CHAPTER XXII

IN KURDISTAN

The last phase--Dunsterforce ceases to exist--The end of Turkish opposition--Off to Bijar--The Kurdish tribes--Raids on Bijar--Moved on by a policeman--Governor and poet.

It was in South-Western Kurdistan that I saw the last phase of the war between the Turks and ourselves.

At the end of September, Dunsterforce had ceased to exist, at any rate under that name. Dunsterville himself had gone down to Bagdad to discuss the whole Caucasian and North Persian situation with General Headquarters, and the officers of Dunsterforce had either gone back to their units in France, Salonika, and Egypt, or had been absorbed by the North Persian force which was concentrating under General Thompson at Enzeli for a fresh smack at the Turk in Baku.

After his capture of the oilfields' port, the enemy seemed to have reached the last stages of physical exhaustion, and to be incapable of further effort. His push through from Tabriz towards Zinjan and Kasvin had been finally arrested, and he had been driven back to his entrenchments on the Kuflan Kuh Pass, where he was well content to sit down to {226} a peaceful, inoffensive life, smoke his hubble-bubble, nurse his blistered feet lacerated by long marches on unfriendly Persian roads, and, in general, by his exemplary behaviour earn "good conduct" marks from the inhabitants of the zone of occupation.

But in the country to the west of Mianeh and south of Lake Urumia the enemy was still inclined to spasmodic activity. It was in this region that he had harried the Nestorian Army as it was fighting its way to the south and to safety. At the beginning of October, 1918, the Turks held Sauj Bulagh, the local capital of the Kurds of Azerbaijan, Sakiz, Sain Kaleh, and Takan Teppeh, all of which were in more or less precarious touch with Kowanduz on the western slopes of the Kurdistan Range, and thence with the main and sole surviving Turkish Mesopotamian Army which was clinging tenaciously to Mosul. Their occupation of these several strategic points on the Persian side of the frontier enabled the Turks to threaten the British post at Bijar, on the confines of South-Western Kurdistan, and in a sense to menace the British occupation of Hamadan.

But Allenby's smashing blow at the Turk in Palestine had its repercussion in the remote highlands of Persia and in the remoter region of the Caspian Sea. Its effect was instantaneous. It broke the Turkish grip on Baku and appreciably loosened his hold on Azerbaijan. He withdrew from Mianeh and made ready to evacuate Tabriz and retire into his own territory in an eleventh-hour effort to {227} buttress up his remaining Asiatic provinces which, one after the other, were tottering beneath the sledgehammer blows of the British.

Early in October the wheel of fate and the illness of a brother officer led to my being transferred from Caspian Headquarters to Bijar, as Assistant Political Officer and Intelligence Officer. I looked it up on the map and started. It was a long and interesting zigzag trek across Persia, first south-west to Hamadan, then north-west to Bijar and the wild country of the Kurdish tribes.

Few Europeans can lay claim to any intimate knowledge of Kurdistan and its predatory but fascinating people. It is distinctly remote from the beaten tourist track. Russian and German travellers and scholars have nibbled at the ethnological and philological problems which it presents, and, much more recently, our own Major Soane in his remarkable book, "Through Kurdistan in Disguise," draws aside the veil a little, and we are able to take a peep at Kurdish life and manners naturally portrayed.

Kurdistan cannot be said to possess either natural or political boundaries, for it embraces both Persian and Turkish territory, and in it live people who are not racially Kurds. Broadly speaking, it may be said to stretch from Turkish Armenia on the north to the Luristan Mountains on the south, and the Turkish-Persian frontier cuts it into two longitudinal sections. Persian Kurdistan, then, is bounded by Azerbaijan on the north, the Turkish frontier on the {228} west, Kermanshah on the south, and Khamseh and Hamadan on the east. Its old administrative capital is Sinneh.

Its geographical outline is one of bold and rugged mountains which in winter are covered deep in snow. Narrow valleys run far into the flank of the towering hills, and it is here, taking advantage of these natural barriers, that the villages cluster and the inhabitants attempt to keep warm during the long, bitter, and often fireless, winter months.

A nonsense rhymester who evidently knew something of the proclivities of the Kurds once scored a palpable bull's-eye on the target of truth when he wrote:

"The hippo's a dull but honest old bird; I wish I could say the same of the Kurd."

The Kurds themselves have more traducers than friends outside their own country. As the great majority of them are Sunni Moslems, it has been pointed out, and with a certain element of truth, that the root of the Persian-Kurdish Question is the religious hatred between Sunni and Shi'ah, just as the root of the Turkish problem is the undying hatred between Moslems and Christians. Kurmanji, the main Kurdish language, has been incorrectly described as a corrupt dialect of Persian, whereas it is really a distinct philological entity, tracing an unbroken descent from the ancient Medic or Avestic tongue of Iran.

I had a good deal to do officially with several of {229} the principal Kurdish tribes, such as the Mukhri, Mandumi, and Galbaghi, while I was stationed at Bijar, and I cannot agree with the generally accepted estimate of their character as "a lazy, good-for-nothing set of thieves." They are admittedly fierce and intractable, of noted predatory habits, and ready to prey with equal impartiality upon Persian or Christian neighbour. On the other hand, I found that they were neither cruel nor treacherous; they are never lacking in courage, and possess a rude, but well-defined sense of hospitality and chivalry.

Unarmed, save for a riding-crop, and accompanied only by a few Sowars, I have gone into their villages in search of raiders--not always a pleasant task amongst Asiatic hill tribes--and the inhabitants would be amiability itself. Here one saw the happier side of these wild, free people who, revelling in the unrestrained life and the health-giving ozone of their native mountains, find the trammelling yoke of modern civilization about as irksome and fearful an infliction as a bit and saddle are to an unbroken colt.

What I liked about the Kurds was their habit--the common inheritance of most free men--of looking their interlocutor straight in the face. Their women, many possessing great physical beauty, and glorious creatures all, would crowd round to do the honours to those visiting their village. Amongst the Kurds the women are allowed a great deal of freedom. They shoot and ride like so many Amazons. It is true they are the hewers of wood and the drawers of {230} water in the village or community, but, save for lacking parliamentary enfranchisement, they do not seem to have many grievances against the masculine portion of the Kurdish world. They always go unveiled, are not a bit "man-shy," and, unlike their Moslem sisters in Turkey and Persia, do not consider themselves spiritually defiled when their faces are gazed upon by some Infidel whom chance has thrown across their path.

From this I do not wish it to be inferred that the Kurdish women are immodest in conduct, or of what might be described as "flighty morals." Far from it.

These self-same tribesmen who received us so hospitably in their villages, and gave us entertainment of their best--treating us in friendly fashion according to their laws, because we had come trusting to their honour in the guise of friends and without hostile intent--would, when they took the "war path" and raided a British post, put up a spirited fight, fully bent on killing or being killed.

Persian Kurds are largely pastoral and nomadic. There are the sedentary tribes who are the tillers of the soil and never move very far away from home. The nomads, on the other hand, roam with their flocks and herds and womenfolk from winter to summer quarters and vice versa, and it is during these periodical migrations that the inherited predatory instincts of the Kurds are given free rein. Many are the armed forays made on a peaceful {231} Persian neighbour's stock. Often there is resistance, and occasionally an attempt at reprisals; so a respectably-sized Persian-Kurdish hill-war may have had as its origin the theft of half a dozen goats by Kurdish robbers. Stray bands of brigands who had made life more than usually interesting for some Persian village or other, if pursuit became too vigorous and they were threatened with capture, were always able to escape the consequences of their depredations by slipping over the frontier and seeking bast (sanctuary) in Turkish territory.

Whether the Kurds are, or are not, the descendants of those first-class fighting men of long ago who opposed the retreat of the Ten Thousand through the bleak mountain passes of Kurdistan, they undeniably are imbued with a certain pride of ancestry which manifests itself in various little ways. No pure nomadic Kurd will ever engage in manual labour, which he looks upon as a disgrace, and a job fit only for helots, nor will he become a Charvadar (muleteer).

The Kurd undoubtedly possesses an unenviable reputation for lawlessness amongst the more law-abiding Persians and Turks of this wild and turbulent frontier land. He is handicapped, perhaps, to this extent, that, being an alien to the Turk in language, and to the Persian in religion, he is looked upon as a pariah, and the hand of both is ever raised against him. Being resentful and overbearing, if not arrogant, in manner, and knowing no legal code beyond that which a rifle imposes, he seeks to enforce his {232} own arbitrary ready-made justice, to call it by that name. So the merry game goes on, and up amongst the snows of Kurdistan Persian and Kurd and Turk kill each other on the slightest pretext, and often for no ascertainable cause.

The Kurd is always well armed, and usually well mounted--often at the expense of some lowland Persian villager. He invariably affects the national costume, which is an abbreviated coat and enormous baggy trousers, with a capacious Kamarband of coloured silk in which he carries pipe, knife, and odds and ends.

Ten armed Kurds riding into Bijar, a town of 10,000 inhabitants, would start a panic in the Bazaar. Shutters would go up and shopkeepers would vanish as if by magic, while the small force of Persian police in the place, who were usually suffering from the combined effects of malnutrition and arrears of pay, would discreetly go to cover, and not be seen again until the visitors had departed. Usually a British military policeman, armed with a stout stick, would be sent to handle the delicate situation, to see that there was no looting, and that the King's peace was preserved inviolate by these quarrel-seeking, pilfering rascals from beyond the hills.

Bijar itself, unhappily for the peace of mind and pocket of its shopkeeper-citizens and wealthy agriculturists, is unhealthily near the "Bad Man's Land" of the nomad Kurds. It is built in a cup-shaped {233} hollow surrounded by barren peaks, and its altitude (5,200 feet) gives it a rigorous winter climate. The enclosed gardens which usually lend a touch of picturesque embellishment even to the meanest and dirtiest of Persian towns are lacking at Bijar. It grows wheat and corn in abundance on the long, wide plateau which stretches unbrokenly for miles between the bare, rugged hills. The arable land is so fertile, and its acreage so abundant, that but one-third is cultivated yearly. The average wheat yield is enormous, yet the people are always hovering on the border-line of starvation, the result of mismanagement, misappropriation, and all the other evils which may be grouped together under the head of Persian official maladministration.

When the British marched into Bijar in the summer of 1918 anarchy and disorder were paramount. The Persian Government is supposed to keep a garrison here, but the oldest inhabitants had never seen it. If it did exist, it was carefully hidden away and not allowed to meddle in such troublesome affairs as Kurdish forays. The Turks during their occupancy looted Bijar very thoroughly, and roving Kurds, too, when short of supplies--and that was often--never forgot to extend their unwelcome patronage to the local bazaars, on the principle of "Blessed is he that taketh, for he shall not want."

The Governor was a local resident, and his office an unpaid one as far as the Persian treasury was concerned; but his power was great and his rule {234} arbitrary, and the post brought him considerable emoluments. He was a timid and vacillating but well-meaning individual, who always trembled at the knees when brought face to face with the unusual. The mere brandishing of a loaded pistol anywhere in his immediate vicinity would throw him into a paroxysm of terror. He spoke halting French, and was afflicted with the prevailing Persian mania for verse-writing. Still, he never allowed his literary pursuits to clash with or nullify his keen commercial instincts; and he grew daily in affluence.

But even a Persian peasant has his limits of endurance when he finds himself being ground to fine powder in the mill of oppression and corruption. Those of the Bijar district were no exception. After having been systematically looted all round, by Turk, Kurd, and dishonest local officials, they rose in revolt when a demand was made upon them for the payment of the Government Maliat, or grain tribute. They followed up an emphatic refusal by threatening to duck the Governor and his coadjutor, the Tax-collector, in the local horsepond. The latter fled the town, while as for the terrified Governor, he promptly shut himself up, seeking bast (sanctuary) with an ill-armed following within the sacred precincts of his serai. From the roof, one of his retinue, using his hands for a megaphone, sent out an urgent S.O.S. call to the British, with the result that a compromise was effected; the Governor was rescued from his undignified plight, and the angry peasants {235} were appeased by his promise that the collection of the unpopular tax would rest in abeyance until Teheran gave its decision on the subject.

Our job in sitting down in Bijar was to hold the place against the Turks and prevent their coming back, to instil a little wholesome respect for law and order into the minds of the plunder-loving Kurds, and to stop them from eating up the smaller and unprotected Persian fry. To keep the Turk at bay and hold the Kurd in awe, we had approximately a couple of squadrons of the 14th Hussars, under Colonel Bridges, a detachment of the Gloucesters in charge of Captain Stephenson, machine-gun and mountain battery sections, and a couple of hundred of Persian levies who were commanded by Captain Williams, an Australian officer. Colonel Bridges was in command of the whole force. The total certainly did not err on the side of numerical superiority.

The day after I reached Bijar the Governor arrived to pay an official call. After the usual formalities as laid down by Persian etiquette for ceremonies of this kind had been safely negotiated, he begged my acceptance of a manuscript copy of his poems, and incidentally hinted that, as the district was in the throes of famine, he would have no objection to collaborating in the purchasing of wheat with British money in order to alleviate the prevailing distress.

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