The near-exclusive focus of international opinion and the media on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict conceals a far broader and more systemic reality: a forest of internal colonial dominations and ethnic and religious persecutions affecting tens of millions of people across the Middle East. Palestine is the media “tree” that absorbs all the light, while entire peoples — Kurds, Yazidis, Alevis, Baloch, Chaldo-Assyrians, Armenians, Eastern Christians… — see their identity, language and territory denied by artificial nation-states born of Franco-British colonial agreements.
The Poisoned Legacy of Sykes-Picot
It all begins with the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, a secret partition between France and the United Kingdom that carved up the defeated Ottoman Empire according to imperialist interests, with no regard for the region’s millennia-old sociocultural, linguistic and religious realities.
These arbitrary borders gave rise to artificial states — Iraq, Syria, modern Turkey — modelled on the European nation-state template: “one people, one language, one flag.” This rigid model proved catastrophic in a region defined by an exceptional ethnic and confessional mosaic.
The Kurdish tragedy is its most glaring illustration. The Kurds, promised independence by the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), were sacrificed at the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) to consolidate Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s new Turkish Republic. They thus became the world’s largest nation without a state, fragmented between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria — each of which has attempted, by force, to assimilate or erase them.
The Strategy of Erasure: Demographic Engineering
The oppression of the Kurds has not been solely military. It has taken the form of an internal colonialism aimed at dispossessing them of their territorial and cultural roots.
In Syria and Iraq, Ba’athist regimes implemented the infamous “Arab belts.” Arab populations were displaced into fertile or oil-rich Kurdish areas to break Kurdish territorial continuity and alter the demographics. In Syria, under Hafez al-Assad, around 140,000 Kurds were expelled from their lands along the Turkish border, replaced by Arab settlers in a strip 10 to 15 kilometres wide.
In Turkey, the policy of Turkification was systematic: decades-long bans on the Kurdish language in public life, the forced renaming of thousands of Kurdish villages, and mass deportations to the country’s west to dilute Kurdish identity within the Turkish majority.
In Iran, the marginalisation of Kurds intensified sharply in the very first months following the Islamic Revolution of 1979. On 19 August 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic, issued a fatwa calling for jihad against the Kurdish people, whom he accused of threatening Islamic unity. This religious declaration served as justification for a ferocious crackdown carried out by the Revolutionary Guards: village bombardments, military assaults and summary executions left several thousand dead within months, marking the beginning of a systematic policy of assimilation and repression that continues to this day in Rojhelat (Iranian Kurdistan).
The Dark Hours of Physical Repression
These policies of erasure were accompanied by massacres and genocidal campaigns that have too often been minimised or passed over in silence.
The Dersim Massacre (1937–1938): Kemalist Turkey launched an operation of extreme violence against the Alevi Kurds of Dersim (renamed Tunceli), in northern Kurdistan under Turkish colonial rule. Aerial bombardments, the use of toxic gases (including mustard gas purchased from Nazi Germany) and systematic massacres in the villages and caves where civilians had taken refuge. Estimated death tolls range from 13,000 (official Turkish figures, acknowledged by Erdoğan in 2011) to 70,000, with tens of thousands deported and young girls handed over to the families of Turkish officers.
The Anfal Campaign and the Halabja Massacre (1988): In Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s regime waged a fully-fledged genocidal campaign against the Kurds. Between 50,000 and 182,000 dead depending on the source, thousands of villages destroyed. The chemical attack on Halabja on 16 March 1988 remains the largest chemical massacre of a civilian population in history: between 3,200 and 5,000 immediate deaths and 7,000 to 10,000 wounded. The precursor chemicals for the weapons had been supplied to Iraq by Western companies (West Germany, the Netherlands, and others).
The Forest of Persecuted Minorities
Beyond the Kurds, the entire human mosaic of the Middle East has been targeted by these exclusionary state nationalisms.
Assyro-Chaldeans, Syriacs and Armenians: Heirs to the oldest civilisations of Mesopotamia, they suffered the Sayfo (Assyrian genocide) in 1915, contemporaneous with the Armenian genocide. Assyrian delegations of the time estimated losses at between 250,000 and 275,000 dead — roughly half their pre-war population. Waves of mass exodus followed, today threatening their survival on their ancestral lands.
The Yazidis: A Kurdish religious minority, they have been subjected to 74 attempts at genocide throughout their history, the most recent carried out by ISIS in 2014: around 5,000 men and elderly people massacred, more than 6,800 women and girls enslaved, and hundreds of thousands displaced. The UN and several countries have recognised these crimes as genocide.
The Baloch: Divided by the Durand Line (the colonial border between Pakistan and Afghanistan), they face fierce repression in both Iran and Pakistan, where their natural resources are exploited without benefit to the local populations.
Other minorities — Eastern Christians, Alevis, and others — have likewise faced policies of assimilation, discrimination or cultural eradication.
Why This Silence?
If Palestine captures all the attention, it is partly because denouncing Israeli colonisation has become a simple and mobilising political marker in many circles. Denouncing the colonial character of the states born of Sykes-Picot would compel the West to call into question the very architecture of the Middle East it helped construct — and to confront strategic allies: Turkey (a NATO member), the oil states, and key actors in trade routes and regional stability.
The Kurds, Yazidis, Assyrians and Baloch have neither a comparable lobby nor an equally polarising image. Their suffering is routinely reduced to “internal problems” or matters of “terrorism” (the PKK, etc.), while the responsible states are courted for geopolitical reasons.
This perspective illuminates a bitter reality: the struggle for self-determination in the Middle East cannot be complete so long as we ignore the tens of millions of individuals whose identity is denied by borders drawn in Paris and London more than a century ago. Recognising this “colonial forest” in all its complexity is a prerequisite for any lasting and honourable peace in a region that has known no peace for over a century.
The French original of this article originally appeared on Kurdistan au féminin. This English translation, by Daniel Mang, first appeared on the Left Renewal Blog.
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