and ironically the Sheikh Said rebellion led Turkish leaders, and primarily Mustafa Kemal himself, to think that Turkey’s best interests would be served if the Mosul vilayet were left out of the “New Turkey.” Leaving out the Mosul vilayet would make Turkification easier in Asia Minor. It would also remove an obstacle for the rapprochement with Britain that Mustafa Kemal deemed necessary.
The implications of this revolt to the government were obvious. First, the region represented a security problem. This, of course, was well known to the Turks, as it had been so long before the period of Ottoman rule. Second, any attempt to exercise a greater level of control in the Mosul district would only extend military supply lines through already hostile territory. Pacifying the region would present a greater drain on the already extended Turkish resources. While a divided Kurdistan troubled many in the regime . . . the loss of Mosul would create a new frontier far more suitable geographically for the Turks. In giving up the province, the Turks lost a major transportation hub as well as the oil fields of Kirkuk. At the same time they gave up a largely Kurdish population, an attractive option to the nationalists who were engaged in the program of Turkification during this post-Lausanne era of population exchanges. Indeed, if one looks at late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century history, it becomes clear that the process of drawing borders and exchanging populations to reify those borders was one aspect, if not the dominant aspect, of government policy. With the advent of the Young Turks and then the Republicans under Kemal, the process took on an ever more nationalist bent. . . . For the founding fathers of the new regime in Ankara, job one was to simply survive. Once the Greeks had been defeated in 1922, the immediate existence of the regime was no longer in question. At this point, however, territorial integrity was still very much in the forefront of their thinking. Mosul, with its largely Kurdish population, was an extremely low priority.14
In those years, the main aim of Turkish foreign policy was rapprochement with Britain. Turkey was also appraising diminishing a Kurdish population that could be difficult to control in the future. A divided Kurdistan was to its interest in this regard. Therefore, it acquiesced to the division of what had been one single unit geopolitically throughout history and pondered abandoning the Mosul vilayet. Leaving Mosul outside was a Kemalist decision, yet this remained unregistered as a fact in the Turkish official historiography.
From the last quarter of the nineteenth century on, distancing from Britain—which had become the greatest guarantor of the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire until then—had brought the Empire’s end. Kemalist Turkey was in favor of changing the direction of foreign policy for a new rapprochement with Britain. If the price of such policy overhaul would be relinquishing the Mosul vilayet, Mustafa Kemal and his team were willing to pay that price. The names Eastern Anatolia and Southeastern Anatolia were designated to those parts of Kurdistan that would remain in Turkey, and the populations inhabiting those regions would be subjected to vigorous policies of Turkification and assimilation.
The fate of the Mosul vilayet, in a sense, was meant as a geopolitical rearrangement of Kurdistan. With Mosul to be delivered to Iraq under British tutelage, it would be considered that no Kurd would remain in Turkey. Prior to the ruptures that occurred in 1925 and 1926, in the first decade following the end of the Great War, the destinies of the Kurdish-majority inhabitants of the Mosul, who would later be called Iraqi Kurds, were interconnected with those of their kin in Turkey. The connection had been established through the Treaty of Sèvres, the only treaty that was not implemented among the post-war treaties.15
Not the suppression of the Sheikh Said rebellion, but the abolition of the Caliphate by the Kemalist regime alienated the Kurds of Mosul from Turkey. With the defeat of the Kurdish revolt and more importantly the settlement of the border question over a trilateral agreement between Britain Iraq and Turkey, interaction between the Kurds of Turkey and those of Iraq was severely hampered. C. J. Edmonds, a British political officer in Iraqi Kurdistan during the 1920s, in his Kurds, Turks and Arabs: Politics, Travel and Research in North-Eastern Iraq 1919–1925 disclosed the feelings of surprise and astonishment among the British officials in Mosul when they heard in mid-March 1924 that the Turkish Grand National Assembly had abolished the caliphate. Edmonds wrote that the propaganda that had kept Kurdistan like a volcano ready to erupt was mainly due to the loyalty that the Kurds held toward the highest authority of their religion, the caliphate in İstanbul.
The abolition of the caliphate not only broke the spiritual and emotional bonds connecting the Kurds of Mosul (later the Iraqi Kurds) to İstanbul, it also incited the religious segments of Turkey’s Kurdish community to revolt under the banner of the influential Sheikh Said. Ottoman Kurds’ loyalty, through their religious identity, was to İstanbul. But the imperial Ottoman İstanbul, the seat of the Muslim caliphate, was replaced by the republican Turkish nation-state’s Ankara, with which the Kurds could not identify themselves. Because of the deeply religious identity of its leadership, the Sheikh Said rebellion allowed Ankara to portray the situation as the revolt of reactionaries against the progressive modernists.
Autopsy of the First Kurdish Rebellion
In reality, although the rebellion broke out prematurely, there was a long period of preparation done by a clandestine nationalist organization called in short Azadi (Freedom, in Kurdish). The date of foundation of Cıwata Azadi Kurd (Society for Kurdish Freedom), later named Cıwata Kweseriya Kurd (Society for Kurdish Independence), is unclear: some claim it to be in 1921, some in 1923. Either way, the organization was responsible for the events leading up to Sheikh Said rebellion. The majority of its founders were nationalist Kurds who had served as officers in the Ottoman army during World War I. Its organizational mode was secretive, and events had moved very quickly since its establishment. Facing difficulties against a constantly on-guard Turkish intelligence and with the time-consuming task of inculcating nationalism in uneducated, poverty-stricken Kurdish society, Azadi leaders realized that the Kurdish populace would believe the sheikhs due to their traditional position and the high regard in which they were held. Azadi’s ranks were therefore filled with sheikhs belonging to the Naqshbandi order. After the arrest of hundreds of Azadi leaders in the wake of a mutiny, the sheikhs were the only ones left to lead the rebellion that was being prepared. They had become indispensable. The supreme command of the rebellion thus fell to the most respected, spiritually admired and trusted nationalist, Sheikh Said.16
The rebellion, when it broke out prematurely on February 8, 1925, had around 15,000 fighting men opposed initially by 25,000 Turkish troops. By April, Turkish troops numbered slightly over 50,000. In mid-April, Sheikh Said was captured, and along with other ringleaders was tried in Diyarbakır and hanged on June 29, 1925, the date considered as the end of the rebellion. By late August 1925, British intelligence which was monitoring the developments with extreme attention and had the most reliable sources for collecting data estimated 357 Kurdish notables had been sentenced to death by the independence tribunals, which had been reactivated to deal with the rebellion. After the capture of Sheikh Said, extensive operations continued to crush the seeds that could grow any possible future Kurdish nationalist movement. The hardest fought battles took place in March, and the tide of the rebellion was turned back in that month. Numerous factors ranging from tribal divisions among the Kurds; sectarian differences that pushed the Alevi Kurds to side with the Turkish government against a Sunni-clergy led rebellion; betrayal, a historically common trait of Kurdish revolts in the region; and lack of significant endorsement of support internationally and from the region, culminated in its eventual defeat.
Although there are varying numbers on casualties, there is not much dispute that no less than 5,000 people lost their lives as the Sheikh Said rebellion was quelled. The figure might even be somewhat higher than this. Robert Olson emphasized that the greatest suffering of the Kurds was not from the numbers killed or the casualties they sustained, but rather from the lands destroyed, villages burned, people deported, and persecution and harassment by Turkish officers, soldiers, and gendarmeries. While this brutality peaked during the period of the rebellion and its aftermath throughout 1925, harsh tactics
