Words matter. These are the best Kurds Quotes from famous people such as Les Aspin, Peter Bergen, Molly Ivins, Feisal Abdul Rauf, Noah Feldman, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There’s a certain amount of sympathy here for the Bush administration’s problem, which is they would like to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they would like to have the Kurds autonomous.
Adding to your list of enemies is never a sound strategy, yet ISIS’ ferocious campaign against the Shia, Kurds, Yazidis, Christians, and Muslims who don’t precisely share its views has united every ethnic and religious group in Syria and Iraq against them.
The Kurds will not be allowed to have an independent country because Turkey wouldn’t stand for it; they have their own Kurdish population.
In the 20th century, the Muslim world created a vision of religious nationalism. Turkey, for example, had to be ethnically Turkish. Kurds, Armenians, other minorities didn’t have a place in such a vision of a nation-state.
Iraqi national identity under Saddam Hussein never truly incorporated Shiites or Kurds. Sunnis, who identified most closely with the Iraqi nation, remain in some ways disenfranchised relative to the other groups, or at least they perceive themselves that way.
So the idea that you could put Kurds, Shiite Arabs, and Sunni Arabs in a nice, liberal, federal system in Iraq in a short amount of time, six months or a year, boggles the mind.
Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who can’t write their own language.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein had and used significant weapons of mass destruction on his own people, both the Kurds and the Iranians.
The allies we formerly relied on – the Kurds and the Syrian Democratic Forces – will have little interest in helping us after we abandon them to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The Kurds have fought, bled and died fighting alongside the U.S.
My readers are surprisingly mixed. I have conservative readers – for instance, women with headscarves – but also many liberal, leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, and secularist readers. Next to those are mystics, agnostics, Kurds, Turks, Alevis, Sunnis, gays, housewives, and businesswomen.
Whenever a Kurd wants to measure the depth of some foreign leader’s commitment to Kurdish autonomy, he listens for one particular word. That word is ‘federal.’ Anyone who will say he favors Kurdish federalism can be counted a friend of the Kurds.
The Kurds are an ancient, democratic, peace-loving people that have never attacked any country.
In the exodus out of Iraq, we’re seeing the effects of just leaving. We left before there was control of chemical weapons stockpiles, without a status-of-forces agreement. We left before the Sunni and Kurds we fought with and fought alongside with were stable, or without empowering them. We left on a political rhetoric.
The United States did not act in Iraq in 1988 when gas was being used on the Kurds or when gas was used in the Iranian-Iraq War.
While our goals in Syria were never clearly enumerated by then-President Obama or President Trump, throughout the war one of our most committed and effective allies in the fight has been the Kurds.
The U.S. cannot force Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds to make peace or to act for the common good. They have been in conflict for 1,400 years.
The country of Iraq is somewhat of an artificial creation going back to colonial days. And so you have the Kurds and then the Sunnis in the north predominantly and Shias in the south.
My priorities? Assisting our allies, the Kurds, in their fight against ISIS.
Back when Saddam Hussein was in power, the Americans didn’t care about his crimes. When he was gassing the Kurds and gassing Iran, they didn’t care about it. When oil was at stake, somehow, suddenly, things mattered.
