, what do you think about America?

[182] They were pro -American, which is one thing that doesn't seem to change, in my experience.

[183] But they also, you know, these were kids.

[184] So they have no memory of 1980, much less 1970.

[185] They weren't alive.

[186] But more than one could tell me, well, I love America, but I will never forget that Henry Kissinger betrayed us in 1975.

[187] I don't know any middle schooler here in the United States who's going to know.

[188] Henry Kissinger.

[189] In Iraq, I probably, to this day, there are middle schoolers who can tell you about what Henry Kissinger did to them, you know, 30 years before they were born.

[190] During the 1980s, Iran and Iraq fought a truly horrific war that lasted eight years.

[191] From American perspective, it was sort of a pox on both your houses.

[192] We don't love either of you.

[193] But eventually, the Americans do start helping Iraq and Saddam Hussein, you know, who was just as distasteful dictator then as he ever was.

[194] And again, the Kurds had no choice but to ally with Iran throughout the 1980s.

[195] The Kurds seized it as a chance to get whatever support they could from Iran in order to fight Saddam Hussein's regime.

[196] As is natural, if Iran is fighting with Iraq, Iran is probably trying to enlist the help of Iraqi Kurds to sort of mess with Iraq.

[197] Despite Saddam Hussein's fixation on defeating Iran, he hadn't forgotten the Kurds in the north of Iraq.

[198] The outcome of the 1975 betrayal was 15 years of oppression, persecution, mass killings.

[199] Saddam Hussein starts taking greater and greater revenge against the Kurds.

[200] When we come back, Saddam wages war on the Kurds.

[201] Canada's ocean playground, Nova Scotia.

[202] On the TED Radio Hour, MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle, her latest research into the intimate relationships people are having with chatbots.

[203] Technologies that say, I care about you, I love you, I'm here for you, take care of me. The pros and cons of artificial intimacy.

[204] That's on the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

[205] Throughout the 1980s, as Iran and Iraq continued fighting, the Kurds were targeted by Saddam Hussein.

[206] At one point, he gets 8 ,000 men from Barzani's region, from Barzan, and executes them.

[207] By 86, they've got Iranian support, and they are thinking that this is our chance.

[208] Iran might win this war, and we might get some sort of independence out of it.

[209] Who knows?

[210] And it's at that point that Saddam began what he called.

[211] called the Al -Anfal campaign.

[212] Unfal is from a verse in the Quran talking about the spoils of war, but it's totally perverted in this case.

[213] And it's just systematic killings of Kurds in the north of Iraq using chemical weapons.

[214] The person put in charge of this was Ali Hassan al -Majid, who's a cousin of Saddam Hussein's, but he gets the nickname Ali Chemical.

[215] Because he starts using all of this poison gas, against civilians and combatants, which he indiscriminately attacks.

[216] And in the town of Halabja on March 16th in 1988, my hometown where I was born, and I was nine years old when this happened.

[217] I was not in Halabja myself that day, but one of my brothers, one sister and my dad were in Halabja on that day.

[218] What happened was the Iranian army managed to overtake.

[219] Halabja and the surrounding areas basically from the Iraqi army and push them out.

[220] A few days later, Saddam Hussein's regime and the Air Force retaliated against this Iranian takeover of my town with chemical weapons that killed 5 ,000 people and maimed many others forever.

[221] And one of the weapons given to him or sold to him were napalms.

[222] As I said, I wasn't in Halabja myself, but those who survived and those who saw the chemical attack, they said that before the airplanes dropped the chemical bombs, they dropped napalm bombs to force people into their homes and bunkers and basements.

[223] And then later when the chemical weapons, chemical bombs were dropped, that's why many people perished.

[224] They had sought shelter from the napalms and then didn't know that the gas would find them in their hiding places.

[225] So the retaliation was against the Iranian army, but the main victim was the people of my town.

[226] To the town of Halabash, where the dead still lie in the streets.

[227] Iraq denies using chemical weapons.

[228] It says Iran carried out the attack.

[229] Whoever's to blame, the victims are clear.

[230] Civilians who were caught up in one of the world's most unforgiving wars.

[231] Some scenes in this report are gruesome and disturbing.

[232] that's just one example of what the Kurds have had to go through for a hundred years since the First World War the chemical attack on my town in 1988 is just one example when you abandon the people or leave them at the mercy of an oppressive regime and tell them to work it out by themselves Was your family okay My dad was slightly injured my sister she walked with her husband as far as she could and then she collapsed by a river and she was saved by Iranian army helicopters and my brother who was 16.

[233] We also thought he was dead and we had given up on him.

[234] He showed up, I think, a week or two later.

[235] He had also collapsed and been saved by some soldiers.

[236] So they were in the end okay, but many people that my family knew perished on that day.

[237] By the end of Saddam's Anfal campaign, the numbers range from 50 ,000 to 100 ,000 people being killed.

[238] And this isn't a Kurdish population at this point that's probably under 4 million in Iraq.

[239] Tens of thousands of Kurdish villagers, farmers, civilians were taken from their villages and farms and killed or buried alive in the deserts of Iraq.

[240] There was radio silence from the West in general and including the United States because Saddam Hussein was their man he was their ally so they did not say anything coming up the dream of a Kurdish nation comes into view again You're listening to ThruLine From the NPR Downtown At 10m local time on August 2nd Iraqi troops crossed the border into Kuwait In 1990 Iraq invades Kuwait its neighbor to the south, and declared it Iraq's 19th province.

[241] And in January of 1991, U .S.-led coalition forces, including Britain and France, launched a military assault on Iraqi forces to drive them from Kuwait.

[242] Just two hours ago, Allied Air Forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait.

[243] And then President George H .W. Bush gets the whole world to team up to kill up to kill.

[244] Saddam out of Kuwait.

[245] And they very noticeably do not go to Baghdad.

[246] They do not want to topple Saddam because they thought through what might happen if Saddam fell.

[247] It could be chaos, regional players, especially Iran, might gain out of it.

[248] And they'd rather have the stability.

[249] Now, they wouldn't mind if someone just put a bullet in his head.

[250] We will not fail.

[251] When being asked about, you know, what should happen with Iraq, President George H .W. Bush makes an off -end comment, well, you know, if these people want to take matters into their own hands.

[252] There's another way for the bloodshed to stop, and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.

[253] I was 12 years old.

[254] I remember very clearly the series of events that happened.

[255] He encouraged.

[256] the people of Iraq to rise and rid themselves of tyranny.

[257] I don't, that's not the exact quote.

[258] I'm sure you know that, but that's, he said something along those lines that, you know, it's over, it's time they rose and rid themselves of this regime, and that's exactly what Kurds and millions of Shias in the south of Iraq did.

[259] We seize the chance.

[260] People basically lost fear of Saddam Hussein's regime when they saw, TV, how it was being annihilated by the allied forces.

[261] And we basically rose against the Iraqi government, Iraqi authorities, and liberated the Kurdish populated provinces.

[262] But then Saddam Hussein cracked down the most brutal way ever against the people for doing that.

[263] The Kurds in the north hear this and they think, great, this is our chance.

[264] The U .S. is at our backs.

[265] But the U .S. is not at their backs.

[266] And the Kurds get all the way south to the city of Kirkuk, there, Jerusalem, they'll say.

[267] And they get all the way there, and suddenly bang.

[268] It becomes clear that they do not have American support.

[269] And Baghdad slaughters tens of thousands.

[270] Again, the U .S. did not come here to do this for the Kurds, and there was an immediate abandonment.

[271] Millions of people ended up in the mountains.

[272] Men, women, and children.

[273] with nothing but the clothes on their backs, absolutely nothing.

[274] It was cold still, even though it was spring, but the Kurdish mountains are really cold, and they lived in caves and cut down trees.

[275] And I heard so many stories that there were people who would give away their brand new car for a piece of bread.

[276] This actually happened.

[277] Those in the West will remember what I'm talking about this day.

[278] They will remember the scene of starving or dying of cold or...

[279] hunger or illness on the mountains, and they were not allowed in.

[280] That was what made it so shocking was that, especially on the Turkish border, they were all stranded.

[281] So if you have the Iraqi army advancing and your border is closed and people are stranded, this had some impact to draw attention to the Kurdish plight.

[282] From ABC News, World News Saturday.

[283] It was a different moment in history, finally.

[284] Tonight of thousands of civilians fleeing major northern cities of enormous numbers of casualties from heavy fighting.

[285] When the world saw millions of Kurds in Iraq heading for the borders, again fearing another chemical attack like had happened three years earlier in 1988, this time the United States did actually step in.

[286] The Security Council passed another resolution calling on Iraq to cease repression of the Kurds, but he acknowledged there were no enforcement.

[287] We're not pretending that the current resolution has any teeth in it that can force an end to the repression.

[288] We know the voice of the world community has been speaking to Iran.

[289] This shook the conscience of the outside world, but Kurds only thank France, because I think it was the French First Lady Daniel Mitterrand that pleaded with Western leaders to come to the rescue of the Kurds, and it was all on TV.

[290] What was different was this time the U .S. could not turn a blind eye on this mass suffering.

[291] At first, it was still footage you had to smuggle out.

[292] I crossed the Tigris River, a small boat under Iraqi mortar fire.

[293] A U .S. congressional staffer, Peter Galbraith, managed to smuggle out videotape that was aired on one of the American networks.

[294] Peter Jennings called me and said, we'd like you to be on camera.

[295] of Kurds fleeing as they were being slaughtered, as Saddam's revenge was rolling up north.

[296] About a million and a half began to flee across the mountains.

[297] And there are pictures of jacketless Kurdish villagers trying desperately to get out before they're slaughtered.

[298] I was eyewitness to what I thought was the destruction of the Kurdish people.

[299] It shamed the United States and Britain and France into action.

[300] This time the United States did actually step in, came to Iraq, and imposed a no -fly zone over northern Iraq, and basically it was a signal for Saddam Hussein's regime to leave the courage of them.

[301] This operation was assisted by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the League of Red Cross and Red Cresence.

[302] societies and various national societies.

[303] And this is the first UN -approved humanitarian intervention against the will of a sovereign state in history.

[304] This is the moment where the international community says, we're going to cross sovereign lines to stop atrocities from happening.

[305] And a U .S.-led coalition sets up this safe haven inside northwestern Iraq.

[306] It's protected by a no -fly zone.

[307] Secretary of State Baker heads to the Mideast where he'll get a first -hand look at the plight of thousands of Kurdish refugees massed along the Turkish border.

[308] So the Kurdistan region suddenly becomes these three provinces of Iraq.

[309] And slowly the Kurds realize that they've got some sort of an autonomous region, which becomes the petri dish for the Kurdish autonomous government that we have today.

[310] thanks to 26 or 27, 28 years now of self -rule.

[311] When a people run their own affairs, they become prosperous and stable and can live happily.

[312] By 2003, the administration of George W. Bush had been making the case for war against Iraq for months.

[313] Administration officials argued that Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons in the past and still had the capability to use them again.

[314] and even more destructive, quote, weapons of mass destruction.

[315] And in October 2002, Congress authorized the U .S. to use military force in Iraq, and the question became one of how and when.

[316] The U .S. makes it very clear that they're going to invade, even months before it's very clear.

[317] But more importantly, they're figuring that the best way to invade Iraq is through the north, through Turkey, which at that point is a solid.

[318] US ally.

[319] And the wild thing about this is that that was going to be a horrible outcome for the Iraqi Kurds because the Turks were negotiating terms to let the Americans march through into Iraq.

[320] It was mostly about money.

[321] But in that agreement, okay, you know, you're going to have this many billion dollars to march through into Iraq.

[322] Oh, and by the way, just to make sure that things stay calm, we're going to send thousands and thousands of Turkish troops with you.

[323] And from From the Kurds of Iraq, their perspective was that those Turkish troops are doing nothing but destroying our experiment with an autonomous region.

[324] Because the Turks have a huge Kurdish population of their own, and they see any autonomous Kurdistan as an incitement to their Kurds towards independence or autonomy.

[325] What happened instead is that the Turkish parliament, shocking everyone, even the Turkish government, the Turkish parliament rejects the bill and says no to America.

[326] America is going to have to do its main invasion up from the south but they have to do something to secure the north and suddenly the only allies that they have up there are these Iraqi Kurds who are just dying to help out and ingratiate themselves with the Americans and suddenly the Kurds are fighting alongside Americans and they're feeling pretty thrilled about the prospect of a post -Saddam Iraq The Kurds helped the U .S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 with boots on the ground.

[327] Kurdish fighters, Peshmerga, is what we call them here.

[328] The two words are sort of like forward and death.

[329] And so sometimes people translate Peshmerga as people who face death.

[330] And that term has been what Kurds call their guerrilla fighters for a long, long time.

[331] I saw Peshmerga alongside U .S. Special Forces.

[332] on every front line that I visited in 2003, soldiers side by side.

[333] At some point there, you know, the Americans installed as viceroy, Paul Bremer, who abolishes the army, the Iraqi army.

[334] He did that, and suddenly at that point, the Peshmerga become the second largest force on the ground.

[335] They're second only to the American military, and all other nations on the ground, the British or the Iraqi army itself, Iraqi security forces are a distant third.

[336] It just seemed like a huge win for the Kurds.

[337] They just thought they died and gone to heaven.

[338] And for many years, as things deteriorate in the south, the Kurdistan region of the north is this oasis where everything that America said it was going to do in Iraq is actually happening.

[339] Do you think that the Americans owe the Kurds anything?

[340] Yes, I do.

[341] I think the U .S. owes the Kurds a lot, especially in the last 10 or 15 years.

[342] If in the past, in the 70s or 80s, the Kurds were not considered an important ally or any importance at all, let's say that would make some sense.

[343] But since 2003, when the U .S. came to remove Saddam's regime and build a new Iraq, a democratic Iraq, the Kurds were true allies, as I said, on the ground and in helping the Iraqi government get back.

[344] on its feet.

[345] And then in 2014, when ISIS overrun Mosul and much of Iraq, there was no force on the ground to face them, fight them back, except the Kurdish Peshmerga and the Kurdish forces.

[346] In Syria, the same way.

[347] So at least in the last 15 years, the Kurds can point to a number of actual things on the ground that they did honestly.

[348] It's hard to cry too many tears about the realities of the Middle East because the Kurds themselves practice it.

[349] They know when they're being used as a tool, and they'll try and exact as much diplomatic and moral pressure as they can to try and make sure they aren't hung out to try, but they know the game and it's been happening for so long, and the math has never changed for them.

[350] They're a landlocked, a stateless nation, the largest ethnic group on the planet without a state.

[351] And more than one Kurd is quoted back to me the famous line by Lord Palmerston, which is empires don't have friends, they have interests.

[352] The Kurds are not naive to think, okay, the U .S. is here this time to help us.

[353] We all know the U .S. is here for its own interests, and we know that fact, but we say we have no choice.

[354] In 2003, if they came to remove Saddam Hussein, for whatever reason, for his links with the 9 -11 attacks or Al -Qaeda, or if they came for oil, we always think, okay, if it's good for them, now it's good for us too.

[355] So there's no naivity or complete trust in the U .S. among Kurds, neither in the past nor now, and I think in the future it will be even less.

[356] We go into alliances with the U .S. or anyone else, but it still burns in the back of every Kurd, what happened in 75, in 91, up to our present day.

[357] Certainly anyone who studied their own history knows that the Middle East, you know, it's a tough neighborhood and it's a hardball all the time.

[358] I mean, they know the rules of the game in their region of the world and that they are terribly, terribly unlucky.

[359] But the dream, of America and its ideals and all of these things definitely captured their imagination.

[360] But the way in which American advisors and military on the ground were giving the reassurances to the Kurds in the Kurdish fighters who just fought with them in Syria, the lack of warning that they got when apparently President Trump let the Turkish president know that it was okay to go ahead and invade, the way it was done, you know, down to if you're given them a week instead of a day to find out that they were absolutely flapping in the wind.

[361] That double cross in a way, to Kurds in the region, I think it's at least on par with Henry Kissinger in 1975.

[362] Despite all these betrayals and inaction from the United States and in different from different U .S. administrations, the Kurds would still see the U .S. as a good ally.

[363] Because we cannot say no. As a small nation, as a powerless people, we will be in no position to say to the U .S. No, you cannot come here, you'll be traitors, go away.

[364] The U .S. is still a superpower.

[365] They would do it anyway.

[366] That's number one.

[367] Number two is the U .S. is still better than the regimes that Kurds in the Middle East have to deal with.

[368] The U .S. betrayed us, okay, but these regimes are killing you, persecuting you, putting you in prison, and destroying your culture and your language and your family and everything else.

[369] So it's the result of a careful comparison that we make.

[370] That's it for this week's show.

[371] I'm Randa de Fattah.

[372] I'm Ramtin Arablui, and you've been listening to Thule.

[373] from NPR.

[374] This episode was produced by me. And me and Jamie York.

[375] Lawrence Wu.

[376] Lane Kaplan -Levinson.

[377] Lou Olkowski.

[378] Nigeri Eaton.

[379] Fact -checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal.

[380] Thanks also to Anya Grumman.

[381] Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric.

[382] If you like something you heard or you have an idea for an episode, please write us at throughline at npr .org.

[383] Or hit us up on Twitter at ThruLine NPR.

[384] Thanks for listening.