of the unintended, yet most important consequences of the Sheikh Said rebellion concerned the ultimate settlement of the Mosul question, the only but ostensibly the main issue that remained unresolved between Turkey and Britain even in the Treaty of Lausanne (July 1924).
The Ottoman province of Mosul, with its Kurdish-majority population, was claimed by Turkey. It comprised the entire area of today’s Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, as well as “the disputed territories,” stretching diagonally from the northeastern corner of Syria with Turkey and Iraq to the current Iraq-Iran frontier near Baghdad. These territories were included in the National Covenant adopted by the Ottoman Parliament in its last session. The National Covenant was published on February 12, 1920, just before the occupying powers in İstanbul that were landed in the wake of World War I disbanded the Ottoman Parliament. The National Covenant defined the borders of Turkey following the Great War. The six decisions taken in the last session of the Ottoman Parliament in İstanbul were later used as the basis for the claims of the Turkish Grand National Assembly that was inaugurated on April 23, 1920, in Ankara. In terms of drawing the borders of the “New Turkey,” it also formed the basis of Turkish claims in the Treaty of Lausanne. Interestingly, at the Lausanne negotiations, İsmet İnönü laid claim to Mosul because its population was non-Arab. He claimed it on the grounds that its Kurds were, in reality, Turks. The exchange between him and the British chief negotiator Lord Curzon at Lausanne were reported in many sources. Curzon, who was determined to hang on to Mosul, for the sake of oil rather than its Kurds, was withering: “It was reserved for the Turkish delegation for the first time in history to discover that the Kurds were Turks. Nobody has found out it before.”8
Whatever the legitimacy of the Turkish claims on Mosul, for the British, the Ottoman administrative unit (vilayet) of Mosul had to be united with the former Ottoman vilayets of Baghdad and Basra for the creation of the new state of Iraq under the British mandate. Incorporation of the Mosul vilayet into Iraq was seen as a sine qua non for the economic viability of the newly designed state, even without the oil wealth discovered by the British in Kirkuk, a part of the province. The Mosul vilayet would provide wheat for Iraq.
The dispute on the Mosul vilayet was submitted to arbitration before the League of Nations since neither Turkey nor Britain was willing to allow to the treaty negotiations at Lausanne to collapse because of that single sticking point. A Mosul Commission was formed in November 1924 under the chair of a Swedish diplomat (Carl Einer Wirsen), and including the membership of a former Hungarian prime minister (Count Pal Teleki) known for his staunch pro-Turkish views, as well as a Belgian colonel (Albert Paulis). The three-member Commission came to Mosul vilayet in January 1925, toured the province and conducted interviews until March 1925, and presented its findings to the League in July 1925. A second Mosul Commission was then formed under the chair of Estonian general Johan Laidoner who visited the province in the same year. General Laidoner presented his Commission’s report to the League of Nations in November 1925. The findings in the second report were almost identical with the previous one. The bottom line of the both was that without the incorporation of Mosul vilayet to the Baghdad and Basra vilayets, the entity to be called Iraq under the British mandate could not survive—although, from the legal point of view, the disputed area should be considered as an integral part of Turkey.
The British “Betrayal”
The concurrence of the Kurdish revolt and the arbitration efforts of the League of Nations on the unresolved Mosul vilayet issue between Turkey and Britain led many Turkish nationalists to see “British finger” behind the Sheik Said rebellion. The treaty that was signed in Ankara on June 5, 1926, between the United Kingdom, Iraq, and Turkey regarding the settlement of the frontier between Turkey and Iraq based on the decision reached by the League of Nations, to the effect that Turkey relinquished its claims on the Mosul vilayet, strengthened the nationalist conviction on the correlation between the Kurdish revolt and the alleged British machinations. The overriding belief in the Turkish nationalist milieu until today is that the legitimately claimed Mosul vilayet was lost and eventually incorporated into Iraq due to sinister British political maneuvers fomenting Kurdish unrest inside Turkey proper, that is, the Sheikh Said rebellion. However, the historical facts, data and documents open to scholarly research on that period of history do not support such Turkish arguments. Robert Olson, the foremost international expert on the Sheikh Said rebellion, wrote the following eye-opener:
The objections raised by the Middle East Department and the director of intelligence at the War Office in late autumn 1921 regarding possible support of a Kurdish rebellion in Turkey still obtained during the period of the Sheikh Said rebellion. . . . In my research in the Public Record Office, I found no documents to indicate that the British changed their policy regarding support for Kurdish rebellion(s) and revolt(s) in Turkey. The policy as established in November 1921 remained in effect up to the outbreak of Sheikh Said’s rebellion on 8 February 1925, in spite of the differences between Great Britain and Turkey resulting over the failure to resolve the Mosul question.9
The British determination of not supporting any Kurdish rebellion or revolt in Turkey that goes back to the year 1921 was the outcome of abandonment of the idea of Kurdish independence. In the Paris Peace Conference when the idea of an independent Armenia was shelved, “Kurdistan was finished too. By March 1921 the Allies had backed away from the vague promises in the Treaty of Sèvres,” writes Margaret MacMillan.
As far as Kurdistan was concerned, they said, they were ready to modify the treaty in “a sense of conformity with the existing facts on the ground of the situation.” The existing facts’ were that Atatürk had denounced the whole treaty; he had successfully kept part of the Armenian territories within Turkey; and he was about to sign a treaty giving the rest to the Soviet Union. Kurdish nationalists might protest but the Allies no longer had any interest in an independent Kurdish state.10
According to MacMillan, British indifference vis-à-vis the Kurdish independence bid extends back to the period of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
Unlike other emerging nations, Kurdistan had no powerful patrons in Paris, and the Kurds were not yet able to speak effectively for themselves. Busy with their habitual cattle raids, abductions, clan wars, and brigandage, with the enthusiastic slaughter of Armenians or simply with survival, they had not so far demonstrated much interest even in greater autonomy within the Ottoman Empire, where the majority lived. Before the Great War, the nationalisms stirring among the other peoples of the Middle East had produced only faint echoes among the Kurds.11
Following such derogatory characterization of the Kurds, she continues:
British support was at best lukewarm in 1919 and was tied, at least partly, to the United States taking on a mandate for Armenia. By the autumn it was clear that was not going to happen. It was also clear that the Turks were far from finished. Atatürk was rapidly building his forces in the east, close to the Kurdish areas. The idea of Britain’s propping up a separate Kurdistan became increasingly unattractive from both financial and military points of view. . . . In Mesopotamia, British authorities argued for incorporating part of the Kurdish territory to the new mandate of Iraq.12
Jonathan C. Randal, too, is categorical on the British “betrayal” to the Kurds:
The British entrusted with a League of Nations mandate for Ottoman territory in what was to be called Iraq, were also bent on thwarting Kurdish nationalist aspirations. Determined to control the oil in territory Kurds claimed as theirs, Britain forced them into a blood-spattered union with its freshly minted Iraqi state, dominated by its Sunni Arab minority.13
Kemalist Realpolitik on Mosul: Dividing Kurdistan
Britain had no real reason to instigate or support a Kurdish rebellion in Turkey. It had had no interest in an independent Kurdistan since the beginning of the 1920s. For Kemalist Turkey, the Mosul vilayet
