Followups AND REALLY AUG. 7th POST REALLY

Kurds
What the hell are Kurds? What Little Miss Muffett ate with her whey? Here's a little Daily Growler jot and a tittle about the ancient people called the Kurds:

1) The Kurds are of Indo-European origin (they are not Arabs) and come from the ancient kingdoms of Corduene and Sophene, right in that Mesopotamian armpit where Iran, Iraq, and Turkey meet. Currently that would be just north of current-day Baghdad...

[Departure: So much killing going on in Baghdad daily now, averaging something like 30 people a day guaranteed to be blown away--an amazing number of our troops, like 5 or 6, getting it every day, too. And Iraq no longer really even gets a mention on the network news shows or the cable news shows, though it's interesting to note the Israeli vs. Hezbollah idiocy is getting full coverage, complete with network and cable news jockeys all decked out in the latest network army-style uniforms, complete with their own flak jackets and eye protection glasses--which I learned all about from reading a "written" statement (in a followingup I was doing) from Kimberly Dozier as she was released from a Baltimore hospital after going under something like 27 surgeries--she was hit in the pelvic and legs when a car bomb went off in May while she was reporting on how the Army was relating so well with ordinary Iraqis. She was cut down across her pelvis and across her legs by schrapnel, while he camera crew just steps ahead of her were totally blown away, like splattered beyond recognition, two Brits, along with a poor dumb Army Captain who was there to palaver with some "ordinary" Iraqis at some tea house--he had only been in Iraq less than a month--there was nothing left of him but ground meat to send back hom to his wife and two daughters. Oh, yeah, an Iraqi interpreter along to interpret the Captain's lying palaver to the ordinary Iraqis was also blown beyond recognition--and Kimberly luckily (she wasn't praising the Lard in the piece I read of hers) survived it.

So Israel is proudly exterminating Lebanese now--oh yes, they have the right to have their own sovereign nation--NOT THE KURDS HOWEVER-- and this is a nasty little illegal invasion of sovereign Lebanon, who probably aren't Hezbollah--ironically, the Jews's original Almighty Jerusalem Temple (Solomon's Temple) was built of Lebanese cedar, the best and longest-lasting building wood in the world at that time--and this extermination gets full, and I do mean full, I even saw some blown up Lebanese bodies in one report, on-the-spot coverage; straddling the fence with their reporting, but being openly careful, of course, not to offend Israel, and, yet, not really wanting to act like the US ain't right smack-dab in the middle of this deadly and costly diversionary war, this war that has our new democratically elected freedom-loving government in Iraq trumpeting that it agrees with the rest of the Arab world, and that includes our buddies in Saudi Arabia and Jordan (where the queen was once an American woman), that Israel should be destroyed-- and this diversion is yet another big NeoCon idiocy (I've seen it attributed to the late Repugnican peabrain Ivy League fool, George Schulz from Raygun's cabinet) that is a vulgar mistake and is already costing thousands of lives and millions of disruptions in millions of lives--and it is doing exactly what these foolish murderous clowns intended; it is taking all our attentions away from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and focusing them on Syria and Iran; yep, the place where Bush wants to have WWIII; making Syria and Iran the Big Saddamistic Boogiemen NOW--and Iran really does have WMDs, my friends--oh but not as many as We the People of the US of A and the nation of Israel have--PRAISE THE WARRING LARD--hundreds of thousands of nuclear warheads against an oil-filthy-rich little fanatical Islamic hypocrite and fool whose nuclear capabilities as of now...well, hell, right now we don't even know if Iran can really enrich uranium that well--no proof of it was found by the UN inspectors just 6 months ago--OH, and, by the way, it's also taking our attention away from the coming, if you trust elections, big-time Congressional elections right around the corner in the merry month of November--just after Bush's October suprise. RED OCTOBER? Why do we put so much faith in elections? Why do Amuricans believe so heartily in them?--the Electoral College seems pretty corruptly designed to keep power in the hands of the F-ing aristocrats, the wealthy, the land owners; yeah, that's who those precious F-ing forefathers were the champions of.]

And Now Back to Our Regular Programming
The Kurds: the Kurds are said to be well educated; they have their own language and have a great body of literature and poetry. The Kurds were nomadic hunters. Settling back in the BC days around Lake Van--and today they reside in the non-nation of Kurdistan, which covers 74,000 square miles of a plateau and mountainous region that runs from the Zagroes Mountains in Iran, through the Taurus Mountains in Turkey to the upper reaches of the Tigres and Euphrates rivers. Their land stretches into parts of eastern Turkey, northeastern Iraq, northwestern Iran, even small sections of northeastern Syria and some of Armenia. They've never had any peace and today they are hated by just about everybody in the area in which they claim rights as a sovereign nation, an autonomous state that was granted them in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres that broke up the Ottomon Empire, after WWI. It was Iraq who refused to agree to the terms of that treaty and claimed that Kurdistan was not a sovereign nation but a state within the nation of Iraq.

The Kurds were conquered by the Arabs in the 7th century (the 600 ADs); in the 11th century, they were ruled over by the Seljuk Turks, followed by the friendly Mongols in the 13th through the 15th centuries, then the Safavids, and then the Ottomon Empire--out of which was saved Turkey.

The Kurdistan language, it is said, is related to Persian and contains 2 main dialects as it is spoken by Kurds, who by the 21st century are mainly Sunni Muslims with a traditional tolerance of Jews, Christians, and Yazidis ( a Shia sect prevalent in Kurdistan, I believe--don't take my word for it), and others (the Kurds have a lot of sects and cults within their religious practices).

Recent Timelines:

1970 Iraq promises the Kurds self-rule with Erbil as their capital.
1974 Iraq takes back its promise and denies the Kurds self-rule. The Kurds go to war with the
Iraqis. (Everything goes in circles. Billy Preston)
1979 Islamic Republic in Iran launches a terribly vicious and murderous action against the
Iranian Kurds. (I'm telling you, these people hate these Kurds.)
1980-88 During the Iraq-Iran eight-year war, Iraq continued to attack Iraqi Kurds.
1988 Poison gas attacks are made on Kurdistan villages in order, quell the Kurds's
nationalistic tendencies. As a result of these attacks, Kurd males were rounded up
and executed-- in 1988, 200,000 Kurds were annihilated (exterminated)--by poison
gas given to the Iraqis by the US government--who was our hero then--that Saddam
Whose-sane?
1991 Pappy Bush's Great American Victorious Gulf War--oh, boy, remember big pot-bellied
Stormin' Norman, the man who had to have a Hummer as his desert commando car?--
and during this war, the Kurds tried an uprising against Iraq and were crushed by Iraq
forces--as a result, 500,000 Kurds fled Iraq at that time.

At this time, the Kurds were divided into 2 political/military factions, the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan--themselves given to warfare among themselves.

1999 These two parties heal their differences and are each given control of their parts of
Kurdistan.

2003 Kurdish forces joined the US invasion of Iraq, and with US & British forces took control of
the city of Kirkuk, the central city of the Iraqi oilfields, which the Kurds have always
claimed were rightfully theirs, and the city of Mosul. With the Turkish Kurds still not
autonomous, all this conquest by the Iraqi Kurds put Turkey on the alert and they
send troops to their mountainous border with Iraq.

2004 Iraq's Shiites decide they don't want Iraqi Kurds in the new free democratic government.

The Turks have consistently suppressed the Kurdish culture, forbidding them to use their language; forbidding them from using Kurd names; forbidding them from calling themselves Kurds--to the compassionate Turks they are Mountain Turks. Why all these cultures hate the Kurds I don't know. I've met a Kurdistani woman while attending NYU back in the better days and I must admit, she was one of the most beautiful women I've ever laid lusting eyes on, Praise Allah, or whoever--and brilliant to boot, so maybe that's it; the Kurds are arrogant because they are a hell of a lot better educated and prettier than a damn flatlander Turks.

1984 The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) is founded to engage in "terrorist" attacks on Turks.

1992 Turkey attacks the Turkish Kurds and kills 20,000 of them and leaves 2 million of them
refugees.

1999 Turks capture PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan and put him to death.

Between 1984 and 1999: 23,000-30,000 Kurds were killed in Turkish attacks. They placed
the Kurds under extreme pressures and hardships and laws all with the threat of death should a Kurd decide to defy the Almighty Turks.

2003 In order to get into the European Union, the Turkish government had to concede some
rights to the Kurds so they lift their ban against the Kurds having their own public schools.
They also, in their compassion, allow the Kurds to give their children Kurdish names. Oh
the benevolence of those good-natured Turks.

2004 The PKK is re-formed as the Kongra-Gel, the Kurdistan People's Congress.

So, there you go, a Daily Growler jot and tittle on the Kurds and Kurdistan, a nation that has never gotten to be a nation, a nation of people hated by three other surrounding Islamic cultures, who also, ironically, hate themselves sometimes and war among each other--like some trouble between the Iraqi Kurds and the Syrian Kurds. Damn Kurds. Blankety-blank Kurds everywhere.

thestaff
of The Daily Growler
with a Departure comment by
thegrowlingwolf