• The consolidation of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq is of huge importance. Kurds in Iraq now have an unprecedented opportunity to define their own future and influence other Kurds in the region.
• Another Turkish incursion into Iraq is likely to be futile but the threat has been raised because of the poor state of Turkish–US relations, the tension between the AK Party and the Turkish military, and Turkish opposition to a successful KRG.
• Kurdish political demands remain limited, but there has been a notable
strengthening of Kurdish self-perception and aspirations at a mass level.
• The intricate web of relationships between Kurds and regional states means
that the future of the Middle East is closely tied to Kurdish futures.
• Regional and Western policy-makers need to reappraise the role of the Kurds
in Iraq and Turkey and how Kurds in Syria and Iran interact with their
governments and are influenced by Kurdish developments in neighbouring states.

PJAK is a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Confederation (Koma Civakên Kurdistan or KCK), which is an alliance of outlawed Kurdish groups and divisions lead by an elected Executive Council. The PKK, listed as a terrorist organization internationally by a number of states and organizations, including the USA, NATO and the EU, is also a member of KCK. More than 37,000 people have been killed in the Turkey-PKK conflict since 1984. A recent New York Times article stated that PJAK and PKK “appear to a large extent to be one and the same, and share the same goal: fighting campaigns to win new autonomy and rights for Kurds in Iran and Turkey. They share leadership, logistics and allegiance to Abdullah Ocalan, the P.K.K. leader imprisoned in Turkey.

Policies and structure

The present leader of the organisation is Haji Ahmadi. According to the Washington Times, half the members of PJAK are women, many of them still in their teens, and one of the female members of the leadership council is Gulistan Dugan, a psychology graduate from the University of Tehran. This is due primarily to the fact that PJAK is strongly supportive of women’s rights. PJAK believes that women must have a strong role in government and must be on an equal level with men in leadership positions.PJAK is a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Confederation (KCK). A number of Kurdish groups and divisions fall under the KCK umbrella, which is lead by an elected executive committee. The KCK is in charge of a number of decisions under the movement, and often, release press statements on behalf of its members. PJAK also has sub-divisions. PJAK’s armed-wing has been named by the organization as the Eastern Kurdistan Forces (Hêzên Rojhilata Kurdistan or HRK). PJAK also has a women’s branch, dedicated to serving women’s interests within the group and women interests in general, called Yerjerika.Like the present PKK goals in Turkey, PJAK leaders say their long-term goals are to establish a federal Kurdish state within Iran. It is mainly focused on replacing Iran’s theocracy with a democratic and federal government, where self-rule is granted to all ethnic minorities of Iran, including Arabs, Azeris, and Kurds.

Armed conflict and arrests

PJAK killed 24 members of Iranian security forces on April 3, 2006 in retaliation for the killing of 10 Kurds demonstrating in Maku by Iranian security forces. On April 10, 2006, seven PJAK members were arrested in Iran, on suspicion that they had killed three Iranian security force personnel. Cihan News Agency claims that over 120 members of Iranian security forces were killed by PJAK during 2005. PJAK set off a bomb on 8 May 2006 in Kermanshah, wounding five people at a government building.As early as mid-2006, the Iranian security forces have confronted PJAK guerillas in many different occasions along the border inside Iran. Since then, the Iranian military has begun bombardments of Kurdish villages in Iraq along the Iranian border while claiming that their primary targets have been PJAK militants. A number of civilians have died. PJAK claims its guerillas fight inside Iran, and in August of 2007, managed to destroy an Iranian military helicopter that was conducting a forward operation of bombardment by Iranian forces.

Relation to United States government and military structures

PJAK is considered close to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK, also called KADEK , Kongra-Gel and KCK), which is listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States State Department.

Wikinews has related news:
Kucinich asks Bush about alleged US support for armed insurgency in Iran

On April 18, 2006, US congressman Dennis Kucinich sent a letter to US president George W. Bush in which he expressed his judgment that the US is likely to be supporting and coordinating PJAK, since PJAK is based in Iraqi territory, which is in practice under the control of US military forces.

In November 2006, journalist Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker supported this claim, stating that the US military and the Israelis are giving the group equipment, training, and targeting information in order to create internal pressures in Iran.

Contrary evidence includes an interview with Slate magazine in June 2006, when PJAK spokesman Ihsan Warya was paraphrased as stating that he “nevertheless points out that PJAK really does wish it were an agent of the United States, and that [PJAK is] disappointed that Washington hasn’t made contact.” The Slate article continues stating that the PJAK wishes to be supported by and work with the United States in overthrowing the government of Iran in a similar way that Kurdish organisations in Iraq cooperated with the United States in overthrowing the government of Iraq in the Iraq war.

However, in August of 2007, the leader of PJAK was permitted to visit Washington DC in order to seek support from the U.S. both politically and militarily but it was later said that he only made limited contacts with officials in Washington. One of the top officials in the PKK made a statement in late 2006, that “If the US is interested in PJAK, then it has to be interested in the PKK as well” referring to the alliance between the two groups and their memberships in the Kurdistan Democratic Confederation (KCK).

Origin: Kurds are reported to be the descendants of many settlers in their current homeland. Their ancestors include Guti, Kurti, Mede, Mard, Carduchi, Gordyene, Adianbene, Zila and Khaldi.BC: Ancient written historical tablets indicates that along other smaller kingdoms and city states the Guti’s kingdoms began around 2300 BC and the Medes kingdom around 1100 BC.
7th century: First record of Kurdish writing.

7th- 18th Century:

7th-9th centuries: Through the expansion of a new religion in the area most Kurds converted from their original belief system to Islam to the point that believers of Yaresan, Zorasterian, Ezidi and Elewi are in a minority today.

10th-12th centuries: Emergence of Kurdish principalities to the north Chaddadides (951-1174), to the south the Hassanwaihides (959-1015), and to the west the Merwanides (990-1096) with their capital in Diyarbakir.

1169- 1250: The Kurdish Ayubid dynasty, founded by Salahadin, expanded from Middle East to North Africa.

14th-15th centuries: Following the tidal wave of the invasion by Mongols, Kurdish principalities started to reconstitute.

1596: Sheref Khan, prince of Bitlis, completed Sharafnameh, the first book on Kurdish history.

1695: Ehmede Khani (born 1651), poet, philosopher, and linguist, publishes his epic Mem-o-Zin, a saga of the Kurdish people calling for the creation of a united national states of Kurdistan.

19th Century:

19th century: The Kurdish feudalists rise against the Ottomans in a series of disconnected revolts (1806). Apart from a few provinces annexed to Persia, all Kurdish territories come under firm Ottoman rule.

1898: The First bilingual (Kurdo-Turk) journal, Kurdistan, appears and begins to propagate the idea of a Kurdistan national liberation movement under the editorship of the Bedr-Khan’s in Cairo.

Early 20th Century

1908: The Young Turks Revolt begin to apply repressive policies against non- Turkish peoples, including the Albanians, Armenians, and Kurds.

1910: The Hewa (Hope) society is founded in Kurdistan (Northern Iraq).

1920: In the aftermath of World War I, Britain is given a mandate over Arab Iraq and the Kurdish vilayet (administrative region) of Mosul, “ceded” by France in exchange for Cilicia. In San Remo Conference (4/19-26/1920) creating separate Armenian and Kurdish states in the territories which had originally been allocated to Russia were discussed.

1919-1920: The first Kurdish revolt against the British occupation of southern Kurdistan (Iraq), led by Sheikh Mahmoud.

1920: The treaty of Sevres (Aug. 10, 1920) confirms the borders defined at San Remo. Section II (articles 62-64) envisages the creation of a Kurdish state on the Kurdish territory.

1921: The French and Turks sing the Ankara Agreement (Oct. 20, 1921). France takes the Kurdish provinces of Jezireh and Kurd Dagh which are annexed under the Syrian mandate.

8/27/1921: Sir Percy Cox, the British high commissioner of Mesopotamia, prevents the throne of Iraq to Emir Faisal, son of the sheriff of Mecca, whom the French had just expelled from Syria. The Kurds of Mosul boycott the plebiscite organized to “elect” Faisal under the banner “Since when are kings elected”?

1923: Sheikh Mahmoud leads a second revolt proclaims himself “king of Kurdistan” and establishes contact with Simko, the leader since 1920 of a Kurdish revolt against the Persian domination. The movement is repressed by the British Army, and the sheikh is exiled to India.

3/ 3/1923: The seal is set on the annexation of most of Kurdistan by the new Turkish Republic, led by its founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers emanate in Kurdistan, so the Kurds also lose any share of their ancestral water riches.

3/3/1924: A Turkish decree bans all Kurdish schools, organizations, and publications, along with the religious fraternities (tekke) and religious schools (medresse).

1925: Sheikh Said starts a new revolt .

2-4/1925: The council of the League of Nations accepts the British claims to annex southern Kurdistan (Mosul and Kirkuk) under the Iraqi mandate thereby robbing the Kurds their ancestral claims to that oil rich area.

8/1927: Khoyboun (Independence), the Kurdish National league, is founded to bring together all Kurdish political parties and organizations following World War I.

Mid 20th Century

1924-1935: Newly established Attaturk Republic in Turkey conducted the policy of genocide of the Kurdish people in which three quarter of a million Kurds lost their lives..

1928: The entire civil and military administration of Kurdistan in Turkey is entrusted to the inspector general of the East, the Turkish high commissioner for Kurdistan. Revolts erupt throughout the Kurdish provinces.

6/1930: Simko, the leader of the Kurdish revolt against the central authority of Perisa since 1920, is assassinated during talks with representatives of Tehran.

1931: Revolts break out in Iranian Kurdistan under Jafar Sultan and in Iraqi Kurdistan under Sheikh Mahmoud Berzenji.

5/1932: Ankara promulgates a law for the deportation and dispersion of the hundreds of thousands of Kurds to non Kurdish western Turkey following a fascist trend in Germany and Italy to depopulate areas with restive minorities.

1933: The Kurds rise up in Iraq, led by Mullah Mustafa Barzani, .

1936-1938: Repression in Turkey led to an armed resistance by the Kurds in the Dersim area..

1941: Komeley Jianewey Kurd (KJK) -Kurdish Resurrection Society- founded by a group of Kurdish intellectuals in the city of Mehabad (Iranian part of Kurdistan), a secret society advocating Kurdish national rights.

1943-1945: Kurdish revolt in Iraq continues under the leadership of Mullah Mustafa Barzani, who is eventually forced to retreat into Iranian Kurdistan. 1945 Memorandum addressed by Kurds to the United Nations Constitutive Assembly outlining national claims.

8/1945: KJK changed name to Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KPDI), the constitution was altered from Kurdish national rights and self determination to limited cultural, economic and political rights within the political boundaries of Iran.

1/13/1946: The first Kurdish republic is proclaimed at Mehabad , under the presidency of Qazi Muhemmed. It was destroyed in spring of 1947 by the Iranian army and the American CIA.

3/1947: The leaders of the Mahabad Kurdish Republic are hanged by the Iranian government at dawn, in downtown Mehabad.

8/1953: A coupe organized by the American CIA brings the Shah of Iran back to power from exile.

1956: Under the aegis of US and Britain Turkey, Iran, and Iraq sign the Baghdad Pact, creating a more coordinated defense against the disparate Kurdish revolts and movements.

6/14/1958: A military coup led by General Kassem overthrows the Iraqi monarchy, denounced Baghdad Pact (later replaced by CENTO Pact) and proclaimed Iraq based on free society of Kurds and Arabs. General Barzani returns from exile in the USSR.

5/27/1960: A military coup overthrows the Menderes government in Turkey.

9/11/1961: Beginning of a Kurdish armed uprising in Iraq, led by Mullah Mustafa Barzani. The Iraqi army launches its first major offensive against the Kurds in mountainous terrain.

6/18/1963: The Soviet Foreign Minister Andre Gromiko sends a note to the ambassadors of Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq warning their governments not to launch a joint military intervention in Iraqi Kurdistan. Turkey and Iran give up Operation Tiger, the planned link up with Iraqi and Syrian troops engaged in Kurdistan.

2/10/1964: Marshal Aref, commander of Iraqi armed forces fighting the Kurdish uprising, recognizes Kurdish national rights.

3/1965: Military Operations begin again in Iraq and continue until the second cease-fire in June 1966.

Late 20th Century

1967-1968: Headed by one hundred members of Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran, Kurdish peasants wage tactical guerrilla war in Iranian Kurdistan. After 18 months of operation it was suppressed by Iranian heavy artillery from the army and air force.

6/30/1968: Saddam Hussein becomes deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Coucil of the Ba’ath Party in Iraq, and his portfolio is expanded to head internal security.

8/8/1969: The Kurdish village of Dakan in Mosul, Iraq is the scene of a major arm atrocity. The war against the Kurds in Iraq is steeped up.

1969: Komala was formed by a group of Kurdish intellectuals in Iranian Kurdistan, which had an impact on workers and peasants movement in Iran.

3/11/1970: The Kurds and the Iraqi government sign an agreement on the “autonomy of Kurdistan” to be implemented within four years, and the fighting stops.

3/12/1970: In what is regarded as the most brutal military coup in modern Turkey, center left and left-wing democratic parties and organizations are outlawed en masse. Thousands of Kurdish separatists and nationalists, students, trade unionists, and members of intelligentsia are among those arrested and brought before special military tribunals.

Spring 1972: Alliances are switched, in an effort to isolate Kurdish movement at home and abroad, the Iraqi government signs a friendship and cooperation treaty with the USSR erstwhile ally of Kurds. Discretely encouraged by the US, Iran decides to back the Kurds.

3/1974: Following the collapse of the 1970 Kurdish autonomy accords in Iraq, war breaks out. The Kurdish towns of Zakho and Qala Diza are razed to the ground. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds flee the cities and brutalities break all previous records.

3/6/1975: The Algiers Agreement between the Iraqi Ba’ath Party headed by Saddam Hussein and the Shah’s regime in Iran is promulgated. Iraq formally concedes to Iranian territorial demands in return for the Shah ending support for the Iraqi Kurdish rebels. With their supply lines cut, the Kurdish resistance crumbles and the Iraqi government launches its policy of mass deportations and resettlement.

June 1976: A new phase of guerilla operation is started in Iraqi Kurdistan.

6/1979: Saddam Hussien becomes president of Iraq.

8/17/1979: Ayatollah Khomeini declares war on the Kurds. The Iranian Islamic Army reoccupies every Kurdish town.

9-10/1979 Kurdish guerrilla operations are carried out throughout Iranian Kurdistan.

8/15/1984: The PKK starts its guerrilla warfare against the Turkish state in southeastern Anatolia.

3/1988: “The Massacre of the Innocents” Iraq uses chemical weapons in the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja and over 5,000 Kurds perish in one afternoon. This marks the beginning of the Anfal, a genocidal campaign against the Kurds of Iraq, which eventually took more than 180,000 lives and destroyed over 4,000 Kurdish towns and villages.

7/1988: Assassination of Dr. Qassemlou, the leader of KDP-Iran in Vienna, where he was about to enter into peace talks with Iranian representatives.

Aug 1988: Kurdish Americans formed Kurdish National Congress of North America in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

3/91/1991: In the aftermath of the Gulf War and the failed uprising of the Iraqi Kurds against the battered Iraqi regime, Saddam’s forces attack Kurds and send over one million fleeing to the mountains of Iran and Turkey.

4/1991: The U.S- led Allied Peratino Provide Comfort begins setting up camps and bringing supplies to hundreds of thousands of Kurds stranded in the mountains. A “safe haven” is established by the United States and Britain above the 36th parallel in Iraq and the tenuous birth of Iraqi Kurdistan follows.

3/1992: The massacre of Kurdish town people in Cizre by the Turkish army during Newroz (New year’s) celebrations.

3/1992: The war between PKK and Turkish troops brought over 5,000 deaths since 1984.

3/1992: Turkish armed forces move into Iraqi Kurdistan and with the approval of the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga, a joint operation against the PKK guerrillas commences. The PKK encircled agrees to lay down arms and surrender to the Peshmerga, Iraqi Kurdish leadership allows unarmed PKK guerrillas to remain in designated mountain camps in the region.

6/1992: Democratic elections are held in Iraqi Kurdistan. Thousands wait for hours at polling stations to cast their ballots. The Kurds create the only democratic parliament and government in the region but must continue to endure Iraqi threats and a stifling embargo by Baghdad of fuel and food supplies.

9/1992: KDP and PUK representatives take part in the newly-established Iraqi National Congress (INC), which brings together a wide-range of Iraqi opposition groups, meets in Salah-al-Din in the Kurdish-held north.

9/1992: Assasination of Dr. Saeed Sharafkandi, the new leader of KDP-Iran during peace talks with Iranian representatives in Mykonous Restaurant in Berlin, Germany

3/1993: Abdullah Ocalan leader of the PKK announces a unilateral cease fire with Turkey. Stating that he wants to seek a political solution, he urges the Turkish government to introduce a federal system that would give Kurds more political influence.

6/1993: The Turkish government in Ankara ignores the PKK’s peace overtures and resumes attacks on Kurdish guerrilla camps along the Iranian border.

7/1993: Kurdish militants under the direction of the PKK, launch attacks and take hostages at Turkish consulates, embassies, and businesses across Europe. They give up after one day but claim success at having garnered worldwide media attention.

1993: People’s Workers party, a pro Kurdish party (HEP) was outlawed by the constitutional court in Turkey.

5/1994: Clashes between KDP and PUK forces started.

1992-1993: More than sixteen journalists are killed in southeastern Turkey while covering the Kurdish situation.

11/1993: The PKK is banned in Germany and France. All PKK offices raided by police and activities of Kurdistan Solidarity Committee halted.

1993: All Turkish newspapers, magazines, and other publications banned from mentioning or interviewing PKK members.

1/1994: All leaves suspended for Turkish military personnel, including the highest ranking officers.

1995: The PKK organize a “Peace Train” to set off from Cologne (Germany) for a final destination in Diyarbekir. The train was stopped in Turkey

4/1995: Foundation of the Democracy party (DEP). Foundation of Kurdistan Parliment in Exile in Holland. Turkey protested before the Dutch government and recalled its ambassador.

5/1996: A UN Memorandum of Understanding with the Iraqi government launches the “Oil-for-Food” program. Under the agreement, 13% of the proceeds from Iraqi oil exports are earmarked for the three northern governorates, which are largely under Kurdish control.

09/1998: Ocalan leaves Syria secretly heading for Russia. A month Later he arrives in Italy. Most HADEP (a pro Kurdish party) leaders are arrested.

9/1998: Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani sign a peace agreement.

1998: Foundation of the Kurdistan National Congress (KNC) by 20 Kurdish organization from all over Kurdistan and more than 100 personalities.

15/02/1999: After Ocalan had left Italy in Mid January secretly, in a covert operation by the Turkish secret service, CIA, Israeli, Greek and Kenyan secret services, he is arrested in Nairobi and brought back to Turkey the same day.

21st Century:

9/2001: Fighting breaks out between the PUK and the fundamentalist Ansar al-Islam supported by Iran.

6/2002: PUK and KDP officials take part in joint discussions with other Iraqi groups aimed at coordinating the work of the opposition in the event of a US-led military campaign against Iraq.

10/2002: Joint session of the Kurdish parliament convenes in Arbil. KDP and PUK parliamentarians agree to work together during a “transitional session” until new elections can be held.

2/2003: Kurdish leaders reject proposals to bring Turkish troops into northern Iraq as part of a US-led military campaign to oust Saddam Hussein. Anti-Turkish demonstrators take to the streets of Kurdish towns.

3/2003: KDP and PUK create a “joint higher leadership” in the Kurdish-held north, under the chairmanship of the two party leaders, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani.

3/2003: US, with help of Britain lead “Operation Free Iraq” and invade Iraq from North and South. Kurdish soldiers (peshmerge forces) from Kurdish Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan play active role in liberation of Iraq from the Baath Party and toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime.

4/9/2003: US forces advance into central Baghdad. Saddam Hussein’s grip on the city is broken. In the following days Kurdish fighters and US forces take control of the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul. There is widespread looting in the capital and other cities.

2/2004: Fundamentalist killed several senior political figures on a double suicide bombing at the offices of the two main political Kurdish parties in Arbil.

12/2004: On 22 December 2004, a Kurdish delegation met with U.N. Electoral Assistance Division, to deliver 1,732,535 signatures, which had been collected endorsing the call for a referendum on the future of Southern Kurdistan.

1/30/2005: Over 90% of eligible voter in the Kurdistan of Iraq participated in a historic election. Along side the Iraqi election, Kurdish Referendum Movement coordinated a referendum in which 1,973,412 people, or 98.7 percent of respondents voted for an independent Kurdistan.

March 10, 2005: Amnesty International requested from Syrian government an immediate end to human rights violations against the Kurds.

April, 6, 2005: Jalal Talabani, the leader of Patriotic Union of Kurdistan was elected as the first Kurdish President of Iraq.

May 20, 2005: Although Europe’s human rights court ruled that prosecution of Ocalan, in 1999 was unfair, Turkey’s Foreign Minister insisted that the Kurdish PKK leader will not be retried.

June 9, 2005: The National Assembly of Kurdistan endorsed Massoud Barzani, the leader of Kurdistan Democratic Party in Iraq as the president of Kurdish Regional Government in Southern Kurdistan.

June 25, 2005: According to Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, one of the members of a team who in 1988 had been directly involved in the assassination of Kurdish leader, Dr. Ghassemlou, was elected as the president of Iran.

July 13, 2005: After a peaceful demonstration in commemoration of Dr. Qassemlou Eastern Kurdistan fell under the increased pressure of Iranian security forces. The security forces interrogated, tortured, and shot a young Kurdish activist, Mr Shwane Qaderi, then dragged him behind a truck on the streets of the city of Mahabad. This event led to escalation of anti government activities in Eastern Kurdistan as well as escalation of arrests of Kurdish intellectuals and human right activists.

Oct. 15, 2005: Southern Kurdistan participated in voting for an Iraqi constitution, hoping it will grant them lawmaking powers, control over their 60,000 pishmargas, and authority over oil and gas in the region.

Nov 2005: Kurdish National Congress of North America, held a conference on Kurdish Independence at two of the Universities in Southern Kurdistan.

Dec 2005: The National Democratic Rally (NDR), made up of socialists, nationalists, liberals, Kurds and others drew up the so-called “Damascus Declaration” in October, inviting the Syrian people to work peacefully for radical change.

Dec 15, 2005: Southern Kurdistan participated in Iraqi election; The Kurdish lists included Kurdistan Alliance 730, Yekgertu KIU 561, and Democratic Solution Party 779.

Dec 2005: Mayors of 56 Kurdish cities in Eastern Anatolia collectively protested in a letter against the pressure of Turkish state not to to close down Roj TV, a popular Kurdish TV station in Europe.

Jan 2006: A reformist Kurdish front was formed in Eastern Kurdistan.

Jan 7, 2006: Unification of the two administration in Southern Kurdistan.

Main References:

www.kurdistanica.com/english/history/histroy-frame.html

www.edkashi.com/ekurds.html

www.kurdistanobserver.com

www.kurdishmedia.com

Since the Earth is 149,600,000 kilometers, (one hundred forty nine million and six hundred thousands kilometers) from the Sun, it takes 365.2422 days (one solar year), for the Earth to complete one orbit around the Sun. This means that Earth travels at a speed of approximately 29.8 km/sec or 1788 km per minutes or 107300 km per hour to travel the 939,992,130 km (584,100,000 miles) around the Sun in one year. Note that this is about 900 times the speed of a car moving at typical highway speed of 120 km per hour. As we move forward, at this speed, the earth also rotates around its axis like a spinning basketball. The Earth’s axis of rotation is tilted at a fixed angle of just over 66.5 degree from orbital plane. Given the earth’s equatorial radius of 6380 km, and 40090 kilometers circumference, and the 24 hr duration of a solar day, the rotational speed of a point on the earth’s equator is 1670 km per hour, which is about four times the speed of a Boeing 737 passenger airplane.

Imagine now that this spinning basketball grows a circumferential wing from its equator (the equator is a plane that divides the Earth into two, half-spheres called the Southern hemisphere, and the Northern hemisphere). Imagine this wing, expanding outward into the surrounding space perpendicular with the polar axis, until it touches the inside of the imaginary inner surface of the sky, which is called the celestial sphere.

At this traveling and rotating speeds, Earth, with a fixed angular tilt moves around the sun like a spherical airplane, the top of the wing or the upper (northern hemisphere) is exposed more directly to the Sun during the half of the journey and, the bottom of the wing (and the southern hemisphere) is exposed more directly to the Sun during the second half. The point at which this switch takes place (that is, from southern exposure to northern exposure) is called the vernal equinox. This signals the start of the season Spring. At this position, the length of the day-time, is exactly equal the length of the night-time, and indeed, the name vernal equinox means “renewed equality”. The vernal equinox usually takes place at a certain precise moment on March 21. After the switch, which sometimes occurs on March 20, the days get longer in the northern hemisphere and the nights shorter until Earth Summer Solstice (June 21, or 22, the start of Summer season), when the length of the day-light is the longest. After summer solstice, and as Earth moves on, the days begin to shorten and nights start to get longer until their durations again equal one another at the Autumnal Equinox, which occurs on September 21 (the start of Fall season) 180 degrees opposite the vernal equinox. At the autumnal equinox, the bottom portion of the imaginary wing of the Earth and the Earth’s southern hemisphere receives the more direct sunlight. The northern hemisphere begins to get cooler and cooler until the Earth reach the winter solstice, which occurs on December 21 (and starts the season of Winter). During this time, duration of the day-light in northern hemisphere is shortened and nights are longer and life in the northern hemisphere begins to take a deep sleep. Winter continues until the earth approaches yet another switch at the point of vernal equinox, to bring once more the Spring season. This is the time of good news of returning sunshine, refreshing air and clear water and warmth as nature and life awakens from their deep winter sleep. This rebirth of life and nature is called NuRuj, meaning a Day of Renewal and is what our Kurdish ancestors started to celebrate in the lash and beautiful green hills and mountains of Kurdistan in 728 B.C.

This is the year when the Medes, through the accumulated knowledge by the Pre-Zoroastrian Magi of astrological and planetary motion, declared that the beginning of Spring to be celebrated as the calendarical NuRuj, meaning the New Day which also marked the beginning of a new year.

Another important reason for this celebration was that, the Medes after a thousand years of nomadic and migratory living, had just dominated the indigenous cultures in the Zagros mountains. For these victories, they decided to establish their first organized and regimented government in Eastern Kurdistan in the city of Ekbatana in 728 B.C. with a ceremonial festivity marking the start of their victory with the season of Spring. Under King Farvartish (Phraortes), 675-653 BC, Pasargadae (Pasar=parapet, -Gadae=a base for lookout), meaning an outpost, was founded on the edge of their eastern frontier. The local people appointed to -Patrol and Guard- (Paras-tin) the Kingdom of the Medes, at the outpost against the Scythians, were called the Parasian or Parsian, known today as the Persians. Later, in 615 BC, under Cyaxares (kna: Ha-Khoy-Sara, Kay-Sara or Uvakhshatra), Arrapkha, (Kirkuk), was captured and brought under the Medes control. It is important to notice that the modern word Kaiser is derived from the title of King Cyazares.
Later in 545 B.C., when the Parsians, a vassal tribe to the Medes, received their freedom from the Medes, they maintained the celebration of NuRuj, which later in Persian language its pronunciation changed from NuRuj to NuRooz as it will be explained further below.

Cyrus the Great (in Kuridsh known as the Little Caesar), was born to Mondana, the daughter of the last King of the Medes, King Astyages who had been given in marriage to Cambyses I, the feudal lord and head of the Parsians. The King’s second daughter, Amytes, was given in marriage to Nebuchadnezzar II, the king of Babylon who lived from 605 to 562 B.C.

These political marriages however, did not secure the King’s life and the future of his kingdom (the Kingdom of the Medes) from plots instigated against him by the internal revolutionaries and the Parsians. An internal revolt led by a revolutionary blacksmith named Kaveh was mobilized to overthrow the King because of the alleged King’s cruelty against his subjects. Parsians, seeking an opportunity to free themselves from the Medes, and knowing of Kaveh’s intention to overthrow the King, further instigated internal agitation against Astyages. In a Battle between Astyages and the Parsians, Cambyses head of the Parsis, lost his life and was replaced by the minor prince Cyrus, the grandson of the king Astyages. After making a secret pact with his Babylonian in-laws in 545, Cyrus led the Parsians in revolt against his grandfather Astyages . In a battle near the Pasargadae, the last king of the Medes was killed and the Young Cyrus, with the help of Kaveh the blacksmith, combined the two people and brought under Cyrus’s rule, the Medes and the Parsians to form the Great Iranian Empire, known in the West (erroneously) as the Persian Empire. This false credit given to the Persians, by the Greek historian, is because by the time Cyrus and his successors expanded the Medes empire further west, they were introduced to the Greeks as Parsians without mention of the near one thousand years history of the Medes predating the Persians. Thus, the Western literature from that time on has occasionally given credit to those who do not rightly deserve such credit for the history of civilization.

In celebration of their victory and freedom from the Medes, the Parsians, threw a big celebration in the Pasargad the place where King Astyages was killed and celebrated their own NuRuj of freedom. In 1971, the Shah of Iran, commemorated this event, with a big celebration at the tomb of Cyrus, in Pasargad. He called the pompous festivity the Festival of 2500 years Imperial Celebration. Actually, the rule of the Persians over Iran ended in 330 BC, by Alexander the Great conquering Persipolis. Persipolis is the name given by the Greeks to Takht-e-Jamshid a place where Darius I build his palace a few miles away from Pasargade. After the Greeks victory over the Persians in 330 BC, Takhte-e-Jamshid changed name to Persepolis, meaning the city of the Parsis. More about the history of Iran after the fall of the Parsians will be explored in future articles by the KAES.

Now, why NuRuj and not NewRooz?, Kurdish is the original language of the Iranians, it predates the accession of the Persian rule and their language by nearly 1200 years.

The original Kurdish Language is derived from the Fahli language (or as it should be pronounced correctly, the Pahli language, which in ancient times was known as Pahlavi. After the Arab invasion, “F” replaced “P” sound in pronunciation). It is ironic that Reza Shah, when came to power, changed his last name from an Arabic last name to Pahlavi, trying to acquire an authentic Iranian identity. Since the invasion of Islam into Kurdistan and Iran in 640 AD, and domination of Arabic language, the pronunciation of many authentic Iranian words had changed from their original phonetic values to the current phonetic values. This is more pronounced in the modern vernacular Persian language. In Kurdish, however, the language has remained relatively purer with less Arabic influence because of their less accessible cultural and territorial environment. For example, when comparing the Kurdish language to Farsi (Parsi), one can use a general rule of vocabulary conversion between the two languages. One such general rule of vocabulary conversion is that the sound “Zh” in Kurdish becomes the “Z” sound in Farsi after the introduction of Islam. This is apparent in the following examples:

Kuridsh Farsi English

roozh (RuJ) rooz day
teyzh tiyz sharp
zheyr zeyr below
derizh deraz long, to stretch
zhen zan women
reazh reaz to pour or small
zhanin zadan to play, or to beat
ghazh ghaz goose-a bird
zhynin zistan to live
zhaar zahr poison
zhari zari to mourn – weeping

There are many other similar examples.

So, based on recorded historical information and current linguistic comparison mentioned above and modern cultural practices, it is recommended that we revert back to the way that New Rooz originally was pronounced as NuRoj. NuRuj is a time of universal celebration to let light enter the hemispheres of our mind. It is also the time for the Kurds and the Persians to celebrate in joint festivity the spirit of celestial harmony. Let the awesome depth of celestial vision, with music, poetry, and spring fragrance of the lash green nature bring us all, the people of Earth together, to hold hands in celebration of NuRuj, to keep pace with the rhythm of life on earth.

This moment of rhythmic awareness as it should be pronounced NuRuj, should once again, enter our vocabulary of the celebration of life, as it is a fine and authentic way to celebrate life on earth. For me, as we approach the vernal equinox, I like to say to you and all:

NuRuj-etan Pir-Ruj Be.
May your New Day be victorious till your Old Days-
With Peace & Joy

Ardishir Rashidi-Kalhur
Kurdish American Education Society

Since the success of the Islamic Revolution, the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to exporting its revolution abroad. One aspect of this campaign has been a commitment to silencing critical voices in the Iranian exile community around the world. Since December 1979 Iranian intelligence agents have assassinated monarchist, nationalist and democratic activists in countries as diverse as the United States, Austria, Dubai, France and Turkey.

Iran is increasingly being held to account for its murderous activities outside its borders. In November
2006 an Argentinean federal judge issued an arrest warrant for eight IRI officials implicated in the
bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires in July 1994 which killed 85 people. Those indicted
include a former Iranian President Hojjatoleslam Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Iran’s former Foreign
Minister Ali Akbar Velayati. Arrest warrants for Iranian officials have also been issued by Switzerland in
April 2006 for the murder of Professor Kazem Rajavi and by Austria in 1989 for the murder of Kurdish
leader Abdol-Rahman Ghassemlou. Iran’s former Intelligence Minister, Hojjatoleslam Ali Fallahian, who
is featured on the cover of this report, is currently the subject of no less than three separate international
arrest warrants.

In this context, the Mykonos case has particular significance because it opens a window on a secret world.
The trial of many, but sadly not all, of those involved elicited minute operational details about Iran’s
program of political assassinations and about the kind of men recruited to carry it out. The testimony of a
high-ranking former Iranian intelligence officer with direct experience of such operations provided a rare
insight into the political direction behind such attacks. The unprecedented release of German intelligence
materials laid bare for public examination the infrastructure that supported Iranian Intelligence operations
in Western Europe.

The IHRDC has sifted through all this material, and has conducted fresh interviews and additional
research of its own, to produce the first comprehensive publicly available report on the Mykonos case to
appear in either English or Farsi. In doing so, it provides human rights campaigners inside Iran, and in the
wider human rights community outside, with the materials they need to demonstrate the violent resolve of
the IRI to silence dissident voices no matter where in the world they are raised.

In bearing witness, the IHRDC report also pays tribute to the immense courage it takes to make a
commitment to free speech and association in the face of such implacable hostility. The Mykonos Case is
just one of many incidents in which Iranian political dissidents have paid the ultimate price for such acts
of personal conscience.
2. Executive Summary
On September 17, 1992 agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) murdered three leading members of
the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) and one of their supporters in a private dining room at
the Mykonos Restaurant in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin, Germany. The attack was one of a series of
assassinations sponsored by the Iranian government after the revolution of 1979 designed to intimidate
and disrupt the activities of political opponents of the regime.

• The Mykonos operation was authorized by the Islamic Republic’s powerful Special Affairs
Committee, which at the time of the murders was headed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei and included President Hojjatoleslam Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Minister of Intelligence
Hojjatoleslam Ali Fallahian and Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati. The Committee charged
Hojjatoleslam Fallahian with superintending the operation.

• The Mykonos operation was carried out by personnel from the Special Operations Council of the IRI
Ministry of Intelligence and by freelance operators recruited by agents of the IRI Ministry of
Intelligence in the field.

• Hojjatoleslam Fallahian put Abdol-Rahman Banihashemi in charge of the Mykonos team.
Banihashemi was assisted in Germany by a locally-based agent of the IRI Ministry of Intelligence
called Kazem Darabi. Darabi recruited four Lebanese nationals resident in Germany – Youssef
Mohamad El-Sayed Amin, Abbas Hossein Rhayel, Mohammad Atris, and Ataollah Ayad – known to
him through their associations with either Hezbollah or Amal – to assist in the operation.

• The primary targets of the Mykonos operation were Dr. Mohammad Sadegh Sharafkandi, the
Secretary-General of the PDKI, Fatah Abdoli, the PDKI’s European representative, and Homayoun
Ardalan, the PDKI’s representative in Germany. Nourrollah Dehkordi, a friend of Dr. Sharafkandi,
was also killed in the attack, and Aziz Ghaffari, the owner of the Mykonos restaurant, was wounded.
• The actual killings were committed by Abdol-Rahman Banihashemi and Abbas Hossein Rhayel, an
experienced Hezbollah operator, who administered the final shots to both Ardalan and Sharafkandi.
Youssef Amin provided security for the assassins blocking the entrance to the restaurant for the
duration of the attack. Farajollah Haidar drove the getaway car and an Iranian national known only as
Mohammad kept the targets under surveillance prior to the attack.

• Although Banihashemi, Haidar and Mohammad were successfully able to escape from Germany,
most of the other immediate Mykonos conspirators were soon arrested. German prosecutors indicted
Rhayel, Darabi and Amin each on four counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. Two
other associates were indicted for aiding and abetting the attacks.

• The Mykonos trial lasted three and a half years. The court met for a total of 246 sessions, heard 176
witnesses, accepted testimony from a former senior intelligence officer of the IRI Ministry of
Intelligence, and considered documentary evidence varying from secret intelligence files to tapes of
Iranian television broadcasts. Prosecutors successfully obtained convictions in four of the five cases.
Rhayel and Darabi both received life sentences for their role in the attack.

• The German authorities concluded that the Iranian government was “directly involved” in the
Mykonos assassinations and in March 1996, Chief Federal Prosecutor Kay Nehm took the
unprecedented step of issuing an international arrest warrant for the Iranian Minister of Intelligence,
Ali Fallahian. The warrant stated that Fallahian was strongly suspected of the murders. Further

warrants were issued for two Tehran-based agents of the IRI Ministry of Intelligence who had played
an early role in planning the Mykonos operation. All three men remain at large.

• Outstanding arrest warrants also still exist for Abdol-Rahman Banihashemi and Haidar. Both men are
currently believed to be residing safely in Iran.

3. Political Context
The Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (PDKI) is the leading Kurdish political party in Iran1
and one of the
most significant political groups opposing the Islamic Republic. Founded on August 16, 1945 in
Mahabad, Iran,
the Party’s declared objective is to win Kurdish autonomy in administrative, legal and
educational matters without jeopardizing Iran’s territorial integrity. Its motto is “Democracy for Iran,
Autonomy for Kurdistan.”
Following the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in a 1953 military coup, Shah
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi disbanded the majority of opposition groups. The PDKI was one of the
political parties banned by the Shah and the Kurdish movement was driven underground. The downfall of
the Pahlavi regime in January 1979 presented the Kurds with an opportunity to once more press for
autonomy and many Kurds enthusiastically joined the revolution.
The PDKI publicly announced its
return to the public stage in March 1979 and immediately set about publicizing the Party’s proposal for
Kurdish autonomy.
The new revolutionary government strongly opposed granting greater autonomy to the Kurdish region.
The concept of an autonomous minority was particularly anathema to the clerical establishment which
was committed to the goal of creating a unified Islamic community. Distrust was further heightened by
sectarian tensions between the mostly Sunni Kurds and the Shiite leadership in Tehran.

Armed clashes
in Kurdish cities like Sanandaj and Paveh between Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran Enghelab Islami)
and PDKI peshmerga militia fueled accusations that the Kurdish aspirations went beyond autonomy and
that the PDKI’s true goal was Kurdish independence.
Following several failed attempts at reconciliation between the government in Tehran and Kurdish
leaders,
on August 18, 1979, acting as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, Ayatollah Khomeini
ordered units of the Army and the Revolutionary Guards to intervene in the Province of Kurdistan to
restore order and re-establish the authority of the central government.
Khomeini dubbed the PDKI the
“party of Satan”
and the regime made membership of the party a crime against the IRI and therefore
punishable according to both Islamic and Iranian law.
The PDKI was once more forced underground,
and armed confrontations continued between the peshmerga and government forces.
In a keynote address broadcast on Radio Tehran on December 17th
, 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini attacked
ethnic identification and calls for greater regional autonomy for Iran’s ethnic minorities as being contrary
to Islamic principles and thus, ultimately, counter-revolutionary in character:
Sometimes the word minority is used to refer to people such as the Kurds, Lurs, Turks, Persians,
Baluchis, and such. These people should not be called minorities, because this term assumes that
there is a difference between these brothers. In Islam, such difference has no place at all. … There
is no difference between Muslims who speak different languages, for instance, the Arabs or the
Persian. It is very probable that such problems have been created by those who do not wish the
Muslim countries to be united … they create the issues of nationalism, of pan-Iranianism, pan-
Turkism, and such isms, which are contrary to Islamic doctrines. Their plan is to destroy Islam and
the Islamic philosophy.
Attempts to broker a ceasefire foundered over IRI demands that the PDKI lay down its arms before
meaningful negotiations could take place.
The outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war in September 1980 forced
the IRI to pay urgent attention to subduing the security threat on its northern border where the
government controlled the major Kurdish cities but many rural areas essentially remained under PDKI
control.
A major IRI offensive in July 1984 succeeded in driving PDKI forces across the border into
Iraq.
With the leaders of the PDKI now based outside its borders, the Islamic Republic repeatedly resorted to
assassination as a tool to disrupt their activities, an approach it adopted towards all the major centers of

political opposition to clerical rule. The IRI pursued PDKI activists in Iraq, Germany, Austria, Turkey,
Sweden and Denmark mounting a number of fatal attacks. Prior to the Mykonos murders, the most
prominent of these occurred in July 1989 when Dr. Abdol-Rahman Ghassemlou, who had been Secretary-
General of the PDKI since 1973, was murdered in Vienna, Austria, in a meeting that had been ostensibly
arranged by Iranian officials to discuss a peace settlement.

4. Planning and Execution
4.1. Ordering the Assassination
The origins of the Mykonos attack can be traced to the decision by the IRI’s Special Affairs Committee
(Komitey-e Omour-e Vizheh) to appoint Hojjatoleslam Ali Fallahian, then Iran’s Minister of Intelligence,
to oversee the elimination of PDKI’s leadership.

The Special Affairs Committee was established after Ayatollah Khomeini’s death in 1989 to make
decisions on important matters of state. The committee’s existence is not provided for by the constitution.
The fact that the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is the head of the committee, and that the
IRI’s “guardianship of the jurist” (Velayat-e Faqih) doctrine endows the Supreme Leader with
extraordinary powers, effectively places the committee above both the government and the parliament.
At the time of the Mykonos assassinations the other permanent members were Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani, then President; Ali Fallahian, then Minister of Intelligence; Ali Akbar Velayati, then Foreign
Minister; Mohammad Reyshahri, a former Minister of Intelligence; Mohsen Rezai, then General
Commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard; Reza Seifollahi, then head of the Islamic Republic of
Iran’s police; and Ayatollah Khazali, a member of the Guardian Council.

One of the issues handled by the committee was the suppression and elimination of political opposition to
the Islamic Republic. Assassinations both at home and abroad were ordered directly by Ayatollah
Khomeini while he was alive.
After Khomeini’s death, the responsibility for recommending individual
assassinations fell to the Special Affairs Committee. Once the committee’s recommendation was approved
by the Supreme Leader, an individual committee member would be charged with implementing the
decision with the assistance of the Ministry of Intelligence’s
Special Operations Council (Shoray-e
Amaliyat-e Vizheh).
The council’s operational commanders received a written order signed by the
Supreme Leader authorizing an assassination.
Upon receiving the assignment to eliminate the PDKI leadership, Hojjatoleslam Fallahian directed
Mohammad Hadi Hadavi Moghaddam, an agent of the IRI Ministry of Intelligence responsible for
gathering information on Kurdish opposition groups and who had contacts amongst the Kurdish diaspora,
to gather information about the leaders of the PDKI.
Moghaddam’s cover as the Director of the Samsam
Kala Company, a front company for the IRI Ministry of Intelligence, enabled him to travel overseas and
gather a large amount of information on the Iranian expatriate community without arousing suspicion. In
the summer of 1991, Moghaddam traveled to Germany to gather intelligence on the activities of local
Kurdish opposition activists. Subsequently he prepared a report and presented recommendations to
Fallahian.
Fallahian forwarded his findings to the Special Operations Council.
In June 1992, two high-ranking agents of the IRI Ministry of Intelligence, Asghar Arshad and Ali Kamali,
traveled to Germany.
They were given the task of assessing the feasibility of undertaking assassinations
in Germany.
Fallahian put Abdol-Rahman Banihashemi in charge of undertaking the operation against
the PDKI. Banihashemi was familiar with Europe and had proven his suitability for the assignment by
leading the hit team that assassinated a former officer of the Imperial Iranian Air Force, Colonel Ahmad
Talebi, in Geneva, Switzerland on August 10, 1987.
Once the decision was taken to target PDKI leaders in Germany, the Ministry of Intelligence sought out a
local facilitator to provide logistical support for the operation. The local operative they selected was
Kazem Darabi, a veteran of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps who had been resident in Germany
since 1980.
Darabi held a leadership position in the Union of Islamic Student Associations of Europe
(UISA) and had a history of violent activism against German-based opponents of the Islamic Republic.
Darabi recruited four Lebanese accomplices – Youssef Mohamad El-Sayed Amin, Abbas Hossein Rhayel,
Mohammad Atris, and Ataollah Ayad – who were known to him through their prior associations with
Lebanese Shi’ite militia groups Hezbollah and Amal.

The final piece of the plan fell into place with the news that Dr. Mohammad Sharafkandi, Homayoun
Ardalan, and Fatah Abdoli would arrive in Berlin on September 14, 1992, to participate in the Congress
of the Socialist International.
The Kurds intended to meet with other Iranian opposition leaders and
activists living in Berlin on the evening of Thursday, September 17. The meeting would be held in the
Mykonos Restaurant. This was the opportunity that the Ministry of Intelligence had been waiting for, and
on or about September 7, 1992 Abdol-Rahman Banihashemi arrived in Berlin to take command of the
Mykonos operation.

4.2. Prelude to Murder
On September 13, 1992 the Mykonos conspirators met in Darabi’s home in Detmolder Straβe 64B,
Berlin.
Present for the meeting were Banihashemi, Darabi, Mohammad, Amin, Rhayel, and Haidar.
Once the meeting was over Darabi took the team to the operational base he had established for them at
Senftenberger Ring 7 in Berlin. This was the empty home of an Iranian student, Mohammad Eshtiaghi.
Darabi had gained access to Eshtiaghi’s home from Bahram Berenjian who was looking after the property
in its owner’s absence. His logistical role in the operation accomplished, Darabi then traveled with his
family to Hamburg to distance himself from what was to come.
Elsewhere on September 13, Ali Sabra
bought a metallic blue BMW, registration number B-AR 5503, for 3120 Deutsche Marks. The money had
been provided by Darabi to procure transportation for the team.
On the morning of September 16, Rhayel and Haidar received an Uzi machine gun, a pistol and two
silencers from an unknown source – most likely someone linked to the IRI Ministry of Intelligence as
German investigators were subsequently able to link both the pistol and silencers to the IRI.
Later the same day an unidentified source made a telephone call to Senftenberger Ring 7 and confirmed the time
and place of the PDKI meeting. The team spent the evening familiarizing themselves with the area around
the Mykonos restaurant.
On the morning of September 17, Rhayel and Haidar went out to purchase a
green and black Sportino sports bag to carry the weapons in.
At 9:00 p.m. on September 17, the team left Senftenberger Ring 7 for the Mykonos restaurant after
receiving confirmation from Mohammad, who was keeping the restaurant under surveillance, that the
PDKI party had arrived. Haidar and Rhayel drove the getaway car – the BMW purchased by Ali Sabra –
to Prinzregentstraße.
Amin and Banihashemi traveled by taxi to Berliner Straβe, near the restaurant.
They met up with Mohammad near a public payphone. Banihashemi then separated from the group.
Mohammad and Amin found him a short while later talking to the driver of a dark Mercedes Benz 190.
This individual – who has never been identified – drove off after a short conversation.
Amin and Mohammad followed Banihashemi at a discreet distance to Prager Platz. There Rhayel replaced
Mohammad. Banihashemi retrieved the sports bag containing the weapons from the getaway car parked
in Prinzregentstraße. Banihashemi and Rhayel then armed themselves and walked back to Mykonos
accompanied by Amin. Haidar and Mohammad waited behind in the BMW.
4.3. The Attack
Dr. Sharafkandi, Ardalan, Abdoli, and Dehkordi had arrived at the Mykonos Restaurant around 7:30 p.m.
The restaurant’s owner, Aziz Ghaffari, had been asked to contact prominent local Iranian dissidents and
invite them to meet with the visitors but Ghaffari apparently botched the assignment extending an

invitation for the following evening by mistake. Once the mix-up was revealed hurried attempts were
made to contact those absent.

Quite by chance one of the intended guests, Masoud Mirrashed,
was already dining at the restaurant.
Another Iranian exile dining at the restaurant, Esfandiar Sadeghzadeh,
was also invited to join the party.
Both were regulars at Mykonos. The flurry of telephone calls elicited two further missing guests – Parviz
Dastmalchi who was a member of the supreme council and executive committee of the Republicans of
Iran (Jumhurikhahan-i Melliy-i Iran) and Mehdi Ebrahimzadeh Esfahani who was a member of the
central council and executive board of the Organization of Iranian People’s Majority (Sazman-i
Fadaiyan-i Khalq-i Iran-Aksariyat).

Parviz Dastmalchi remembers the confusion surrounding the evening:
I received a message from Aziz [Ghaffari] on my answering machine on Wednesday around 5 p.m.
regarding a meeting on Friday. I went to the restaurant that same night (Wednesday evening) and
Aziz confirmed the meeting and asked me whether I got his message. On Thursday evening around
8:00 p.m. I received a phone call from Nouri [Dehkordi] who mentioned the misunderstanding
about the time of the meeting. He explained that Aziz was supposed to have invited people for
Thursday evening but he had made a mistake and invited them for Friday. He asked me to join
them. When I arrived at the restaurant, Aziz and the PDKI delegates were arguing about the
mistake. The delegates insisted that they had not told Aziz that the meeting would take place Friday
evening since they were in fact flying out on Friday morning.

Aside from those mentioned above, the only other customers present at Mykonos that night were Peter
Böhm, a patron who was sitting at a table by the entrance, and a young couple who left shortly after Ebrahimzadeh arrived. Also present was a
waitress, Maria Voltschanskaya.
At approximately 10:50 p.m., the two assassins,
Abdol-Rahman Banihashemi and Abbas Hossein
Rhayel, entered the restaurant. Youssef
Mohammad Amin waited outside blocking the
entrance. Banihashemi and Rhayel had been
provided with photographs of the targets and were
familiar with the layout of the restaurant.
As a result, they were able to travel through the
premises without hesitation, and carry out the
murders within a short period of time.
Banihashemi carried an Uzi machine gun inside a
sports bag, and Rhayel carried an automatic pistol.
Both weapons were equipped with silencers.
Upon entering the restaurant, they moved swiftly
to the back room, where the PDKI party and their
guests were dining. Two tables were placed close
together on the right side of the room along the
wall. Mirrashed was sitting at the end of the right

table, Dastmalchi, Abdoli, and Ardalan were sitting clockwise to his left; and Sharafkandi, Dehkordi,
Ebrahimzadeh Esfahani, and Sadeghzadeh were sitting on the other side of the table. Ghaffari was sitting
at the second table, a short distance from the first. The lower end of the table was unoccupied.
Parviz Dastmalchi recalls:
The main topics discussed at the meeting were the situation of the opposition outside of Iran, the
PDKI’s activities and how to coordinate these activities. Before the discussion started, we chatted
about Iranian assassinations abroad. Dr. Sharafkandi said: “I was talking with a peshmerga51
about
life and death in the Kurdistan Mountains. He was sitting on the ground. He stood up and jumped
over a bush and said, Kak Saeed,the distance between life and death is just like that.”
Mehdi Ebrahimzadeh Esfahani adds:
Before the incident, Dr. Sharafkandi, Dastmalchi and Mirrashed were talking about Iran’s national
interests, territorial integrity and Kurdish autonomy. Dr. Sharafkandi was explaining the PDKI’s
position in favor of autonomy for the Kurds within Iran. Dr. Sharafkandi emphasized that he felt
just as Iranian as anyone else.
It was at this moment that Banihashemi entered into the room shouting in Persian, “You sons of whores!”
and opened fire immediately. It was clear from where he directed his fire that Sharafkandi, Ardalan, and
Abdoli were the primary targets. After two bursts from Banihashemi’s Uzi, Rhayel, who had followed
Banihashemi into the room, administered head shots to both Ardalan and Sharafkandi. Between them the
assassins fired thirty shots in total.

Parviz Dastmalchi describes the moment the gunmen opened fire:
I was talking with Dr. Sharafkandi, when Mirrashed who was sitting on my right interrupted us and
started talking. When I turned to face Mirrashed, I saw [someone] behind him. I thought another
guest must have arrived, so I looked up to see who it was. I was not able to see his face. The
assailant’s face was covered with what looked like a handkerchief at the time, but which later
turned out to be his sweater. A machine gun appeared just to the right of my face aimed at Dr.
Sharafkandi. I saw the first three cartridge-shells jumping out. I fell backwards under a table.
Abdoli fell under the table as well, about 50-60 cm away from me. His mouth was full of blood and
he was dying. I did not move at all. After the second salvo I looked up to see if the murderer had
left. I saw an arm with a pistol pointing towards Dr. Sharafkandi. At this time I realized that there
were two people involved, since this person’s coat was black and white, while the first person had
been wearing a green coat. I thought he would shoot Abdoli first and then me, but after a few
seconds, I heard my name called by Ebrahimzadeh [Esfahani] and I came out and asked for help.
Ebrahimzadeh Esfahani was sitting next to another of the victims, Nouri Dehkordi:
While Mirrashed was talking with Dr. Sharafkandi, I saw an unusual expression cross his face…
then I heard somebody say in Persian, “you sons of whores!” I looked up and saw someone about
180 centimeters tall. His face was covered, but I was able to see his eyes and his low forehead. I
also saw gunfire coming from him, aimed at Dr. Sharafkandi. I reflexively pushed Esfandiar
[Sadeghzadeh] down with my left hand and pulled Nouri [Dehkordi] down with my right. Esfandiar
went under the table and I, still in my chair, ducked my head underneath. Nouri, who was slumped
against me, had been shot as I was pulling him down and his blood was on my shirt. I heard two
salvos

and then at least two separate shots. After a long silence, I recovered from the shock and
began calling out to the others. Nouri was still alive. Blood was coming out from his mouth, and he

was breathing noisily. Dr. Sharafkandi was lying over Nouri, and Ardalan and Abdoli were in pools
of blood on the other side of the table. Ghaffari was on the floor. He was alive.
Sharafkandi, Ardalan, and Abdoli were all killed during the attack, and Dehkordi died shortly afterwards
in the hospital. Using his Uzi, Banihashemi focused on the PDKI leaders and fired twenty-six shots to
Abdoli, Ardalan, Sharafkandi, and Dehkordi. Ghaffari, who was standing to the left of Ardalan, was
caught in the line of fire. Though Ghaffari was shot twice, once through his right leg and then again
through his kidney, he survived the attack.
Rhayel shot Ardalan once in the back of his head, and Sharafkandi twice in the head, and once in the
neck. Altogether, Sharafkandi was struck by twelve bullets – in his head, neck, and abdomen. He received
wounds to his lungs, liver, and kidneys.
Rhayel’s final shots were unnecessary.
Ardalan was shot four
times in the chest. The subsequent forensic examination revealed that Ardalan might have survived but
for the final shot to his head.

Abdoli was hit by four rounds from the Uzi. One hit his heart, killing him
instantly. Dehkordi was shot seven times. He was taken to the Steglitz Clinic, where he died at 12:25 AM
on September 18, 1992, due to internal and external bleeding, as a result of a bullet that hit his chest and
passed through his body.

4.4. The Getaway
Once Rhayel had administered the final shots to
Sharafkandi and Ardalan, the two assassins left the
restaurant the way they had come in. Once outside,
Rhayel and Banihashemi were joined by Amin and
the three men ran to Prinzregentstraβe where two
other accomplices, Mohammad and Farajollah Abu
Haidar, were waiting with a getaway car.
The five men drove off at a high speed, nearly hitting
a cyclist. In the car, Amin took off the coat and shirt
he had been wearing and put them in a bag. Amin
then cleaned the pistol and put it in the sports bag
containing the Uzi.
Banihashemi and Rhayel left the
getaway car at Bundesplatz U-bahn station.

Amin and Mohammad exited the vehicle at Konstanzer straβe and went their separate ways.
Amin, while walking towards the Konstanzer straβe U-bahn station, left the bag containing his discarded
clothes on the sidewalk.
Haidar abandoned the BMW on Cicerostraβe and left the sports bag containing
the weapons hidden from view under a car in the same street.
5. Arrests and Trial
5.1. Police Investigation
The Sportino sports bag abandoned by Farajollah Haidar on the night of the murders, which contained the
weapons used in the Mykonos operation, was found by an employee of the Berolina car dealership on
September 22, 1992.
The recovered weapons were formally identified as an Israeli-manufactured Uzi
machine gun and a Spanish Llama X-A automatic pistol.
Also in the bag were two silencers.
Comparative tests on these silencers and those used in the assassination of Iranian oppositionists Ali
Akbar Mohammadi in Hamburg on January 16, 1987
and Bahman Javadi in Cyprus on August 26,1989
revealed significant similarities in the manufacturing and design characteristics.
The German police were able to match the serial number of the Llama automatic pistol used by Rhayel to a shipment
delivered by the Spanish manufacturer to the Iranian military in 1972.
The forensic examination of the weapons by the German authorities found Abbas Rhayel’s palm print on
one of the pistol magazines recovered from the sports bag and also traces of blood from one of the
Mykonos victims, Nouri Dekhordi, on the pistol itself.
When the abandoned getaway car was finally
recovered by police investigators in October 1992, a spent Uzi cartridge was found inside, as was a plastic
shopping bag with Amin’s fingerprint on it.
Within a few weeks of the shooting, the German authorities had rounded up five of the suspected
perpetrators. Pursuing leads generated by the German foreign intelligence service, the
Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the German police were able to locate both Amin and Rhayel at Amin’s
brother’s house in Rheine. Amin and Rhayel were arrested on October 4, 1992.
Atris was arrested three
days later, and Darabi on October 8, 1992.

After hearing of the arrests of his associates, Ataollah Ayad sought to leave Germany. He did not have
enough money to buy a ticket, so he began calling different contacts seeking their assistance.
In November 1992 he met with Mohammad Chehade, the Amal Militia’s representative in Germany and the
chairman of the Lebanon Solidarity Society. Ayad described his role in the preliminary planning of the
Mykonos assassinations, named the participants involved, and requested money. Chehade declined to
assist him. Ayad was arrested on December 9, 1992 in Berlin.
The remaining suspects – Banihashemi, Haidar, Sabra, and Mohammad – escaped arrest. Banihashemi
reportedly left Berlin immediately after the assassination and traveled through Turkey back to Iran.
Mohammad likewise left by the same route.
Haidar escaped to Lebanon where he lived for some time
before moving to Iran. He has since been reported to be working for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.
After Sabra learned of media reports concerning the arrests of Amin and Rhayel and saw their
pictures in the newspaper, he feared he might be next and decided to flee Germany. He traveled first to
Bulgaria and then to Lebanon, where he is currently believed to be working for the Hezbollah spiritual
leader, Sheikh Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fazlollah.
The investigation of the Mykonos operation was headed by German Federal Prosecutor Bruno Jost. On
May 17, 1993 Jost announced the indictment of Amin, Darabi and Rhayel on four counts of murder and
one count of attempted murder, and the indictment of Atris and Ayad on four counts of aiding and
abetting murder and one count of aiding and abetting an attempted murder.

The indictment, signed by Germany’s chief federal prosecutor, Alexander von Stahl, asserted that
Darabi’s assignment was to “liquidate” the PDKI leaders as part of a “persecution strategy of the Iranian
Ministry of Intelligence against the Iranian opposition.”
The trial of the five Mykonos suspects opened on October 28, 1993 in the Berlin Court of Appeal. The
trial lasted three and a half years. The court met for a total of 246 sessions, heard 176 witnesses, and
considered documentary evidence varying from secret intelligence files to tapes of Iranian television
broadcasts.
The trial also featured statements from one of the accused, Youssef Amin, and heard the
testimony of a former senior official of the IRI Ministry of Intelligence, identified in court only as
“witness C.”
Several witnesses testified regarding the relations and affiliations of the accused with Hezbollah, Amal or
the IRI. Testimony recounted the history of the Islamic Republic’s involvement in assassinations and its
targeting of political opposition groups. Witnesses Shahed Hosseini and Abdollah Ezatpour, who
succeeded Abdoli and Ardalan respectively in the PDKI,
explained to the court the reasons underlying
tensions between the PDKI and the Islamic Republic.
Dr. Manouchehr Ganji,head of the France-based
“Flag of Freedom” (Derafsh-e Kaviyani) opposition party, described other murders and assassination
attempts on members of his own political party.
Former Iranian President Abdolhassan Banisadr
testified that the Mykonos murders had been personally
ordered by Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, and President Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani.
In an interview with IHRDC conducted in January 2007 Banisadr stated that he had
confirmed this information with well-placed sources with direct knowledge of the inner workings of the
IRI Ministry of Intelligence.
Banisadr also described for the court the role played by the IRI’s Special Affairs Committee in
commissioning and overseeing political assassinations.
He asserted that the recommendation to assassinate an opposition figure is usually first made by the Committee and then carried out with the
consent of both Khamenei and Rafsanjani. Thus, he concluded,

The person who ordered this attack, under the current Iranian constitution and under Islamic law, can
be no other than Khamenei himself.

The key prosecution witness was a former senior Iranian intelligence official known during the trial only
as witness “C” but who was subsequently identified as Abolghassem (Farhad) Mesbahi.
Abolghassem Mesbahi was in charge of the intelligence station in the Iranian Embassy in Paris in the early 1980s. His
activities were directed primarily against exiled opponents of the Iranian government.
Mesbahi was declared persona non grata by the French government and expelled in 1983 for intelligence
activities incompatible with his diplomatic status. He was transferred to the Iranian Embassy in Bonn
where he served as the intelligence coordinator for Western Europe and continued to monitor the Iranian
opposition.
Mesbahi testified that in 1984, he had been involved in an assassination attempt on the
exiled Iranian dissident and satirist Hadi Khorsandi in London.
In 1985, Mesbahi went back to Iran to assist in founding the new Ministry of Intelligence. In 1986, he
served as deputy head of the international and political office of the Foreign Ministry for six months and
was then put in charge of United Nations affairs.
In 1987, he went to Switzerland to obtain a PhD.
During this period Mesbahi acted as a back-channel for Rafsanjani’s contacts with European

governments and the United States.
In this position he was involved in freeing Rudolf Cordes, a West
German hostage seized in Beirut by the Shi’ite group Holy Strugglers for Freedom in January 1987 and
held until September 1988. He also met former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, French President François
Mitterand and a former French Foreign Minister, Roland Dumas.

In November 1988, after meeting with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Mesbahi came back to Iran
only to be confronted with accusations that he was a double-agent. He was arrested but released from
prison after only three months. He remained under house arrest for another year and half. Having been
dismissed from the Ministry of Intelligence, he started a private business to support himself. On March
19, 1996 Mesbahi was warned by Ali Fallahian’s deputy, Saeed Emami, that the Special Affairs
Committee had ordered his assassination.
He left Iran for Pakistan on April 18, 1996. After making
contact with former Iranian President Abdolhassan Banisadr he moved to Germany where he was granted
political asylum.

Mesbahi had personal experience working in the field as an Iranian Intelligence officer when Ayatollah
Khomeini directed assassination operations. As a result, he was able to brief the Berlin Court in some
detail about the modus operandi used by Iranian operatives, which he believed had not changed much
since Ayatollah Khomeini’s day. Mesbahi also shared with the court specific information about the
Mykonos operation that he had learned from five different sources inside Iran.
It was Mesbahi who
revealed that the Special Affairs Committee had considered different assassination strategies for targeting
the leaders of the PDKI in Germany and that Asghar Arshad and Ali Kamali, the two high-ranking agents
of the IRI Ministry of Intelligence, had been sent to Germany in June 1992 to assess the feasibility of
mounting an attack in the Federal Republic.

Mesbahi had learned much of what he knew about the Mykonos operation directly from Abdol-Rahman
Banihashemi, who he met through a mutual friend. He told the court that Banihashemi had mentioned to
him that the operation was codenamed “Faryad Bozorg Alawi.”
This can be roughly translated as the
“the outcry of the Shiite religious leader.”

Mesbahi’s testimony was supported by other witnesses. Both Professor Udo Steinbach107
and Professor
Heinz Halm,

prominent German Middle East experts, agreed that the IRI had an established program
which sought the elimination of Iranian dissidents. Paris assistant district attorney Patrick Lalande, who
had direct experience of investigating such activities, told the court:

The Iranians are extraordinarily determined in their efforts to assassinate members of their
opposition abroad. They will tell you that they treat their opponents abroad just as they treat them at
home and that this is a purely domestic affair.
Powerful corroboration for Mesbahi’s testimony also came from a remarkably frank interview given by
the Minister of Intelligence and Head of the National Security Council, Hojjatoleslam Ali Fallahian, to
the Iranian television station IRB on August 30, 1992, a tape of which was shown to the court. During the
interview, given less than a month before the Mykonos assassinations, Fallahian explained that his
organization had been successful in disrupting the activities of opposition groups in many ways:
Overall, no opposition groups can be found in this nation at present. They have been forced to
flee… We are currently following them and are constantly watching them outside of this nation.
We have infiltrated their central organizations and are informed of their activities. We have been
able, thanks to God, to keep their activities under our constant control… Furthermore, we have
been able to strike a blow at many of these opposition groups outside or close to our boundaries. As
you know, one of these active opposition groups is the Kurdish Democratic Party (PDKI), which
through two organs, the main group and the auxiliary department, operates in Kurdistan… we have
been able to strike decisive blows at their cadres. The respective main group and auxiliary
department suffered severe blows and their activities shrank.

Another important indication of Iranian state involvement in the assassinations offered by the witnesses
was the fact that on September 16, 1992, the day before the Mykonos murders, a state of military alert had
been declared in Kurdistan by the government in Tehran. The witnesses argued that this was evidence that
the Islamic Republic wished to be prepared for any adverse reaction by the Kurds when the news of the
assassinations broke. There was no other obvious reason for the alert. Shahed Hosseini testified that such
action was typically taken on the potentially volatile anniversaries of other similar events, such as the
murder of the former PDKI leader Dr. Ghassemlou.
5.5. BfV Report on the Mykonos Assassinations
On December 19, 1995 the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für
Verfassungsschutz, better known by the acronym BfV)
submitted its report to the German Prosecutor’s
office on the direct involvement of the Ministry of Intelligence in the Mykonos assassinations. The report
stated the following:
A department of the Ministry of Information and Security113
was directly involved in the
assassination of the Kurdish leaders on September 17, 1992 in Berlin. This department which is
responsible for assassinations and is known as the “special operations unit,”
has been for some
time after the members of the PDKI. A team from this department, for example, was responsible
for the Ghassemlou assassination.
The Ministry of Information and Security sent an assassination team to Berlin from Tehran at the
beginning of September. The team met with local agents, to research and plan the assassination.
The team used a Ministry of Information and Security source to concretely establish when and
where the leadership of the PDKI was going to meet. This source – based on the BfV’s information-
was in the restaurant during the assassination. After the assassination the [Ministry of Information
and Security] team left Berlin for Iran using a carefully set plan.
In his closing statement in November 1996, German Federal Prosecutor Bruno Jost told the Court:

It is not possible to avoid mentioning the state terrorist background of the murder.

5.6. Arrest Warrant Issued for Ali Fallahian
Three weeks before the Mykonos trial began, the Iranian Minister of Intelligence, Hojjatoleslam Ali
Fallahian, flew to Bonn to meet with Germany’s most senior intelligence official, Minister of State Bernd
Schmidbauer. Fallahian requested that the five Mykonos suspects be freed and sought to stop the
prosecution.

Schmidbauer rejected Fallahian’s request.

Indeed, German prosecutors were so convinced of Iran’s complicity in the assassinations that Chief
Federal Prosecutor Kay Nehm took the unprecedented step of issuing an international arrest warrant for
Fallahian on March 14, 1996. The warrant stated that Fallahian was strongly suspected of ordering the
murders.

News of the warrant led to demonstrations in Iran. In front of the German Embassy in Tehran, protestors
burned the flags of the U.S. and Israel. Seyed Hossein Mousavian, the Iranian ambassador to Germany,
attributed the incident to the demonstrators’ patriotism and explained that the arrest warrant was an insult
not only to Fallahian, but to the whole of the cabinet, indeed all the people of Iran.

Vague threats also appeared in news stories released by the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA)
relating to the arrest warrant. IRNA reported that the German judiciary’s issuance of the arrest warrant
“could create a danger for Germans abroad,” because “other nations” might follow the German precedent
and issue arrest warrants in absentia for citizens of Germany.
Mahmoud Mohammadi, the
spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, stated that there was “absolutely no evidence” to justify the
warrant.

These statements were echoed by the Iranian Embassy in Germany which expressed the desire
to hold the German Attorney-General accountable in front of the international community. Ambassador
Mousavian went on to state that if European nations continued to treat Iran in the same manner as
America and Israel did, then those European nations would be treated in the same manner by Iran.
In an interview with Der Spiegel, President Rafsanjani said that he did not blame the German government
for the Mykonos trial and the arrest warrant issued for Fallahian. He suggested that “American or Israeli
agents had a hand in the process or that the judiciary was simply making a mistake.”

5.7. The Judgment
The Berlin Court of Appeal finally issued its judgment on April 10, 1997. Kazem Darabi was convicted
and sentenced to life imprisonment. The judgment noted: “Darabi… organized the killings for the Iranian
secret service. He knew the goal and willingly participated in the destruction of four human lives.”
Abbas Hossein Rhayel was also convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The court found Rhayel guilty
of firing at least some of the fatal shots.

Youssef Mohamad El-Sayed Amin was found guilty as an
accessory to the four murders and was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Mohammad Atris was also
convicted of being an accessory to the murders and was sentenced to 5 years and three months.

Ataollah Ayad was acquitted and released after being remanded in custody pending trial for four years.

The Court found that the motives of the accused were political, because they advocated a fundamentalist
regime in Iran and were ready to support their cause by murdering opposition leaders.
In his 395-page
decision, the presiding Judge, Frithjof Kubsch, pointedly noted that the trial had proved “Iran’s political
leadership ordered the crime.”
Kubsch did not identify any Iranian officials by name, but he noted that
witness testimony and other evidence showed that Iran’s Special Affairs Committee had ordered the
murders, and that the supreme leader, president, foreign minister and intelligence minister were all active
members of that committee:

The previous statements make it clear, that the assassination of the leaders of the DPK-I (PDKI)
under Dr. Sharafkandi, was neither the act of individuals, nor caused by conflicts within the
opposition groups themselves. Rather, the assassination is the result of the work of the rulers in
Iran.

The accused … had neither personal relationships with the victims nor any other interest that would
lead to an independent resolution to plan such an act. Even Darabi would, due to his intelligence
connections and his subordination to the political interests of the regime, not plan an assassination
without an appropriate order, and because of logistical reasons, he would not even have been able
to carry one out without outside help.

The evidence makes it clear that the Iranian rulers, not only approve of assassinations abroad and
that they honor and reward the assassins, but that they themselves plan these kinds of assassinations
against people who, for purely political reasons, become undesirable. For the sake of preserving
their power, they are willing to liquidate their political opponents.
Consequently, without naming them, Kubsch implicated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, President
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati and Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahian:

The political leaders of Iran gave the order for the murders, for the sole purpose of staying in
power. Those who issued the orders and pulled the strings were Iranian state functionaries.

For the first time in German legal history, a higher court had clearly assigned responsibility to another
state in a murder trial.

Germany withdrew its ambassador from Tehran and encouraged other EU
nations to do the same. As a gesture of solidarity with Germany, fourteen EU countries suspended

diplomatic relations with Iran, as did New Zealand and Australia,
but most missions returned to Tehran
within the month.
The Iranian government made its displeasure with the judgment very clear. Demonstrations of varying
size occurred in Tehran and Qom over the course of several days.
President Rafsanjani, speaking
during a Friday sermon said that the judgment was political and predicted that it would go down in
history as being “shameless.”

He stated that Germany had “broken the hearts of millions,” and that “the
judgment will neither be forgotten easily nor remain unanswered.” He continued to threaten somewhat
ambiguously that Germany would “lose its privileges” in Iran.
Ayatollah Khamenei blamed the German government in Bonn for the judgment and commented that
Germany had lost the trust of the Iranian people.
138
When the German ambassador finally sought to return
to Tehran, Ayatollah Khamenei gave the foreign ministry specific instructions to refuse the ambassador
accreditation, insisting that the German government had perniciously accused Iran of a crime it had not
committed.
6. Conclusion
The Islamic Republic of Iran has long been committed to eradicating centers of political opposition to the
regime both at home and abroad. Between 1979 and 1996, the leadership of the Islamic Republic ordered
a series of high profile political assassinations, many of which occurred in Western Europe. After
Ayatollah Khomeini’s death in 1989, the responsibility for directing this campaign was assumed by the
Special Affairs Committee headed by Khomeini’s successor as Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei. Operational responsibility for carrying out the Special Affairs Committee’s instructions fell to
the Special Operations Council of the Ministry of Intelligence.

The Mykonos case provides the best insight to date into Iran’s campaign of overseas assassinations. The
operation vividly illustrates Iran’s use of terrorist proxies to pursue its targets where its own local
resources are lacking. The plan was both cheap and effective. The modus operandi used by the Mykonos
team limited the exposure of the Ministry of Intelligence assets but made little attempt to disguise the
origins of the operation or mislead investigators. No attempt was made to remove the serial numbers from
the weapons used in the attack nor was any serious attempt made to dispose of them so that they could not
be traced back to Iran. This suggests that the IRI may have seen some advantage in confirming to the
opposition community that it was behind the attacks.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the Mykonos episode is the unwavering hostility the IRI
demonstrated towards the PDKI. Dr. Sharafkandi was the second leader of the PDKI to be murdered in a
European city in three years. In all, IHRDC is aware of dozens of rank and file members of the PDKI
killed by the Iranian regime outside its borders, mostly in Iraq. The calm professionalism of the Mykonos
killers is emblematic of the ruthlessness with which the Islamic Republic has consistently sought to
counter its political opponents.

Methodology
IHRDC gathered information for this report from the examination of the following sources:

• Testimony of victims and witnesses. These included witness statements taken by the IHRDC
attorneys, accounts written at the time of the events, and personal memoirs.

• Government documents. These include recorded public statements by state officials in both Iran and
Germany, statements released by Iranian and German government agencies, and documents relating
to the judicial proceedings in Germany, including transcripts of courtroom testimony.

• Books and articles written by private individuals. These include newspaper reports, magazine articles,
and accounts written by the survivors of the attack.

• Photographs of the crime scene. Photographs of the interior of the Mykonos Restaurant after the
attack were released to the public.

Where the report cites or relies on information provided by government actors or other involved parties it
specifies the source of such information and evaluates the information in light of the relative reliability of
each source. The documents cited in this report can be reviewed in their original format at
www.iranhrdc.org.

IHRDC follows the transliteration system used by International Journal of the Middle East Studies. Well-
known Iranian proper names are presented as they usually appear in the press.

Finally, in the interests of full disclosure, the IHRDC wishes to place on record that eyewitness Parviz
Dastmalchi was employed by the Center as a consultant for the duration of much of this project,
conducting invaluable research on our behalf in the German records of the Mykonos incident.
Annex A: Victims

The Mykonos victims were specifically targeted because of their affiliation with the PDKI. Three of the
victims, Sharafkandi, Ardalan, and Abdoli, were prominent, high-ranking members who had worked on
behalf of the party for years. Dehkordi, a friend of Sharafkandi, had been acting as an interpreter for the
others at the Socialist International Congress.

Dr. Mohammad Sadegh Sharafkandi
Dr. Mohammad Sharafkandi was born in Bokan, Iran on January 11, 1938. He received his degree in
chemistry at the Institute of Higher Education in Tehran and went on to study at the University of
Sorbonne, Paris, where he received his PhD in analytical chemistry in 1976. While studying in Paris in
1973, he joined the PDKI. After returning to Iran in 1976, while teaching at the Teachers’ Higher Training
College in Tehran, he became the representative of the PDKI’s Secretary-General, Dr. Abdol-Rahman
Ghassemlou. In 1980, he became a member of the PDKI Central Committee
and was put in charge of
the party’s operations in Tehran. In the summer of 1980 he moved to the Kurdistan Province in Iran and
the Central Committee elected him to be a member of the PDKI’s Political Bureau, the highest echelon of
the PDKI leadership. He was in charge of the party’s publicity efforts. In 1986, he became the PDKI’s
Deputy Secretary-General and assumed the title of interim Secretary-General after Dr. Ghassemlou’s
assassination on July 13, 1989. In December 1991, he was unanimously elected Secretary-General of the
PDKI.

Fatah Abdoli
Fatah Abdoli was born in Naghade, Iran on April 15, 1961. He joined the PDKI as a student and by 1980
he was one of its active members. After the Sixth Congress, he served as an alternate member of the
Central Committee and as head of the PDKI Committee in Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan Province in
Iran. At the Seventh Congress, he was elected as a member of the Central Committee and was assigned to
head the Committee of Sardasht in western Azarbayejan, Iran. He succeeded Abdollah Ghaderi,
after the latter’s murder in 1989, as the PDKI’s principal representative in Europe.

Homayoun Ardalan
Homayoun Ardalan was born in Saghez, Iran on February 2, 1950. During the 1979 revolution, he left his
studies at the University of Sanandaj to join the PDKI. He was elected as a member of the Central
Committee in 1984 and then became the head of the PDKI Committee in Saghez. After the Eighth
Congress, in 1988, he moved to Germany as the PDKI’s local representative.

Nourrollah Mohammadpour Dehkordi

Nouri Dehkordi was born on March 30, 1946 in Shahr-e Kord, Iran. He left Iran in the 1960s, first
traveling to Austria and then to Berlin in 1970. While studying in Austria and Germany, he joined the
World Iranian Students Confederation,
actively opposed the Shah, advocated freedom for political
prisoners and promoted human rights and democracy. He returned to Iran to participate in the revolution
against the Shah in 1979. At the beginning of the revolution, he was co-founder of a new political
organization which advocated socialist ideas simply named, “Left.” After the Islamic Revolution “Left”
became known first as the “Left Union” and later as the “Council of the United Left.” In the summer of
1981 he came under investigation for his political activities and was forced to leave his family and go into
hiding. In 1982, he went to the Kurdistan Province of Iran to help the PDKI and then returned to Germany
in 1984, where he was granted political asylum. He was employed by the Red Cross in 1986 as a social
worker and remained politically active.
He was a close friend of both Dr. Sharafkandi and his
predecessor Dr. Ghassemlou. Although not a professional interpreter or a PDKI activist, he was serving as
a translator for the PDKI delegation to the Socialist International Congress as a personal favor to Dr.
Sharafkandi.

Annex B: Perpetrators
The Mykonos operation brought together experienced operators from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence
and the Lebanese Shi’ite militia groups Hezbollah and Amal.
The majority of the assembled team
members were already resident in Germany, but several key roles were played by Iranian agents who
traveled to Germany specifically for the operation.

Abdol-Rahman Banihashemi (aka Sharif)
Abdol-Rahman Banihashemi was an established agent of the IRI Ministry of Intelligence with experience
in overseas operations. He worked directly under Fallahian and had previously been active for the
Ministry of Intelligence in Lebanon and Switzerland.
Banihashemi arrived in Berlin around September
7, 1992 to take command of the Mykonos operation.
After the operation, he traveled back to Iran
through Turkey. Once home he was reportedly rewarded with a Mercedes-Benz car by the IRI Ministry of
Intelligence in recognition of his service to the state.
He was also awarded shares in several companies
belonging to the intelligence agency.

Kazem Darabi
Kazem Darabi, who acted as the local facilitator for the Mykonos operation, has been identified as an
active agent of the IRI Ministry of Intelligence
and as a member of the Revolutionary Guards.
Darabi was also a leading figure at Berlin’s Imam Jafar Sadeqh mosque. The German Federal Office for the
Protection of the Constitution (BfV) believed the mosque to be strongly associated with Hezbollah
sympathizers.
Darabi is believed by the BfV to have served as the conduit between Hezbollah
operatives in Berlin and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Darabi was born on March 22, 1959 in Kazeroon, Iran, and had resided in Germany since June 6, 1980.
Darabi first attracted the notice of German security officials in April 1982, when authorities in Dortmund
issued a warrant for his arrest

because of his alleged role in an attack on Iranian students opposed to
Ayatollah Khomeini who lived in the University of Mainz international student dormitory. The students
were violently assaulted by a mob of eighty-six Khomeini sympathizers.
In May 1982, Darabi was convicted of assault and battery for his part in the student dormitory attack159

and the presiding judge ordered his expulsion from Germany.

He appealed the decision and the Iranian
embassy in Bonn also intervened on his behalf.

Darabi was released. He moved to Berlin where he
enrolled at the Technical Professional School of Berlin (Technische Fachhochschule Berlin) in 1983.

Darabi joined the Islamic Student Association of Berlin (Anjoman-e Islami Daneshjooyan Berlin) shortly
after his arrival in the city. He became a member of the Association’s Executive Board in July 1984.

Darabi also held a leadership position in the Union of Islamic Student Associations of Europe (Etehadiye-
e Islami Daneshjooyan Oroopa), or UISA, from 1984, a position he still retained at the time of the
Mykonos incident.

The UISA, which became a firmly pro-Khomeini organization after the Islamic
Revolution of 1979,

arranged religious-political demonstrations and published books, magazines,
newspapers and manifestos to advance the ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Its other activities
included gathering news and intelligence, identifying opponents of the IRI and combating the activities of
Iranian opposition figures.

To fulfill these duties, the UISA cooperated with other Islamic groups, notably Hezbollah, as well as
Iranian organizations and institutions such as embassies and cultural offices.

In 1984 Iran’s Ministry of
Culture and Islamic Guidance, which was controlled by members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, took
over the UISA. From that time onwards, UISA acted as an intelligence and security arm of the
Revolutionary Guard Corps.

After the creation of the IRI Ministry of Intelligence in October 1985,
UISA was transformed into a branch of the IRI Ministry of Intelligence and its leaders were appointed
from the Ministry of Intelligence’s ranks.

Darabi was actively involved in gathering information on dissidents and opposition groups during this
period. On April 24, 1991, Darabi was recorded on a BfV telephone intercept passing information that he
had collected on a Kurdish-Iranian student – a member of the Kurdish student union and the Iranian
opposition – to Mohammad Amani-Farani, the Iranian Consul-General in Berlin. Darabi reported to
Amani-Farani that he had been conducting surveillance on the student.

Darabi has also been linked to an attack that took place at the 1991 Iran Cultural Festival in Dusseldorf.
Organized by the Iran Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, this festival was held from September
12 through October 31, 1991.

Darabi was recorded on a BfV telephone tap receiving instructions from
someone at the Iranian cultural center (Khaneh-e Iran) in Köln associated with the IRI Ministry of

Intelligence to gather some ‘Arab friends’ from Berlin and go to Dusseldorf.
Amin, Rhayel, and
Ayad were among the people recruited by Darabi. According to Amin’s later court testimony, they armed
themselves with pistols, gas guns and mace.

On September 29, Darabi and his accomplices assaulted
members of the Iranian opposition group Sazman-e Mojahedin-Khalq (MEK)

who were presenting
books and pictures at the exhibition. Several MEK members were seriously injured. Eye witnesses later
testified regarding the apparent leadership role played by Darabi in the assault.

Darabi was arrested by the German authorities for his role in the Mykonos incident on October 9, 1992.

Abbas Hossein Rhayel (aka Ragheb)
Abbas Rhayel was recruited by Darabi to be the second trigger man in the Mykonos operation. Rhayel
was a Lebanese national who had joined Hezbollah and attended a Hezbollah training facility in Iran in
1985-1986 along with another member of the Mykonos team, Youssef Amin.

Rhayel was born in Lebanon on November 12, 1967 and grew up in Beirut.

He traveled to Aachen,
Germany in 1989 along with his friend Amin and another Lebanese national associated with the Mykonos
operation, Ali Sabra. Rhayel and Amin soon moved from Aachen to Berlin.

Rhayel twice applied for
political asylum unsuccessfully. On the third occasion he submitted a fraudulent application using false
documents in the name of Imad Ammash. He was granted a temporary residency permit in this name
which was extended until March 18, 1992.

Rhayel stayed with friends such as Darabi, whose name he
had been given by Hezbollah contacts in Iran.

While receiving social welfare benefits, he occasionally
worked in different places such as Darabi’s grocery store, a local “Habibi” restaurant in Berlin, and the
flea market (Flohmarkt).

In May 1992 the German authorities finally ordered Rhayel to leave the
country. Although he received transit papers from the German authorities, he did not take the opportunity
to leave voluntarily.

Rhayel was arrested for his alleged involvement in Mykonos assassinations on October 4, 1992 in the
home of Youssef Amin’s brother in Rheine while he and Amin were preparing for their escape.

Youssef Mohamad El-Sayed Amin
Youssef Amin provided security for the Mykonos operation, ensuring the hit team would not be disturbed
as they sought out their targets in the restaurant. He was a veteran of Hezbollah and had received training
alongside Abbas Rhayel in Iran.
Amin was born in Lebanon on November 5, 1967.
He moved to Germany in 1989 with Rhayel and
applied for political asylum in Berlin on February 1, 1990. He later withdrew his request and applied
instead for a temporary residence permit. This was granted by the German authorities and extended until
March 5, 1992.

Like Rhayel, he lived for a while in the home of Kazem Darabi as the latter’s guest.

In June 1991 Amin moved to Rheine to join his brother who lived in the city,

but he continued to travel
frequently to Berlin to extend his residence permit. He also worked in Berlin for periods at a time at
Darabi’s grocery store, the “Habibi” restaurant, and at Adnan-Darabi’s Laundry, another of Darabi’s
businesses. He also attended the Imam Jafar Sadegh mosque. In June 19, 1992 German authorities
ordered him to leave Germany by September 4, 1992. He ignored this instruction.

Amin was arrested together with Rhayel on October 4, 1992 at the home of his brother in Rheine.

Mohammad Atris
Mohammad Atris was born in Lebanon on February 10, 1970. He moved with his family to Germany in
1989, where they all applied for asylum. He later withdrew their applications and received temporary
residence permits instead.

Atris received his work permit in 1990 and took various jobs in different
restaurants. In 1992 he reported being unemployed and received unemployment benefits. While initially
his interests focused on discos, women, cars and exercising, he gradually became interested in Islam and
became a familiar presence at the Imam Jafar Sadegh Mosque. Atris came into contact with Amin at the
mosque.

Atris was known to the German authorities as a petty criminal and had been investigated for robbery,
assault and the possession of firearms.
On October 7, 1992 he was arrested on suspicion of preparation
of forged documents to help the Mykonos perpetrators escape but was released without charge.

A second, more substantial, arrest warrant was issued on January 27, 1993 in which he was charged with
assisting the Mykonos assassination plot and with preparing forged documents to help Rhayel escape the
country after the attack.

Ataollah Ayad
Ataollah Ayad played an early role in the planning of the Mykonos attack.
Darabi enlisted his
assistance in the planning phase of the operation but his operational plan was rejected by Banihashemi.

Ayad was born in Lebanon in 1966 and is of Palestinian origin. At the age of 10 he enlisted in the
Democratic Front, a Palestinian military youth group. After receiving military training in Syria, he joined
the Shi’ite Amal militia in 1983 and fought as a squad leader, first against Israeli forces and then against

Hezbollah during Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon.

He moved to Berlin and applied for asylum
in 1990 and his family joined him later. They received temporary resident permits, but their asylum
applications were denied and they were ordered to leave Germany by August 1991. He was arrested by
the German authorities on December 10, 1992 and was held in custody until August 28, 1995.

Farajollah Haidar (aka Abu Jafar, aka Faraj)
Farajollah Haidar drove the getaway car for the assassination team.

He had been identified by the BfV
as a key member of Hezbollah in Osnabruck.

Haidar was born on January 1, 1965 in Lebanon. He
abruptly left Germany with his family for Beirut on September 25, 1992, presumably to evade arrest. His
family returned on October 22, 1992 and his wife told the authorities that he was still in Lebanon.

Further investigation showed that he left Lebanon for Iran where his family later joined him.

Mohammad
Mohammad, an Iranian national who has never been fully identified, acted as a spotter for the Mykonos
team. On the night of the murders Mohammad was keeping watch on the restaurant. At about 9:00 p.m.
he called the team’s operational base – at Senftenberger Ring 7 – to inform Banihashemi that all the
targets had arrived at the restaurant and the operation could proceed as planned.
206
Mohammad reportedly
left Germany for Iran immediately after the assassination.

Ali Dakhil Sabra
Ali Dakhil Sabra procured the BMW car used by the assassination team for the operation. He had served
in Hezbollah alongside Amin and Rhayel and came with them to Germany where he applied for asylum.
On October 20, 1992 he withdrew his asylum application and flew to Lebanon.

If such an observation must not frighten the researcher, it imposes on him a rigor, an ever renewed vigilance, and the full consciousness of his responsibilities.

The building of a corpus of Kurdish language will then meet difficult problems ; among them, the collecting of usable texts, scarce, scattered, difficult to access, the concurrent use of several writing systems and the defining of significant linguistic limits, are the most arduous to solve.

The aim of the work we begin here is to build a dependable tool, which will encourage linguists to do research on Kurdish language, by putting at their disposal a very large set of data to which they presently cannot easily gain access.

The presence of this corpus, which will have to conform to the internationally recognized linguistic standards as they apply to such projects, will also act as a resource for researchers already working in the Kurdish field or more generally interested into Middle-East and the role Kurds play in this area. It will indeed offer a standardized access to a set of very diverse data, comprising linguistic, historical, political, anthropological elements, which cannot for now be accessed easily because of the lack of a Kurdish national archive.

Concretely, this corpus will put all these data together in computerised form on an unique medium, will use as much as possible an encoding common for all Kurdish dialects, while offering a large choice at presentation level (writing systems…), adaptable to each researcher’s needs. This aspect is particularly important for Kurdish language, as, because of the political division endured by the different areas of Kurdistan, sources (when they have fortunately been kept in good condition) are stored in different places, use different writing systems with which researchers and sometimes Kurds themselves are not always familiar.

Computerised publishing will offer a high speed access not available to common methods, as well as new possibilities of on line research in fields as Kurdish lexicography and terminology : queries all over the corpus by word of the texts, place of publishing, category of text, historical period, author, and even, depending upon the type of tagging operated on texts, topics belonging to specialised fields (anthropological, political etc).

The building of such a corpus is a very long term work, which will go on for several years. It will begin through the “electronic publishing” of some “test texts”, the work on which will allow to get a better picture of the concrete difficulties of the project. Then, several texts, considered as “founder texts”, will be encoded. As a researcher’s companion to the texts, a set of software products specifically adapted to the use with the corpus and Kurdish language in general, in its different writing systems, will be progressively built and distributed : on-screen presentation, translitteration, processing, parametrable queries softwares, and parameterable building of secondary sets of data (KWIC concordancies, frequencies, topics…), which will increase tenfold the potential use of the corpus.

In this respect, the distribution of the Kurdish corpus through the standardised channels for linguistic sources (international linguistic agencies…), will give to Kurdish in its different dialects a place among the great research languages of the next millennium. Who would not rejoice at this perspective ?

1.2. Introduction : corpora techniques
1.2.1 Basic necessities
1.2.1.1 Minimum size
The conception after which a text corpus can only be used to do research on those properties of language expression that belong to statistics (words or phrases frequencies, semantic fields…) misses the truth. However, if what is sought is to allow a lexicographic research able to disclose characteristics resorting to what is conventionally called the “genius” of a language, it is necessary to give access through the corpus to rather infrequent realisations. This makes necessary to reach a minimum size, as there are realisations that occur only once or twice over one million words !

Alain RAY [RAY, 1977] poses a lower limit of one million words, but corpora may be much bigger in size, and the present trend is to increase it. For instance, Cobuild dictionary [Cobuild, 1987] is based upon a corpus whose size is tet times bigger than this figure.

1.2.1.2. Consistency and care in realization
The chosen texts must abide by quality criterions (error rate), and also offer a consistency in the manner they are organized (characters sets used). Those problems will be studied in more details in the first Technical Document of the project.

1.2.1.3 Data representativity
There is now a debate among corpora research community concerning this concept of the representativity of the data gathered inside text corpora, which is partially challenged [PERY-WOODLEY, 1995]. However, a more intuitive notion of representativity still remains useful, as, for example, Lamartine’s poems cannot embody all of the French language of the 1840s… This problem of how to choose the data to put in the corpus will be entered upon in Section 3, “Methodology of the corpus building”, which will put forward an orientation.

If we admit as our choice the lower limit of one million words just mentioned, which means about eight to ten books of middle size, and if the corpus gathers texts of different categories ( news, novel, poetry…), while admitting that the designation of those categories itself has to be investigated as a research topic in its own right, it seems logical to decide that this limit should be applicable to each of them.

1.2.2 The different types of corpora
There are numerous different types of corpora, and I won’t try to describe them all here. I will rather concentrate on giving some basic elements useful for a reflexion about the more consistent aims for a corpus of Kurdish language. For this purpose, I will classify corpora by opposite characteristics, as does C. BALL [URL : BALL, 1997].

1.2.2.1 Synchronic or diachronic corpus
This opposition is concerned with the choice of texts. The synchronic corpus gathers texts from a same period in time (practically, one ten-year window or several times this period at most), and bears a more or less precise testimony of the state of a language. A good example is the corpus on which the Cobuild dictionary is based.

The diachronic corpus tries to follow the evolution of the language during the chosen period, which may well be several centuries long. A good example of this type of corpus is the ARTFL corpus of French language, built through a collaboration between French national research body C.N.R.S. and Chicago University. It goes from XVIth century up to now.

mentioned
1.2.2.2 Monolingual or multilingual corpus
This opposition seems clear enough. European Union gives several examples of projects in the field of multilingual corpora, such as the Lund University English-Swedish corpus, the parallel Bergen English-Norwegian corpus… The multilingual corpora may indeed be parallel, that is gathering different translations of the same texts (or sometimes of texts written in different languages about the same subject). A typical example (and fairly known in the corpora research community) is the bilingual English-French corpus of the debates in the Canadian Parliament. Such corpora may furthermore be aligned, which means that corresponding position labels are inserted in the texts of each language, which allow to relate each segment (paragraphs, even sentences) of text across the languages of the corpus. This allows for translation or lexicography researches. In the case of Kurdish, it could very well be decided to align texts across the different Kurdish dialects.

1.2.2.3 Tagged or untagged corpus
It has just been it was possible to insert labels into text. This is called to tag text, a practice which is gaining currency more and more in corpus research field, for a precise aim which is for the project itself to determine.

Some corpora are built just by gathering texts, without any tagging. They are not unuseful at all, as to have a great amount of raw text allows for instance to study words and phrases frequencies in the language and collocations, or even to build concordances.

Concordances may be obtained through an automatic search across the whole corpus for all the occurrences of a given word. If it is a synchronic corpus, they are of obvious interest to the lexicographer, but even in a diachronic corpus, which potentially presents an history of the studied language (for instance from XVIIth century to now), a set of dated concordances may well allow the historian of ideas to trace the appearing and rise of a concept or of a new meaning (a common example of this being a study using the ARTFL corpus, which unveiled the interesting fact that the use of the word “revolution” in its meaning of “political upheaval” increased significantly in the French texts during the years preceding French Revolution).

In the case of a multilingual corpus, it has already been mentioned that a common practice was to use tags to align different languages versions of a same text. Aligning may be accomplished through the use of identical numbers for the corresponding sections (sentences, paragraphs). Even for a monolingual corpus, this structural tagging is also of current use to mark the divisions of a text (pages, chapters, stanzas, etc).

However, the first expected informations in a text are probably bibliographical : author, date of publication, publisher, type of text, commentary… There is a trend to some standardization in this field [Text Encoding Initiative, 1996] [URL : Corpus Encoding Standard, 1997].

A linguistic tagging may also be applied to the words of the text, by part-of-speech (type of word). It is then spoken of part-of-speech or grammatical tagging (French étiquetage grammatical or assignation grammatical [DE LOUPY, 1995]). A semantic tagging of the type long used in margins by anthropologists, to tag by subject parts of the text, may also be used. This proposal will be developed in the next section.

And in conclusion, as mentioned by LANGE et GAUSSIER [LANGE et GAUSSIER, 1995], “Multilingual corpora also facilitate the reflexion about each of the languages involved.”.

1.2.3 Some usages of corpora
1.2.3.1 Language studies
Number of studies already possible to do without corpora would be much easier if one existed. So style or authorship studies (presence of such syntactic characteristic in an author, study on the use of such grammatical construct…). A corpus query would then substitute to the manual browsing of thousand of pages oFrenchn paper. An example related to Kurdish language would the use of a Sorani corpus to extract all the occurrences of “constructed” propositions to study the possible connotations of their use.

1.2.3.2 Building of linguistic dictionaries
As Kurdish language lacks dictionaries, it is quite obvious that one of the first usages of corpora will be lexicographic, as soon as a Kurdish language corpus will gather enough texts.

The lexical dictionary, which is interested into language itself, is typically built in two manners : introspection, and search for citations, that is typical sentences. Corpus work may substitute to the first and speed up notably the second of these methods, as Cobuild example shows clearly. Corpus may indeed allow to fine-tune by collocations studies the extent of the semantic field of words. Moreover, an aligned corpus, by bilingual simultaneous queries for collocations, allows to precise the differences between the words linguistic fields in the two languages. This leads to translations studies, which would be a great help to a multilingual lexicography of Kurdish.

1.2.3.3 Applications to Computer Assisted Translation
Beyond the building of paper translation tools, we may dream to the day when computerised translation tools will begin to exist for Kurdish.

The review Tribune des Industries de la Langue et de l’Information Electronique (Forum for Language Industries and Electronic Information) wrote : “The border between Assisted Translation and tools to help translation is little by little becoming more blurred. We may bet with a certain amount of certainty that multilingual corpora will have an important role in Assisted Translaton in the forthcoming years.” [TLIE, 1995, p. 23].

And, if data on and in Kurdish language becomes available, it will be possible to re-train for Kurdish some of the already existing computer tools. Section 1.2.3.5. will show that a corpus may allow the developing of a lot of “intermediate” tools that are the roots for practical computer applications which will have a real bearing on the defence of the language.

1.2.3.4 Building of encyclopedic dictionaries
The encyclopedic dictionary (or for this matter the specialized dictionary) is not directly interested into language, but rather brings to the reader semantic data concerned with a specific field. An example would be the entry for “house” : in such a dictionary, the “definition” would in fact put the Kurdish house in its anthropological context, taking as a base for instance the studies by M. MOKRI [MOKRI, 1961 (1970)] or the paper by Leszek DZIEGEL [DZIEGEL, 1988]. Such a dictionary would probably also show what a Kurdish houses looks like in different areas through photographs or drawings, and will propose a cross-reference to “village” or “architecture” …

In the ultimate aim to build such tools, texts may be submitted to a semantic tagging, which could for instance refer any architectural term found to “house”. Another example is the richness in vocabulary of Kurdish language for all the clothes, which furthermore vary from an area to another. Suppose a researcher is studying Kurdish clothes. He may use the corpus to find all references to names of clothes he knows – but if there are names he is not aware of (or he doesn’t think of at the moment), they will be missed. Now, if the texts of the corpus have been tagged to refer any cloth name to the term “cloth”, then a computerized query by topic becomes possible.

The technique of margin cotation of texts from a set of standardized criterions, which has later evolved into computer aided cotation, is used by anthropologists since a rather long time. But this type of marking is complex to use : what level of precision is required for the place of the text to mark ? To the word, to the paragraph, to the sentence ? Furthermore, a same section may well be concerned by several topics (for instance “cooking” + “tabooes” + Bahdinan area), which is difficult to mark if using what seems to be the dominant practice now in corpus tagging systems.

And then, such a tagging needs to be able to express topics by keywords or standardized codes, which in turns means to link the query function to a thesaurus tree in which words are distributed into nested subsets (hypo-/hyper- nymia). So a query on the word “djel û berg” (clothes) would also – if the researcher requests it – the word “djemedenî”.

And then, we must note that an encyclopedic work – or a specialized one – will automatically need a study in interdialectal or regional lexical differences (see Technical Document, section 1.2 – “Data normalisation”), as shows in the case of clothes the research of S. MOHSENI [MOHSENI, to be published].

Hence the question of encyclopedic tagging can be seen as very complex, and not possible to solve in the limits of the present document.

However, the reflexion on this problem as it has been conducted here yields at least one positive aspect, that is that the work on how to build a Kurdish corpus which will need ancillary software to be accessed, may in itself generate other research concerning in general the computer processing of Kurdish language. This point will be more precisely touched in the Technical Document, section 1.4, “Possible uses of data”, but I will first in the next section mention some possibilities opening in my opinion a new room for the defence of Kurdish language.

1.2.3.5 Uses that may contribute to the defence of Kurdish language
From a corpus, it is possible to create some data sets as : a words frequencies list, a lemmatised lexicon (lexicon of all of the inflected forms of the words, as plurals, verbal inflexions, “constructed” forms, lemmas in general), which could be stored in a relational database.

Such a lemmatised lexicon may be of great use for very practical software applications contributing to the safeguard of the language. The more obvious – and the easier to build – is automatic orthographic correction of Kurdish in the market word processing software applications. Then, such a lexicon, fed to an Optical Characters Recognition software, will increase its rate of recognition, and will start a cumulative process on the existence of electronic texts in Kurdish (it will become easier to scan and recognize Kurdish texts). This cumulative effect will apply to research itself, which will become more attractive.

Such a lexicon could be distributed quite independently from the commercial software for which it would act as a plug-in. Last, it could be used in concordance with an computerized grammar of Kurdish language to start research on Computer Assisted Translation, and, more immediately, to the semi-automatic tagging of corpus texts.

This last point needs explanation : suppose for instance that the word derom has been referred in the lexicon to the first person of the singular of the indicative present of the verb royishtin – whatever means have been used for that, by hand or automatically, through grammar rules including verbs variation, does not concern us here. The consequence is that, each time this form is matched during a research through the text, it may then be tagged in the proper manner by a consultation of the lexicon. Having a lexicon of inflected forms allows to search simultaneously for all the forms of a given word, as a query in the lexicon will retrieve all the forms linked to particular form (ie royishtin to derom as well as derom to royishtin).

2. Context : Kurdish language and expression
2.1. General introduction
The first fact to confront when initiating a Kurdish corpus project project is :

from a synchronic point of view, the division of this language between different dialects and writing systems (without any exact matching between those two parameters),

from a diachronic point of view, the appearance at different periods of different standards for literary written expression, and a modification (sometimes radical) of the writing systems in use, and their constant evolution.

Those facts will have a great influence on the way the work on textual corpus will have to be accomplished. Specifically, the use of different writing systems will bear on the technical choices which will be introduced in the Technical Document which will follow the present Preliminary Reflexions.

This section will give a minimal description of the different dialects and writing systems in use now or in the past. Besides the three big groups of dialects (northern, central, southern), it will also mention a Kurdish “dialect”, which has long been the literary standard, the Goranî, now disappeared as a living language.

In the same manner, besides the three big groups of writing systems (Roman, or Hawar, modified Arabic-Persian, modified Cyrillic), some writing systems now out of use will be presented, and specifically the “traditional” Kurdish writing system, close to the Ottoman notation of Turkish. For each of the present writing systems, a quick presentation of its evolution will be drawn if necessary.

And then, as this presentation is done from the point of view of the construction of a corpus of texts, minimum elements – diachronic as well as synchronic- will be given concerning common people or literary expression for each of the concerned dialects.

2.2. The different dialects
2.2.1 Kurmandjî
This group of dialects is also called “northern”. It is indeed spoken in the most northern parts of Kurdistan of Iraq and Iran, in the Kurdish areas of Syria, and in almost all of the Kurdistan of Turkey – in fact everywhere save where Dimicirc;lî (Zaza) speakers live – and by the Kurds of ex-Soviet Union, and Khorassan. Contrary to the dialects of the central group of dialects, it has genders and cases, which does it a linguistically more archaic dialect than Soranî, with which it has as well several phonological differences (presence of the “v” sound).

Those dialects are written according to the area in a Roman writing system (the majority), but also in Cyrillic and Arabic-Persian writings (see further).

MACKENZIE [MACKENZIE, 1961 (1990)] distinguishes in this “Kurmandjî” group the following subdialects : Sr, Akre, Amadiye, Barwr-or, Gull, Zakho and Sheikhan.

The publishing of the grammar of Djeladet BEDIR KHAN and Roger LESCOT [BEDIR KHAN and LESCOT, 1970] marks a very important date in the process of the theoretical definition of a northern Kurdish language, based on the written, standardized language which was used in the review named Hawar.

2.2.2 Soranî
This group of dialects, generically called “Soranî”, is considered to be geographically “central”, by opposition with “northern” and “southern” dialects. It is spoken in the greatest part of Kurdistan of Iraq and Iran, and has no genders nor cases. It is for the most part written in an Arabic-Persian type of writing (see further).

MACKENZIE [MACKENZIE, 1961 (1990)] distinguishes in this group the following subdialects : Suleimaniye, Wrmwa, Bingird, Pidar, Mukr, Arbil, Rewandiz, et Xnw.

In Sulaymania, capital city of the Baban, the Ottoman Empire had created a secondary school (Rushdiye), the graduates from which could go Istanbul to continue to study there. This allowed Soranî, which was spoken in Sulaymania, to progressively replace Goranî as the literary vehicle. MACKENZIE writes that the present Kurdish standard called Soranî is in fact a idealized version of the Sulaymania dialect, which uses the phonemic system of the Pidar and Mukr dialects.

2.2.3 Southern Kurdish dialects
Kurdish linguists have a tendency to group these dialects with Lorî (see further). They comprise essentially Kermanshahî and the dialect of Kurds Faylî, formerly living in Baghdad area, but which have mainly been expelled to Iran by the Iraq regime, and of whom few have really returned. Concerning Kermanshahî, it seems that the Kurdish people of this area, if they indeed speak their dialect, when they write, do it mainly in Persian.

In any case, we lack information of the exact situation of those dialects now, and would be very happy to know more before considering including occurrences of them inside the corpus, specially about to which extent there is publishing in them…
2.2.4 Dimîlî (Zaza)
Dimîlî is traditionally counted among Iranian north-western dialects. There are problems about its precise origin and classification. However, the majority of the linguists who studied it agree to consider it not as a Kurdish dialect [ORANSJKIJ]. This is a real paradox, as its speakers, whose cradle is in the western part of the Kurdistan of Turkey, are beyond discussion Kurdish people, as well culturally as from the eminent role they played in the national movement. It will be enough to mention the Dersim uprising of 1937 and the place this area still holds in the movements to date.

An numerous immigration to Germany and Sweden gave birth to several publications. There is some difficulty with Dimîlî because of this apparent divorce between linguistics stricto sensu and political and cultural fields. Its place in a corpus of Kurdish language must then be discussed, and a work on Dimîlî seems, in any case, to be done in an independent work whose links with the building of the corpus are yet to decide precisely.

2.2.5 Goranî, the first literary standard
The situation of Goranî is not unlike the one of Dimîlî. Its cradle is the Awraman (or Hawraman) area, which extends on both Iran and Iraq Kurdistan. With its complex and “double” characteristics, it bears testimony of the length and complexity of the process of formation of Kurdish populations.

Indeed, linguists put it in the north-western Iranian group of languages, together with Bâjalânî of Mossul and Kandulai in Zagros areas. But, if they distinguish it very clearly form Kurdish itself, it is spoken in an indisputably Kurdish setting, at all levels. Moreover, it has been used as a literary language, specially for poetry, in vaste areas of central Kurdistan. It was notably the literary language of Hawraman principality – and is still spoken in this area (though the Iraq government’s policy there has quite emptied Hawraman, posing a real threat to the survival of Hawramî).

It is then easy to see the difficult problems resulting from this very specific situation for the building of a Kurdish corpus. Those problems are of the same order with the ones already mentioned for Dimîlî.
2.2.6 Lorî
Lorî is traditionally associated with Bakhtiarî. Those two dialects are spoken by several millions people living in an area situated at the southern limit of Kurdistan of Iran. This geographic and human proximity, as well as the strategic importance of their area of diffusion, which goes down to the Perliteraturesian Gulf, sparked endless debate about the belonging or not of Lors and Bakhtiars to the Kurdish nation ; this problem could only be decided, if it has to be, by the interested people themselves. Here the difference with Dimîlî speakers (Zaza), is very clear.

Josif M. ORANSKIJ [ORANSKIJ] writes about them :

With Persian and Tadjik (with their own subdialects), also belong to the south-western subgroup : Tatî, Bakhtiarî and Lorî dialects, and the vast majority of local languages spoken in Fârs.”

Beyond superficial affinities with southern Kurdish dialects, and specially Faylî, it is then clearly established that Lorî must be considered apart, from a linguistic as well as cultural point of view. Concerning the specific problems of corpus building, the rather recent character of written publications is also an argument for this position.

2.3. Expression in Kurdish language
2.3.1 Introduction
The choice of te texts to put inside a Kurdish corpus must be guided by two considerations :

some minimum data concerning Kurdish culture and its evolution. It is not the place here of a history of Kurdish , but to define which types of texts come into being and at which period ;

a census of all the available texts, specifically for texts existing in a bilingual form, without for now looking at copyright problems, which , if it poses the risk of making distribution difficult, should not hamper collection.

This section will concentrate on the first of those two approaches, a first list of possible candidates for inclusion in a corpus will be found in Appendix A.

2.3.2 Kurdish writing during the classical period
The importance of oral literature in traditional Kurdish culture must first be emphasised. Some of the great founding texts of Kurdish culture find their inspiration in themes already treated in the oral tradition, as Mem u Zin which is inspired by Mame Alan. The orientalists of the end of last century and theirs informants (Mahmud Bayazîdî) leaved us with several transcripts and translations of Kurdish tales.

One of the first texts we have concerning the Kurds is the Sharaf Nameh, a description of Kurdish tribes and princes from the XVth century. It is a Persian text. A lot of classical Kurdish writers used Arabic, Turkish or Persian, even when then wrote about Kurds. As it has already been mentioned, when a litterary standard different from those languages will emerge, proper to the Kurds, it will be Goranî, a linguistically non Kurdish language, which will become the culturally Kurdish literary standard.

Last, the traditional Kurdish texts essentially consist of poetry (the prose novel will rise only during the modern period, and even very late in it).

2.3.2 The legal status of Kurdish language in modern times
Even for modern times, building a Kurdish textual corpus, compared to either languages, meets specific problems. Indeed, the history of prohibition and repression to which Kurdish language has been submitted during modern times has a deep bearing onto its development.

In Turkey, as soon as 1909, the Union and Progress Committees forbade Kurdish clubs. Twenty years after, Atatürk forbids the use of Kurdish language and orders the destruction of each and every Kurdish text the authorities are able to lay the hand on. In the Soviet Kurdish areas, there are indeed a lot of publications in Kurmandjî from the 20s to now, reviews, novels, poetry, but unfortunately they are very much unknown in the West.

If, since a very short time, it seems more possible than before to publish in Kurmandjî in Turkey, it is at the cost of the ever enduring physical danger to which are submitted authors, journalists, sellers, owners… a death danger. So it is not surprising that it is in the emigration – and specifically in the press – that we find the most important life of this dialect.

If the status of literary standard seems still devoted to its southern neighbour, Soranî, the situation could well evolve quickly.

In Iraq, after 1926, when a cultural autonomy was granted to the Kurds in the Iraqi frame, Kurdish schools being allowed in the Kurdish area, several Kurdish newspapers began to be published. But after 1930, the autonomy was suppressed, and it was the revolt of Shaikh Mahmud, the revolt of the Barzan brothers (1943-45) and their crushing. After the collapse of the Kurdish nationalist movement in 1975, at the very time during which officially Kurdish language was recognized, Kurdish Academy in Baghdad was allowed to publish numerous studies (see Annex A), in Kurdistan itself, with the scorched earth policy practiced by the central government and operation Anfal, which resulted in quite 200 000 deaths, we may guess that the real situation of the language was perhaps not what first met the eye.

However, from the point of view of written expression, this very date of 1975 still points to a very important transition moment, which cannot be found in the same manner in the history of Kurmandjî. This could be considered as a possible transition moment between a synchronic and a diachronic part of our corpus (for Kurmandjî, perhaps the date of the adoption of Hawar alphabet, in 1932, could be considered such a transition between two parts of a period running from the middle of XIXth century to nowadays,but this choice remains mainly conventional).

In Iran, even if Kurdish has at times been allowed to be published, it never was a teaching language. During the short-lived republic of Mahabad, in 1945, a Kurdish press took life, specifically for women and children, but it did not survive after the year the republic itself lived. Since the islamic revolution, lately, some cultural reviews are again published, using the standard writing system put forward by the Kurdish Academy on Baghdad (see section 2.4. “The different writing systems”), for northern as well as central dialects. There are also publications in Lorî.

2.3.3 Kurdish modern expression
Considered from the point of view of the different Kurdish dialects, present times publications are mainly in Kurmandjî and Soranî – but it exists as well some texts in Dimîlî, and academic reprinting of classical Goranî texts.The precise state of Lorî publishing is unknown to me.

Considered from the point of view of the different types of texts, in the beginning of the modern period, poetry keeps its preeminence, inherited from the classical period. The poetic vocabulary evolves very much, under the influence of the nationalist movement. For instance, up to a rather late period (the sixties in Soranî), it contained a lot of Arabic words (the litterati often being Arabic-trained mollahs), before knowing a relative “kurdisation”.

So there is a rather unequal balance inside the written literary expression in modern Kurdish, as there is very few works in prose, and a lot of poetic expression. So it was press publications which played a very important role into the creating of a modern written Kurdish language in whatever dialect of this language. First created in the thirties, it still has a very big role in the contemporary life of this language, notably through a real explosion of the number of newspapers published in emigration during the years 80-90. So press texts and papers should obviously be present in any endeavour to create a Kurdish corpus.

From the point of view of language standardization, the regional characteristics are mor pregnant in Kurmandjî than in Soranî, the latter having witnessed in the seventies the creation by the Kurdish Academy of a standard “Ideal Soranî”, to use the expression put forward by MACKENZIE.

Any corpus work will make necessary deeper studies into this mechanism of linguistic standardization and the problems it poses, and how a corpus research might well help to work on them. The work of Amir HASSANPOUR would be of great use here.

Last, there are also some academic publications, and technical texts. Those would constitute a very important part of a Kurdish corpus.

The future evolution seems to lead Kurdish language towards the setting up of a bidialectal standard : Soranî and Kurmandjî – even if this fact does not seem to be easily recognized even by the more politicized Kurds…

2.4. The different writing systems
It is necessary to mention these matters here, as the existence of several writing systems has a very heavy bearing onto the practical difficulties of the building of a Kurdish corpus.

2.4.1 The “Hawar” alphabet
This Roman alphabet takes its name from the name of the review Hawar (The Call), published in the French-administered Syria, and where it was for the first time put forward in 1932 by the group of Kurdish intellectuals gathered around Djeladet Bedir Khan. It is now dominant among the Kurds of Turkey, be they Kurmandjî or Dimîlî speakers. A lot of reviews published in Europe in northern Kurdish use this alphabet Hawar.

Djeladet Bedir Khan devised this notation so that it would be rather close to the alphabet adopted by the Turkish government to replace the Ottoman letters in alphabetization work when those were forbidden in 1928. Not allowing a precise notation of the realisations of speakers coming from different areas of the Kurmandjî zone, this writing is hence not totally phonetic, but it is precisely a good compromise which allows a writing common to all those different speakers. For instance, the Hawar does not allow to note the difference between aspirated and accented consonants ” ç k p r t ” [RIZGAR, 1993], a difference which is well written in Cyrillic notation through the use of a diacritic (posterior quote).

There are several versions of the Hawar alphabet [ÇELIKER, 1996] one using the opposition between the short (mute) vowel written ” ” and a long one written ” i “, another notation using respectively ” i ” and ” î ” to express the same opposition.

The technical problems stemming from this “lack of phoneticity” in Hawar writing will be mentioned again in the Technical Document’s section 1.2. concerned with the “Problems of data normalisation”, notably to touch the question of transliteration to the Cyrillic writing which is still in use nowadays by the majority of the Kurds in ex-U.S.S.R.

2.4.2 The notation using Armenian alphabet
At the beginning of the twenties, the Kurds living in Soviet Armenia started using Armenian alphabet and published a spelling book using it for Kurdish schools. Some years later, this notation was replaced with a Roman one (see next section). It seems however that very few Kurdish texts in Armenian alphabet came to us.

2.4.3 The different Roman writing systems of Kurmandjî
When a Roman writing system for Kurdish is mentioned, it is generally the HaArabicwar. But un U.S.S.R too, in 1927, the studies of the Assyrian philologist Q. Maragulov and of Ereb emo, inspired by the roman alphabet put forward in the 1910s by I. A. Orbeli, a scholar of Armenian origin who was studying Iranian languages, led them to another Roman notation of thirty-seven letters, adapted to the phonology of Kurmandjî. It was replaced before World War II with the Cyrillic alphabet still in use now by decision of the Soviet authorities [BLAU, 1989, p. XI].

2.4.4 The Cyrillic alphabet
Since World War II, the Kurds of U.S.S.R. use a Cyrillic alphabet of 39 letters (in fact 32 and a posterior quote used as diacritic), among which 6 are in fact Roman letters (plus a inverted “e “) which have been added to render sounds belonging to Kurdish.

The Kurdish texts published using this alphabet are for the most part written in Kurmandjî dialect.

3. Methodological proposals for realisation
3.1. Introduction
All the sections of this part of the project are only proposals, made to be submitted to criticism and above all to constructive alternatives.

It has been mentioned in Section 1 that the way a corpus was organised and eventually marked depended partly on the aims of its constitution. Section 2 clarified some of the disponible data about Kurdish language. This section will try to draw conclusions from the two preceding ones, first in terms of the internal structuration of a corpus of Kurdish language, that is the final object of the work. Then will be studied the methodology to use to progressively build the corpus, with a specific emphasis on feasibility problems.

3.2. Descriptors structuring the corpus
3.2.1. For a “variable geometry” corpus
It has been mentioned that the choice of texts to work on depended on the researchers’ aims. As the corpus is built precisely to encourage research on Kurdish language, it is difficult to forecast their field in advance. The corpus should not therefore be limited to one type of choice, but should offer the researchers the possibility to select themselves, using descriptors clearly precised the coherent subset of data on which they choose to base their (different) researches (for instance : all the Kurmandjî press papers published between 1900 and 1920). This section tries to put forward such descriptors.

It is the notion of reusability, as put forward by Marie-Paule PERY-WOODLEY :

” The multiplication of the fields of utilisation combined with the cost of collecting and preparing the corpora provoked the emergence of a new criterion : the reusability. The question of the reusability allows to ask in an other way the question of the representativity. The notion of reusable ressources implies “variable geometry” corpora, susceptible of adaptation to different methods and aims. From the available ressources, researchers should be able to build – select, reorganise – corpora answering to specific needs. ” [Marie-Paule PƒRY-WOODLEY, p. 218, "Quels corpus ?", T.A.L., 1995, vol. 36, n¡ 1-2, pp. 213-232]

3.2.2 Classification from dialect and subdialect
First descriptor, the dialectal class, from the standards which emerged little by little from history : the group of northern dialects (“Kurmandjî”), the group of central dialects (“Soranî”), and the group of southern dialects (essentielly Lorî).

This classification could be if necessary precised through the use of subdialectal groups. Then, when the author tries to conform to an ideal standard (“Sulaymania model” for Soranî, “Bedir Khan” model for Kurmandjî), the subdialectal group or the area to which he belongs should be mentioned.

3.2.3 Diachronic classification
For each of the Kurdish dialects, the classification should of course precise the date of publication, a very important parameter. The users will be so able to choose the period on which they want to work. The problems of how to build coherent subsets of the corpus will be mentioned in the next section, but as a work hypothesis, we put forward here several turning points which could be used to define diachronic subsets :

from the beginning of XIXth century to 1920, approximative date of the end og the Ottoman empire,

from 1920 to 1970, date of the treaty through which Kurds wrest some cultural rights from Iraqian government,

from 1970 to now, a period which witnesses the development of Kurdish language publishing, through the work of Kurdish Academy in Iraq for one part, and in emigration for another.

Clearly, this periodisation is to use with care and its pertinence is itself a question to be answered, if the aim is to make it evolve towards a more pertinent repartition of data. This question must certainly be studied at the same time the building of the corpus makes progress. In any case, the final corpus must offer to any user the possibility to select himself text according to his own criterions.

3.2.4 Texts typology
Besides the classification by “litterary kind”, which is the most “classical”, numerous textual typologies coexist, be they based on situation (situations of producing…), sociology, function of text chunks (descriptive – narrative), linguistic parameters discourse analysis, or others. The subgroup “Typology of documents” of the EAGLE research group produced about this problem proposals which fit in the Text Endcoding Initiative (TEI) frame.

Last, D. BIBER even put forward a methodology in which a typology proper to each corpus is elaborated through a statistical treatment of several grammatical parameters of the texts it contains, which could in the future allow automatic text classification [BIBER, 1989] (though it is allowed to wonder if a classification made from a corpus which has since then received new texts is still valid…).

provisory classification is here put forward into eight categories, which will be used in the Annex A of this document :

Popular literature
Novel
Poetry
Press
Theatre
Essays
Dictionaries
Transcription or recording of speech

This mode of classification must only be considered as used only for immediate convenience, or better as a minimum of information about texts delivered to the corpus user. Further research will have to be conducted during the project to at least choose the best way to make it more complete, at best devise alternate classification(s) based on parameters coming from the study of the texts themselves.

For now, however, these categories will be the ones used in Annex A of the present document. It is also from this practical classification that the next section, “3.2. Development priorities”, will begin to tackle the problem of disponibility of Kurdish text.

It must be mentioned that those categories are not conceived as exclusive of each other : it should not be forbidden to simultaneously put a text into several categories, for instance some papers of the political press being as well put in the “Essay” class. Last, speciality texts, technical or pedagogical, which could also constitute a category of their own, are not defined here, only because taking the count of this type of texts is difficult – they are usually not referenced in the West even if they reach there.

3.2.5 Contextual information
The researches of D. BIBER and the already mentioned paper by M.-P. PERY-WOODLEY, as well as the recommendations of the Text Encoding Initiative lead to the conclusion that, to get maximum reusability, each of the texts of the corpus will have to be documented very precisely. For instance, TEI mentions that the original price of a publication may give information to the researcher about the intended (or touched) public, all important socio-linguistic elements. As mentioned by M.-P. Péry-Woodley :

“To be reusable in a rational manner in studies with different methods and aims, the different elements of a corpus must bear precise indications concerning their production, they must be able to take place in a situated and descriptible manner in a model of textual variation. Although this aim is much more modest than the building of a corpus representative of all the texts produced by a language-culture, it still necessitates a theorisation of the variation able to produce a sort of matrice against which the chosen texts may be situated.” (ital. G. G.) [PERY-WOODLEY, op. cit., p. 224].

3.2.6 Conclusion
So the following minimum descriptors appear :

dialect and sub-dialect
publication date
type of text

To which it is necessary to add contextual information to be precised, but which will much probably defined through a study of the EAGLE and TEI proposals.

3.3. Development priorities
3.3.1 Choice of the first contents : a compromise between ideal and reality
Preceding section presented what could be a general corpus of Kurdish language if means would allow. Unfortunately, in the current state of things they are rather limited,and choices must be done in terms of development priorities, specifically to take in account the really available texts.

Concerning the size of the corpus, it has already been mentioned that one million words was commonly considered minimum whatever the sought application. But this size is to look at in relation within the different categories of text comprising the corpus, supposing each one could be used as a base for a specific study. If a researcher is only interested into one period, or only in newspapers, he should still find in the corpus enough texts of this category or period to work.

Concerning the type of texts to include, the experience of the developing of other corpora shows that, if the researchers at the beginning took care of respecting specific proportions between the different types of texts they defined, in the name of corpus representativity, this last notion tends now to be questioned by linguistic arguments : considering the great number of “sub-languages” corresponding for instance to specific socio-professional fields, a true representativity would only be obtained through the integration of all the uses, which is obviously impossible.

So it seems that we now witness a move from representativity towards reusability – a concept we already met. And last, researchers take more and more into account the real availability of such or such type of text already in electronic form. For the “great languages” as English, this “reality principle” leads to build bigger and bigger corpora : the British National Corpus is 100 million words, whereas the preceding generation corpora were considered “big” with ten times less…

For less current languages, this same principle led to pragmatically question the notion of representativity : by lack of means, corpora had well to be built with whatever texts were at hand ! It is probable that a Kurdish corpus will be submitted exactly to this type of choice.

And last, the political situation of Kurds is in itself a parameter which must be taken into account in the choices for the corpus development. This situation generates an “enclosing phenomenon” for their language compared to other languages in the world : few studies exist on Kurdish language, be it linguistics or bilingual lexicography. Moreover, we already saw that the lack of unity of Kurdish populated areas had for consequence the use of different writing systems, which then reproduces the enclosing phenomenon to a lesser scale, between the different dialects.

So it seems that, to fight against this double enclosing, it would be important to accomplish first :

the electronic edition of bilingual texts (Kurdish dialect – another language)
For competence reasons, we would start with texts having an English or French translation, but it is clear that regional languages (Turkish, Arabic, Persian) should be also included at longer term, which could be used as the basis for a call to collaboration.

the electronic edition of Kurdish bidialectal texts, and in priority for the two “main” dialects, Kurmandjî – Soranî.
For obvious reasons of means and working force, we would first focus on the two present main dialects, Kurmandjî and Soranî, which have the more numerous texts published. Obviously, it is not any theoretical stand, only a pragmatic one, and any initiative concerning other dialects would be received with great pleasure. Here again, a call for collaboration should be envisaged, once technical and methodological questions will have been decided upon.

Simultaneously, it seems important to realise electronic editions of texts considered as “founding texts” of Kurdish culture. This may imply texts originally written in Goranî, but in conformity with the just defined proposed priorities, it would be better to first work on modern dialects editions, and with translations in French or English.

And last, it will probably be easier at the beginning to work on Kurmandjî texts, only for writing system reasons. (see Technical Document).

3.3.2 Making known the Kurdish Corpus Initiative
The present document, which is only a pre-project version, should be broadcasted to provoke remarks concerning the viability of the project. Once corrected after those remarks, it should be translated into English, Kurmandjî and Soranî – and eventually into other (oriental) languages to be made known more broadly. This task will already need a considerable commitment to work.

The Project itself will be elaborated after this second diffusion. But it is very clear in the mind of its authors that it is only – and only has the ambition to be – proposals for orientations, which will still be, at this stage, susceptible to be modified and amended. Indeed we wish our initiative will suscitate other initiatives, which we wish to be coordinated with ours in a way to define, only for the best overall efficiency. But in any case, it is not our aim to control anyone else’s any work.

3.3.3 Make a first census of texts susceptible to be integrated into the corpus
One of the first works to be done to make an evaluation of the orientations to give to the project is a first census of what is theoretically available as published Kurdish texts, and than – whatever their legal status is – susceptible to be incorporated into the corpus. The aim of this census is not to determine at this early stage which texts to put into the corpus, rather to get a general picture of what is known and available.

A first list, which already shows that those materials are finally rather numerous, will be found in Annex A, section 5.3. This preparatory census will be put together with the successive versions of the project so as to gather proposals to supplement it and critical remarks concerning the choices and criterions of choices used (defects of the chosen edition of a given text, supplementary information about other available translations etc).

3.3.4 Proposing to everyone to contribute with their knowledge of the texts
Simultaneously, the Annex contains a proposal for a standardized form which could help anyone to contribute with the references of texts which he knows. This work is necessary to progress, but overall, we hope it will help us to think together about how the corpus could be built, nurture a natural reflexion about it. In its present state, this form itself must be submitted to criticism and will be put together with the successive versions of the project.

However, one important point is the attribution of an unique reference number for each text, its definition still being to decide precisely, which, as numerous technical matters, will need the elaboration of technical documents. Last, a guide of reflexion or / and conversation, sort of oral version of this form, could be devised. It would help interested persons – be they researchers, Kurdish language speakers or both – to contribute directly or discuss with others about texts which, according to them, should definitely be incorporated first into the corpus, and about the criterions to select such texts.

3.3.5 Beginning to pragmatically gather texts
While beginning to gather data about what has been published – this is the census which has just been mentioned – it must be taken in account that the field is quite new. The form and the census should also simultaneously be used to gather the most possible texts already in electronic form (“pragmatic” approach).

3.3.6 The question of the marking of texts
We saw that the choice of the type of marking was dependent on the aims of the building of the corpus. Should the latter have one or several aims ? In relation with what was put forward in the preceding section, it seems that, because of the ambition of the project, it would be better to limit first the marking of the texts to a structural one, a choice which is by the way coherent with the approach of a work with bilingual texts and about translation.

And last, before really thinking to constitute a full corpus, it seems essential to first produce electronic versions of some short texts. This will allow to take the measure of the conceptual and technical difficulties which are in store for the producers, and to give them a way to train themselves with the tools they will have to use. The Technical Document will give some hints about those tools.

As the knowledge of the persons taking part in the project increases, as other persons will volunteer to participate, and perhaps as specific requests concerning the use of the corpus will emerge, it should be possible to proceed to a new type of marking, using other criterions, notably encyclopedic ones (see section 1.2.3.1).

3.5. Chronology
3.5.1 Work which will have to go on during the whole project
pragmatic accumulation of texts
get documentation about the way other researchers work in the corpus field :
how corpora are structured
syntactic and morphologic analysis
building of lemmas lexicons
Part-of-Speech tagging
processing techniques
available software

3.5.2. July 97 to January 98
writing of a first text, draft version of the project, to do “internal diffusion”
producing a first census of available texts
beginning to ask the questions of the mode of constitution of the corpus
beginning to work on copyright problems, from the experience of other researchers (types of agreements done etc)

3.5.3 : January to June 98
producing a pre-project text which will be broadcast more openly for criticism
take in account the reactions and prepare the project itself
translate the final version and broadcast it on the net

Simultaneously :
beginning a self-training to the text gathering and marking techniques, through :
technological survey
internal seminaries
producing technical notes
experimental electronic acquisition and encoding of some texts
preparing of a interview guide with Kurdish speakers for collecting data about what they consider as interesting texts to include in the corpus
working on the ratio between the different types of texts, the dialectal and diachronic questions
work deeper on the problems of obtaining texts (copyright, understandings with publishing houses, newspaper owners etc) :
taking first contacts with copyright owners (specially newspapers)
make a study of the possibility of public help and sponsoring

4. Bibliography
BEDIR KHAN, Djeladet et LESCOT, Roger, Grammaire Kurde (Dialecte Kurmandji) (Kurdish grammar), Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, Paris, 1970.

BIBER, D., “A typology of English texts”, Linguistics, no 27, 3-43, 1989.

BLAU Joyce, “Introduction”, Les Kurdes et le Kurdistan, bibliographie critique 1977-1986 (Kurds and Kurdistan, a bibliography with commentaries), 1989).

ÇELIKER, Celadet, Çend Pirsên Alfabeya Kurdi, Weanên Roja Nû (Some questions about Kurdish alphabet), Stockholm, 1996.

Cobuild, Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary, Collins, London, 1987.

DE LOUPY, Claude, “La méthode d’étiquetage d’Eric BRILL” (Eric BRILL’s tagging method), T.A.L., vol. 36, no 1-2, pp. 37-46, 1995

DENY J., Grammaire de la langue turque (Grammar of Turkish language), P.U.F., Paris, 1921 (Wiesbaden, 1971).

DZIEGEL, Leszek, “Villages et petites villes kurdes dans l’Irak actuel” (Kurdish villages and small cities in present Irak), Studia Kurdica, no 1-5, 1988, pp. 127-156.

LANGE et GAUSSIER, 1995, “Alignement de corpus multilingues” (Multilingual corpus alignment), T.A.L., 1995, vol. 36, no 1-2, pp. 67-80.

MACKENZIE, D. N., Kurdish Dialect Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, London Oriental Studies, vol. 9 & 10, S.O.A.S., 1961 (1990) & 1962 (1990).

MOKRI, M., “Le foyer Kurde” (Kurdish hearth and home), Ethnographie, Paris, 1961, pp. 79-95, reêd. in Contribution Scientifique aux Etudes Iraniennes (A scientific contribution to Iranian studies), Klincksieck, Paris, 1970.

PERY-WOODLEY, Marie-Paule, “Quels corpus pour quels traitements automatiques ?” (Which corpora for which automatic processing), T.A.L., vol. 36, no 188; 1-2, pp.213-232, 1995.

REY Alain, Le lexique : images et modèles, du dictionnaire à la lexicologie, (Lexicon : images and models, from dictionary to lexicology) Armand Colin, 1977.

RIZGAR, Baram, Kurdish-English English-Kurdish Dictionary, London, 1993.

Text Encoding Initiative, TEI P3, Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Lou Burnard, eds., Chicago, Oxford, 1996.

URL : Tribune des Industries de la Langue et de l’Information Electronique, (Forum of language industries and electronic information) no 17-18-19, février-août, 1995.

thus creating a maximalist Kurdistan (which probably would be quite US-friendly, just like the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq at present), a greater Yemen, an Iran that would move eastward (acquiring certain areas of Afghanistan while losing a part of its west to Azerbeijan and an Arab shia state), and so forth.

Not having read the article accompanying the map, I’m guessing this is not so much a proposal as an exercise in thinking out loud. Such a re-drawing would have the whole region – not to mention all Muslim countries – up in arms, possibly quite literally. But it remains an interesting avenue of thought, especially for the disenfranchised peoples who would benefit from such a rearrangement.

History

Through much of the late 1900s, Peshmerga often came into conflict with Iraqi forces, using Guerilla Warfare style tactics against them. Many of these Peshmerga were led by Mustafa Barzani of the PDK, while others were under the command of the PUK. After Mustafa Barzani’s death, his son Masoud Barzani took his position. Most of the Peshmerga’s efforts were to keep a region under the specific party’s control and to fight off any incursions by the Iraqi Republican Guard. They also came into conflict with PKK forces who came across the border from Turkey.

Following the First Gulf War, Northern Iraq fell into a state of civil war between the KDP and PUK, and their Peshmerga forces were used to fight each other.

During the 2006 Anfal campaign trial, the defense team of Saddam Hussein said Peshmerga, a group of separatist guerillas, sided with Iran in its war with Iraq.

The Roots of the Peshmerga (1890-1958)

The Hamidiya Cavalry (1891-1908)

Main article: Hamidieh soldier

The roots of the modern-day Peshmerga, especially in regards to training, can be found in the early attempts of the Ottoman Empire to create an organized Turkish-Kurdish military force. In 1891, Ottoman Sultan Abd al Hamid II (1876-1909) created the Hamidiya Cavalry, merging Turkish leadership with Kurdish tribal fighters. This force had to defend the Cossack Region from a possible Russian threat.

Kurdish Forces in WWI (1914-1918)

Main article: Caucasus Campaign

As the Ottoman Empire struggled to stay together during World War I, it once again called on the Kurds, with their newly-acquired military experience, to supplement the Turkish army. According to Safrastian, most military age Kurds not already in the light cavalry regiments were drafted into the Turkish army and encouraged to fight with their Muslim Turkish brethren against the Christians and Armenians.

Because of the anti-Christian and anti-Armenian propaganda, the Turkish army fielded enough Kurds to completely man numerous units. Among the all-Kurdish units were the Eleventh Army, headquartered in Elazig, and the Twelfth Army, headquartered in Mosul. Kurds also made up a majority of the Ninth and Tenth Armies and supplied enough troops for many frontier units and 135 squadrons of reserve cavalry. These forces, with their experience and knowledge of the terrain, were essential in fighting the Russian threat to the Eastern Ottoman Empire.

Simko’s Kurdish State 1919-1922

By Summer of 1918, Simko had established his authority in the region west of Lake Urmia.The Nestorian patriarch was killed in an encounter with supporters of Simko in 1918. In 1919, Simko organized an army of 20,000 Kurds and managed to establish a small state in nothwestern Iran centered in the city of Urmia. After conquest of Urmia, Simko appointed Teymur Agha Shikak as the governor of the city. After this, he organized his forces to fight the Iranian army in the region and managed to expand the area under his control to nearby towns and cities such as Mahabad, Khoy, Miandoab, Maku and Piranshahr in a series of battles. In the battle of Gulmakhana, Kurdish forces under his command wrested control of Gulmakhana and the Urmia-Tabriz road from Iranian forces. In the battle of Shakaryazi the commander of Iranian Army, General Amir Ershad was killed. In the battle of Miandoab Reza Shah commander of Iranian Army, dispatched Khaloo Qurban to counter Kurdish expansion, but he was defeated and killed by Simko’s forces in 1922. In the battle of conquest of Mahabad, Simko himself commanded his forces with the help of Seyyed Taha Shamzini. After the very tough battle in October of 1921, Iranian forces were defeated and their commander Major Malakzadeh along with 600 Iranian gendarmes were killed. Simko also conquered Maragheh and encouraged the Lur tribes of western Iran to revolt. At this time, government in Tehran tried to reach an agreement with Simko on the basis of limited Kurdish autonomy. Simko had organized a strong Kurdish army which was much stronger than Iranian government forces. Since the central government could not control his activities, he continued to expand the area under his control and by 1922, cities of Baneh and Sardasht were under his administration.

Shaykh Mahmud Barzanji Revolt (1919-1923)

Main article: Kingdom of Kurdistan

Although both the Turks and the British used Kurdish tribes to instigate cross-border conflicts, local shaykhs recruited Kurds to revolt against the regional powers. The first of these Kurdish call-to-arms occurred in British controlled Southern Kurdistan in May 1919. Shortly before being appointed governor of Sulaymaniya, Shaykh Mahmud Bazanji ordered the arrest of all British political and military officials in the region. After seizing control of the region, Barzanji raised a military force from his Iranian tribal followers and proclaimed himself “Ruler of all of Kurdistan”.

Tribal fighters from both Iran and Iraq quickly allied themselves with Shaykh Mahmud as he became more successful in opposing British rule. According to McDowall, the Shaykh’s forces “were largely Barzinja tenantry and tribesmen, the Hamavand under Karim Fattah Beg, and disaffected sections of the Jaf, Jabbari, Shaykh Bizayni and Shuan tribes”. The popularity and numbers of Shaykh Mahmud’s troops only increased after their ambush of a British military column.

Among Mahmud’s many supporters and troop leaders was 16-year-old Mustafa Barzani, the future leader of the Kurdish nationalist cause and commander of Peshmerga forces in Kurdish Iraq. Barzani and his men, following the orders of Barzani tribal shakyh Ahmad Barzani, traversed the Piyaw Valley on their way to join Shaykh Mahmud Barzanji. Despite being ambushed numerous times along the way, Barzani and his men reached Shaykh Mahmud’s location, albeit too late to aid in the revolt.

The Barzani fighters were only a part of the Shaykh’s 500-person force. As the British became aware of the shaykh’s growing political and military power, they were forced to respond militarily. Two British brigades were deployed to defeat Shaykh Mahmud’s fighters at Darbandi Bazyan near Sulaymaniya in June 1919. Shaykh Mahmud was eventually arrested and exiled to India in 1921.

At the root of the rebellion, Shaykh Mahmud’s leadership appealed to both Kurdish nationalist and religious feelings. Although he knew he could not directly defeat the British, Shaykh Mahmud hoped to seek recognition of Kurdish nationalism by advocating a ‘free united Kurdistan’. Using his authority as a religious leader, Shaykh Mahmud called for a jihad against the British in 1919 and thus acquired the support of many Kurds indifferent to the nationalist struggle. Although the intensity of their struggle was motivated by religion, Kurdish peasantry seized the idea of “national and political liberty for all” and strove for “an improvement in their social standing”.

Despite opposition by other regional tribes, possibly fearful of the shaykh’s growing power, Shaykh Mahmud’s fighters continued to oppose British rule after the shaykh’s arrest. Although no longer organized under one leader, this inter-tribal force was “actively anti-British”, engaging in hit-and-run attacks, killing British military officers, and participating in local rebellions. The fighters continued to be motivated by Shaykh Mahmud’s ability to “defy British interference”. The success of the Kurdish fighters’ anti-British revolts forced the British to recognize Kurdish autonomy in 1923. Returning to the region in 1922, Shaykh Mahmud continued to promote raids against British forces. Once these uprisings were subdued, the British government signed Iraq over to King Faysal and a new Arab-led government. After having to retreat into the mountains, the defeated Shaykh Mahmud signed a peace accord with the Iraqi government and settled in the new Iraq.

Shaykh Said Revolt (1920-1925)

Main article: Sheikh Said Rebellion

As Shaykh Mahmud battled for Kurdish autonomy and independence in Southern Kurdistan, similar uprisings were occurring throughout Northern Kurdistan against the fledgling Turkish government. Of these revolts the primarily tribal Kuchgiri rebellion of 1920 was perhaps the most notable as Kurdish fighters struggled for autonomy and were able to seize numerous Turkish arms and supplies. The defeat of these uprisings inspired the Turkish government to deal with the “Kurdish problem” by enacting laws limiting both Kurdish identity and the governing ability of shaykhs. As the Turkish nationalist position became firmer, attacks on the democratic rights of the Kurds increased.

Forced underground, Kurdish nationalist leaders formed the political group Azadi (Freedom) in Dersim, Turkey in 1921. Unlike earlier Kurdish nationalist groups, the core of Azadi was comprised of experienced military men, not the urban Kurdish intelligentsia. According to Olson, Azadi’s fighting forces included numerous tribal fighters and several former Hamidiya regimental leaders, all equipped with rifles and other weapons previously owned by the Turks.

The strength and expansion of Azadi would lead to its downfall. During a Turkish military expedition in September 1924 several Azadi leaders mutinied, fleeing into the mountains with numerous weapons and hundreds of lower-ranking Kurdish soldiers. Over 500 officers and soldiers – three companies of one battalion and one company of another – left the Turkish ranks to join the Kurdish army.

In response to the rebellion, the Turkish government, realizing the strength of Azadi, quickly arrested many of the organization’s leaders, both munitineers and conspirators. With their leadership depleted, a power vacuum formed in the political-military structure of Azadi. Out of the remnants of Azadi emerged Shaykh Said of Palu, a Naqshbandi shaykh related by marriage to Khalid Beg, Turkish Army colonel and Azadi founder. The remaining Azadi infrastructure supported the Shaykh’s leadership, believing a shaykh could generate more support than an army officer.

Once convinced to join the rebellion, Shaykh Said immediately began mobilizing participants and establishing a chain of command. According to Van Bruinessen, Shaykh Said “knew what he wanted, had the capacity to convince others, and had a great reputation for piety, which was useful when his other arguments were insufficient”.

As a new leader, Shaykh Said, like Shaykh Mahmud years earlier, appealed to the Kurdish sense of Islamic unity. Besides the usual fighting retinue of a Kurdish shaykh, Shaykh Said was able to increase his ranks during his tour of Eastern Anatolia in January 1925. New recruits answered the call to arms as Said issued fatwas, gave speeches denouncing the secular Kemalist policies, and wrote letters inviting numerous tribes to join in a jihad against the government. Said also met personally with tribal leaders and their representatives, including Barzan tribal representative Mustafa Barzani. Although some tribes refused to follow Said, he was received positively in many towns. The Shaykh’s rise to power enabled him to proclaim himself ‘emir al-mujahidin’ (commander of the faithful and fighters of the holy war) in January 1925. Overall, 15 to 20,000 Kurds mobilized in support of Shaykh Said and Azadi. Many of these fighters were equipped with horses, rifles, or sabers acquired from the numerous munition depots across the countryside. Other Kurdish firepower was either personally owned prior to the rebellion or taken from the Armenians, despite Turkish attempts at Kurdish disarmament.

With sufficient firepower recruited from the tribes, a plan of attack was set in place. In creating a battle plan, Said and the other prominent remaining Azadi leadership established five major fronts to be commanded by regional shaykhs. These shaykh leaders were assisted by former Hamidiya Cavalry officers who provided military structure to the rebellion. After organization, unit responsibility was divided among nine areas. The overall headquarters of Said’s military force was located in Egri Dagh and protected by a force of 2,000 men. During the onset of the revolt, Said’s fighters, facing nearly 25,000 Turkish troops, gained control of a vilayet near Diyarbakir. Besides seizing Turkish land and acquiring additional munitions, early victories instilled confidence in the rebellion and garnered further Kurdish support.

Throughout the conflict, Said’s fighters used both conventional military tactics, including multi-front assaults and attempts at urban seizure, and unconventional warfare, including guerrilla tactics. An example of the conventional military organization was evident in the assault on Diyarbakir, where reports saw “three columns of 5,000 strong, under the personal command of Shaykh Said”. The establishment of conventional higher levels of Kurdish military command may also be assumed as documents written by foreigners were addressed to a ‘Kurdish War Office’. These documents, found by Turkish forces, may have been propaganda however, designed to create the illusion of international support for the Kurdish rebellion.

Despite the valiant efforts of Said’s fighters, the Kemalist government was able to quickly amass forces to suppress the rebellion by early April 1925 and capture Shaykh Said as he attempted to flee to Iran on 27 April 1925. After his capture, Shaykh Said was promptly tried for his actions against the Turkish government. Said, along with a number of his followers, was hung on 29 June 1925. Like the Iraqi Kurds under Shaykh Mahmud, Shaykh Said’s surviving followers did not stop their attacks after the removal of their leader. Throughout 1925 and 26 their assaults continued as they conducted guerrilla operations against Turkish military units. After their capture, these remaining fighters proclaimed themselves to be ‘the unvanquished clan of the nation’. Whether or not these ideas of nationalism were expressed by all the remaining followers cannot be determined, although, according to Van Bruinessen, “neither the guerrilla troops, nor the leaders of the Ararat revolt that followed, used religious phraseology”.

Because of growing Kurdish awareness, nationalism, despite its early urban, intellectual, and political-only roots, had become a military cause in and of itself, separate from religious motivations. Although recruitment remained based on tribal or shaykh allegiances, the Kurdish nationalist struggle became a legitimate call to arms. By fighting for “Kurdistan,” Kurdish fighters, the future Peshmerga, separated themselves from the mujihadeen, their regional religious warrior brethren.

Khoybun (The Ararat Revolt) (1927-1930)

Main article: Republic of Ararat

Despite the failure of Shaykh Said and Azadi, Kurdish intellectuals and nationalist leaders continued to plan for an independent Kurdistan. Many of these nationalists met in October 1927 and not only proclaimed the independence of Kurdistan, but also formed Khoybun (Independence), a “supreme national organ … with full and exclusive national and international powers”. This new organization’s leadership believed the key to success in the struggle for an independent Kurdistan lay not in tribal allegiances, but in a “properly conceived, planned and organized” military enterprise.

In displaying the need for a proper military structure, Khoybun nominated Ihsan Nuri Pasha Commander-In-Chief of the Kurdish National Army. Nuri Pasha, besides being a former Kurdish member of the “Young Turk Movement”, showed his allegiance to the Kurdish cause when he led the mutiny within the Turkish military prior to the Shaykh Said Revolt.

By 1928, Nuri Pasha had assembled a small group of soldiers armed with modern weapons and trained in infantry tactics. This force initiated the Khoybun revolt, marching towards Mount Ararat. Nuri and his men not only achieved success in reaching Mount Ararat, but they were able to secure the towns of Bitlis, Van, and most of the countryside around Lake Van, establishing a notable area of Kurdish resistance.

Along with their weapons, organization, and ability, Kurdish strength was enhanced by the positioning of the rebellion. Although Turkish forces attempted to suppress the revolt as early as 1927, their success was tempered by a lack of Persian cooperation, as Mount Ararat lay in the Turkish-Persian border. By 1930, however, Turkish forces began to take the upper hand. Beginning in May, the Turkish army went on the offensive, surrounding Mount Ararat with over 10,000 troops by late June. Troop numbers on both sides continued to grow as Kurdish tribes were recruited to join the cause and approximately 60,000 more soldiers were called up by the Turkish government.

The biggest blow to Khoybun’s Ararat revolt, however, came from Persia. Although initially supportive of Kurdish resistance, the Persian government did not resist Turkish military advances into Persia to surround Mount Ararat. Persian frontier guardsmen also began to close the Persian-Turkish border to non-essential travelers, including Kurdish tribes attempting to reinforce the revolt. Persia would eventually completely submit to Turkish operational demands, trading the land surrounding Mount Ararat for Turkish land near Qutur and Barzirgan.

The organized revolt on Mount Ararat was defeated by the fall of 1930, although the Turks waited until the following spring to attack any remaining tribal dissenters. Similar to the outcome of previous Kurdish uprisings, the Turkish government was merciless to the rebels and anyone suspected of aiding them, destroying villages and killing thousands of Kurds.

Despite the defeat, Khoybun and the Ararat revolt are important to the history of the Peshmerga for three reasons. First, never before had a military force been constructed specifically for the Kurdish nationalist ideal. The influence of the tribal shaykh as military commander was increasingly reduced as nationalism became a more important reason for Kurdish military actions. Second, the Khoybun revolt showed a growing relationship between the Barzani tribe and Kurdish nationalism. Although Mulla Mustafa Barzani had been involved in Shaykh Mahmud’s revolt and had met with Shaykh Said, the military support granted to the Khoybun cause from the Barzani tribe (as led by Shaykh Ahmad and commanded by Mulla Mustafa) was unprecedented. This level of support would continue to grow as future Peshmerga, specifically from the Barzani area, would again be called on to defend attempted Kurdish nation-states. Finally, the Khoybun revolt began a pattern of international cooperation against Kurdish nationalism. Exchanges of land between neighboring countries would be seen again as regional powers temporarily put aside their differences in an attempt to suppress Kurdish military ability.

Emergence of Barzani’s Forces and the Barzani Revolt (1943-1945)

The Republic of Kurdistan – Mahabad (1945-1946)

Main article: Republic of Kurdistan

In 1941 Britain and the USSR partitioned Iran into two zones of control in order to prevent the country from entering the war on the side of Germany. In the Soviet zone, the Kurds of northwest Iran enjoyed de facto independence. At war’s end, Tehran pressured the Soviets to leave, which they did in December 1945. As they left, the Kurds formally proclaimed themselves independent in January 1946, with their capital at Mahabad. The government included many Kurds from Iraq, including Mustafa Barzani, the army commander. Their forces were Soviet-equipped and uniformed, but they owed no ideological allegiance to the USSR. Their flag was the tricolor of the Kurdish Communist Party (Komala) plus a golden sun in the center.

Teheran gradually marshalled its forces, and when they were satisfied the Soviets would not intervene they crushed the Mahabad Republic in December 1946. The leaders were executed, but Barzani led the Iranian forces on a wild goose chase and eventually escaped to the Soviet Union. His escapades contributed much to Kurdish legend and nostalgia for independence. In 1946 he founded the Kurdish Democratic Party, Partiya Demokrata Kurdistane (PDK). The Mahabad Republic stands as the high point of the Kurdish nationalist movement. This short period of national identity marked the official creation of the peshmerga and cemented the role of Mustafa Barzani as a military hero of the Kurdish people.

Post-Mahabad Journeys and Conflicts (1946-1947)

Peshmerga in the USSR (1947-1958)

Life for the Peshmerga failed to improve upon entering the Soviet Union. They were quickly brought to an impromptu compound surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by Soviet troops. According to Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish exiles were interrogated, given bread and soup, and treated as prisoners of war.

The Peshmerga also were soon deprived of their leader. Within weeks of their arrival, Mustafa Barzani was escorted to Nakhichevan, Soviet Armenia, where he stayed until being transferred to Shush and finally to Baku, Soviet Azarbaijan. Eventually, many of the Peshmerga leaders were separated from the rank and file and their families. Among those separated were Shaykh Sulayman, Ali Mohammad Siddique, Sa’id Mulla Abdullah, and Ziyab Dari. The separation would not last however, as the rest of the Barzani tribe and their Peshmerga were brought to Baku by the end of 1947. While in Baku, the Peshmerga were reorganized under the command of As’ad Khoshavi. Under Khoshavi, Sa’id Wali Beg, Mohammad Amin Mirkhan, Mamand Maseeh, and Misto Mirozi were appointed company commanders. Once reconstituted and given Soviet uniforms and weapons, the Peshmerga conducted training in “regular” military operations under the tutelage of several Soviet military officers.

After their first few years in the Soviet Union, the Peshmerga and other followers of Barzani saw their training cease, quickly becoming subject to government manipulation. For long periods the Peshmerga were separated from their leadership with many forced into hard labor. Only after Barzani personally wrote to Soviet leader Josef Stalin did conditions finally improve for his followers. The Peshmerga were finally reunited with their command in late 1951.

Conditions also improved for Mulla Mustafa Barzani as he was eventually granted the privileges of a leader-in-exile. Throughout his years in the USSR, Barzani was able to broadcast via Soviet radio and attended courses in language and politics. Although many sources claim Barzani was given the rank of general in the Soviet Army, Massoud Barzani denies that this occurred. Possibly most important, however, was Barzani’s ability to correspond with Kurdish exiles throughout the world, including Jalal Talabani and Ismet Cherif Vanly.

Meanwhile, the successful coup d`etat of Brigadier Abd al Karim Qasim and his followers in Iraq in July 1958 opened a new chapter in Iraqi-Kurdish relations. Shortly after taking power, Qasim pardoned Shaykh Ahmad Barzani and allowed Mulla Mustafa, his followers, and his Peshmerga to return to Iraq. The Barzani exile in the Soviet Union ended after 12 years, and upon their return, the Peshmerga would once again play a prominent role in Iraqi regional politics.

The Peshmerga in Modern Iraq (1958-2003)

Barzani’s Return to Iraq / Prelude to War (1958-1961)

The Kurdish-Iraqi War (1961-1970)

Peshmerga and the Barzani-Talabani/Ahmed Split

The Second Kurdish-Iraqi War (1974-1975)

Secret negotiations between Barazani and Saddam Hussein led to the “March Manifesto”. The agreement included a pledge from the Kurds to stop their rebellion, and in exchange the regime would allow the establishment of a Kurdish autonomous region in areas where the Kurds were a majority.[6] The agreement was to be implemented within four years.[7] However during those four years the regime encouraged the “Arabization” of the oil-rich Kurdish areas.[8] After decreasing the percentage of Kurds in the north for four years, the regime demanded the implementation of the manifesto. The Kurds weren’t willing to implement it. After the ultimatum extended by the Baath regime expired, the manifesto became a law on March 11, 1974.[9] Clashes between the rebels and the Iraqi security forces erupted immediately. During the fighting, the Iraqi army used 80% of its force and was able to push the rebels toward the northern border. However the fighting cost the lives of more than 10,000 Iraqi soldiers.[10] The Iraqi army was unable to crush the rebellion because of Iran’s continual assistance to the rebels, Tehran even deployed two Divisions of the Iranian Army inside Iraq in January of 1975.[11] Saddam Hussein, who chose the confrontational attitude toward the Kurds was determined not to lose that fight.[10] In late 1974 he began negotiations with the Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.[12] An agreement was reached and signed by the sides during an OPEC summit in Algiers. The Agreement guaranteed that Iran would stop assisting the Kurdish rebels. In exchange Iraq agreed to demarcate the joint border with Iran according to the Constantinople Protocol of 1913. In the 1913 protocol the border line in the Shatt Al-Arab was in the middle (thalweg) of the waterway,[13] and not as was previously decided in 1937 between the countries. In the 1937 understanding Iraq’s territorial water extended to most of the Shatt.

The Shah stopped the Iranian support to the rebels, withdrew his forces and sealed the border on April 1. The Iraqi army was able to crush the Peshmerga rebellion until the end of March.[10] Many leaders of the Kurds, including Mustafa Barzani fled to Iran and others to Turkey.

Creation of the PUK (1975-1979)

The Political Bureau (or central committee) of the KDP, led by Ibrahim Ahmed and his son in lawJalal Talabani, broke off from the KDP in 1966 when Mustafa Barzani insisted on taking all important decisions without consulting other party leaders.

When the KDP laid down arms following theAlgiers agreement in 1975, the Politbureau joined with other groups to form the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan). PUK quickly ecoming the second biggest party in Northern Iraq and the, building its own force of Peshmerga.

The PUK and the KDP developed an intense rivalry that would even lead to war between the two factions.

The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988)

Main article: Iran-Iraq War

During the Iran-Iraq War the Iraqi Kurds sided with Iran against the Ba’athis Iraq. Help from the Kurds was one of the most important reasons for Irans continuous success in the Northern Front (Iraqi Kurdistan) and eventually the Iranians even captured Kirkuk. Iraq responded to the Iranian advances with chemical gas and Saddam Hussein and his government gassed thousands of Kurds and Iranian soldiers. Although the gas did beat the Iranians in the Central Front and Iraq could recapture all lost territories there including the oil-rich Majnoon Islands Iran kept on making gains in the North until the Iranians accepted Saddams truce. However Saddam still tried to invade Khouzestan as he thought he could still win the war and the Mujahedin al-Kalq (an Iranian terrorist organisation that had sided with Iraq) attacked Iran in the center, but both of these invasions failed (though Iraq did make small gains in Iran) and Saddam also accepted the truce. Now the Iranians pulled out of North Iraq and Iran stopped supporting the Kurds in Iraq. The Kurds had to now continue fighting Saddam on their own and were unsuccessful.

1989

On 13 July 1989, Dr. Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, Secretary-general of PDK-I, and two of his collaborators, were assassinated in Vienna, Austria as they were negotiating with envoys of the Iranian regime, at the latter’s invitation, for a peaceful solution to the Kurdish issue in Iran. Dr. Ghassemlou’s successor, Dr. Sadeq Sharafkandi met with the same fate on 17 September 1992 in Berlin where he had attended the Congress of the Socialist International.

PDKI Fights For:

A democratic, independent and non-aligned Iran
The right of the peoples of Iran to self-determination
Realization of worker’s social and economic demands
Equality of men and women in society and within the family
Separation of religion and State

Peshmerga During Operation Desert Storm (1990-1991)

Main article: Gulf War

In the wake of the First Persian Gulf War (aka “Operation Desert Storm”: January to March 1991), humanitarian considerations drove the United States to establish two “no-fly” zones in Iraq: one zone was in southern Iraq, where the Hussein regime had viciously persecuted the Shiite Arabs; the other zone was in the Kurdish territory in northern Iraq. The Baghdad government was forbidden to operate any aircraft in either of these zones, a proscription enforced by United States and United Kingdom military assets in the region. Unable to use air power in the north, and with its conventional capabilities having been all but demolished during Desert Storm, Baghdad had little choice to but to sit by and witness the rebirth of the Kurdish self-governing region.

The Kurdish Civil War (1995-1998)

The civil war among the Peshmergas of the PUK and the KDP held up the military development of the Peshmerga as the attention was no longer on outside threats.

1998-2003

After the 1998 “Washington Agreement”, fighting between the KDP and the PUK Peshmerga came to an end. As active PUK Peshmerga put down their weapons, elder Peshmerga veterans began filling more political PUK roles. With the KDP increasingly led by Barzani family members, the political tension between the Kurdish parties remained.

The international emergence of the al-Qaeda terrorist network following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the U.S. did not allow Peshmerga weapons to be silent for very long. Although sporadic fighting continued with the PKK (the Turkish-based Kurdish Worker’s Party), the PUK Peshmerga faced its largest threat from Ansar al-Islam, an al-Qaeda-sponsored[citation needed] militant group attempting to establish itself on the Iraqi side of the Iran-Iraq border and supported by the Ba’athist government[citation needed]. Led by Mullah Krekar, a Kurd of strict Islamic faith, Ansar al-Islam was composed of over 500 guerrilla fighters, many of whom fled Afghanistan after the U.S. Operation Enduring Freedom.

Although they had faced traditional military opposition from the Iraqis and mountain-based guerrilla tactics during inter-Kurdish fighting, the PUK Peshmerga had difficulty countering the fanatical assault of Ansar al-Islam. The foreign fighters used suicide attacks, assassinations, mines, bombs, and swords and machetes to not only kill the Peshmerga but to desecrate their bodies. Whereas Ansar al-Islam allegedly received support from Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, the PUK Peshmerga had only the KDP forces as allies. Both parties were steadfast in their displeasure about the Ansar al-Islam presence. PUK commander Anwar Dolani, for example, asserted there is “no room for terrorism in Iraqi Kurdistan” and Massoud Barzani claimed Peshmerga forces did not need assistance to defeat the unwelcome militants. Despite Kurdish solidarity, U.S. preparations to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein brought welcome reinforcements to the conflict.

Peshmerga During Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003)

The Peshmerga, along with the US-led Coalition’s 10th Special Forces Group, moved through Mosul and Kirkuk towards Baghdad.

Peshmerga in the New Iraq (2003-Present)

The Peshmerga are allied with the American-led coalition. The Peshmergas of the PUK and the KDP are now working together, but whether this alliance will hold remains to be seen, considering that the KDP actually helped Saddam’s forces drive out the PUK in the 1990s. [15] [16]

[edit]
The New Peshmerga Military

Image:Kurdische Panzer.jpg

Peshmerga forces fought side by side with American troops in the 2003 Iraq War in Iraqi Kurdistan. Since that time the Peshmerga have assumed full responsibility for the security of the Kurdish areas of Northern Iraq.

In early 2005 it was speculated by Newsweek magazine that Peshmerga forces could be trained by the US to take on Sunni rebels in Iraq.

In late 2004, when Arab Iraqi Police and ING (Iraqi National Guard) units in the city of Mosul collapsed in the face of an insurgent uprising, Kurdish Peshmerga battalions, who had recently been converted into ING forces, led the counter-attack alongside US military units. To this day, there are a number of Kurdish battalions of former Peshmerga in the Iraqi Army serving in Northern Iraq.

It is estimated that as of January, 2005 there were 180,000 Peshmerga fighters in Iraqi Kurdistan. The article estimates their number to be 270,000 A recent CBS News reports places their number at 375,000. 2007 400,000 Soldiers.

The Peshmerga are an active partner in the American-led coalition in Iraq. Many Peshmerga are fluent in Arabic, in contrast to foreign coalition troops, and they therefore play an important role in the Sunni triangle of Central Iraq. On the strategic level the Peshmergas are ready to fight a guerrilla war in case of a Turkish or an Iranian invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan.

References

^ “Kurdistan: The Other Iraq”
^ milliyet.com
^ “Willing to face Death: A History of Kurdish Military Forces – the Peshmerga – from the Ottoman Empire to Present-Day Iraq”
^ “Willing to face Death: A History of Kurdish Military Forces – the Peshmerga – from the Ottoman Empire to Present-Day Iraq”
^ “Prosecutor Confident of Genocide Case Against Saddam” 14 September 2006
^ Ephraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi-Karsh – Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography (The Free Press, 1991). pp. 67-75.
^ .S. Harris – Ethnic Conflict and the Kurds in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, pp.118-120, 1977
^ The introduction in Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds (Human Rights Watch Report, 1993).
^ Kurdish Revolt in Iraq 1974-1975, Onwar.
^ a b c Joint intelligence analysis by the U.S. State Department, CIA and DIA from May 1, 1975 – The Implications of the Iran-Iraq agreementPDF (651 KB) .
‘^ J. M. Abdulaghani – Iraq and Iran: The Years of Crisis. Baltimore, The John Hopkinks University Press and London, Croom Helm, 1984. p. 142.
^ C. Kutchera – Le Mouvment national Kurde, Paris Flammarion, 1979. pp. 322-323.
^ The full text of the agreement
^ The Last Years of Mustafa Barzani, Middle East Quarterly, June 1994.
^ http://www.iraqinews.com/party_partriotic_union_of_kurdistan.shtml
^ www.redpepper.org.uk/intarch/x-iraqliberty.html

Kurdish Music (Kurdish: Muzîk û strana kurdî) refers to music performed in Kurdish language.
Traditionally, there are three types of Kurdish Classical performers – storytellers (çîrokbêj), minstrels (stranbêj) and bards (dengbêj). There was no specific music related to the Kurdish princely courts, and instead, music performed in night gatherings (şevbihêrk) is considered classical.

Several musical forms are found in this genre. Many songs and are epic in nature, such as the popular Lawiks which are heroic ballads recounting the tales of Kurdish heroes of the past like Saladin. Heyrans are love ballads usually expressing the melancholy of separation and unfulfilled love. Lawje is a form of religious music and Payizoks are songs performed specifically in autumn. Love songs, dance music, wedding and other celebratory songs (dîlok/narînk), erotic poetry and work songs are also popular.

Musical instruments include the tembûr (saz), biziq (bozuk), qernête (oboe) and bilûr (flute) in northern and western Kurdistan, şimşal (long flute), cûzele, kemençe (a spike fiddle that some musicologists have credited the Kurds with its invention) and def (frame drum) in the south and east. Zirne (wooden shawm) and dahol (drum) are found in all parts of Kurdistan.

The most frequently used song form has two verses with ten syllable lines. Kurdish songs (stran or goranî) are characterized by their simple melodies, with a range of only four or five notes.

History

Historically, Kurdish Music has very ancient roots that go back to the Hurrian period of Kurdish history. The Hurrians – the ancestors of the modern Kurds – were an ancient people that inhabited present-day Kurdistan and established several kingdoms before their aryanization by the coming Medes. A Hurrian tablet dating back to the 13th century B.C. was discovered in Ugaret; it contains in its upper portion the text of a Hurrian hymn. In the lower portion, it contains a series of numbers and technical terms that have been interpreted as a score rendering the tune to which the hymn would have been sung. This is then the earliest known musical score in history. Interestingly, the meqam in which the hymn was composed corresponds with the modern meqam “Kurd”.

Kurdish musicians had a great role in the musical life of the Islamic caliphate. Zeryab was one among the absolutely greatest musicians in the Islamic era. He brought the Middle Eastern musical tradition to Muslim Spain and trained local musicians in his style. He also invented many maqams and musical forms and improved the design of the ‘ûd. Ibrahim Mûsili and Is’haq Mûsili were considered among the greatest musicians of the Abbasid court. They wrote several first-rate works on local Iranic and Mesopotamian styles. Musicologists like Safi al-Din Ûrmawi – the founder of the systematist school of music (Wright 1978) – and Muhammad al-Khatib Arbîlî who wrote some of the most seminal works on Middle Eastern musicology.

In Turkey

For most of the 20th century, songs in Kurdish Language were banned in Turkey. Some singers sang in Turkish, while others violated the ban and were imprisoned or fled to various countries[citation needed], especially Germany. A black market, however, has long existed in Turkey, and pirate radio stations and underground recordings have always been available. In the 2000s the ban[citation needed] has been lifted due to the falling activities of PKK.

Some of the foremost figures in Kurdish classical music of the past century from this part include Mihemed ‘Arif Cizrawî (1912 – 1986), who is considered the greatest Kurdish classical composer and vocalist, Hesen Cizrawî, Şeroyê Biro, ‘Evdalê Zeynikê, Si’îd Axayê Cizîrî and the female singers Miryem Xanê and Eyşe Şan.

Şivan Perwer, the most famous Kurdish musician of all time, came from the Kurds of Turkey. He came to fame in 1972 during a Kurdish revolt in Iraqi Kurdistan, and became a superstar before fleeing to Germany in 1976. Şivan Perwer is a superb composer, vocalist and tembûr player. He concentrates mainly on political and nationalistic music – of which he is considered the founder in Kurdish music – as well as classical and folk music. Şivan’s innovative style, passionate melodies and highly expressive and powerful voice, in addition to his masterful use of various instrumental combinations has made him the inspiration of a whole generation of musicians and given him an international reputation.

Another important Kurdish musician from Turkey is Nîzammetîn Arîç – also known as “Feqiyê Teyra”. He began with singing in Turkish, but rejected becoming a star at the cost of debasing his language and culture. As a result of singing in Kurdish, he was imprisoned, and then obliged to flee to Syria and eventually to Germany. Arîç, also a film director and actor, is greatly talented in performing Kurdish classical music and folk songs with brilliant mastery, dynamism and taste. He also has a unique and elegant style in musical composition.

Other noted musicians from this part include Kazo, Ali Baran, Birader and Beytocan. Famous groups of music are: Koma Amed, Koma Denge Azadi, Carnewa and Agire Jiyan.

Zazaki musicians mostly sing traditional ballads of Dersim such musicians not only have influenced contemporary Turkish music but also Kurdish music in general. Such artists include the Metin & Kemal Kahraman, Ahmet Aslan and Mikail Aslan.

Iranian Kurdistan

In Iran, Kurdish language, radio stations and newspapers have generally been allowed, but music has long been carefully scrutinized for political references. Kurdish music from Iranian Kurdistan has a rather distinctive form with its ancient native instruments such as the Def and the tembûr and with a shadow of Persian influence. The sacred sufi music of the Yarsanî sect (Ahli Haqq) with its 72 meqams is thought to be one of the most authentic and deep-rooted musical traditions in the world.

Some of the most famous classical musicians – composers and singers – of the past century from this part include Hasan Zirak (1921 – 1972) who performed and recorded more than thousand songs, Muhammad Mamlê (1925 – 1998) who was known for his beautiful voice, Abbas Kamandi, Aziz Shahrokh, Hesen Derzi, Shehên Talabani, Sey Heme Sefayi, Usman Hewrami and Mazhar Xaliqi.

The Kamkars (Koma Kamkaran) from the city of Sine is a leading ensemble in Kurdish music today. They are internationally renowned for their performance of Kurdish folk music and with great dynamism and innovation. Some members of the group, including Arsalan and Hooshang Kamkar, have also worked individually and produced successful works.

Nasir Rezazî, who resides in Sweden, performs Kurdish music from all genres. Ali Akbar Moradi is the greatest master of the religious tembûr music of the Yarsan sect to which he belongs.[citation needed] Female singers include the late Marziye Fariqi and her sister, Leila who is known for performing pop-Westernized songs.

Several Kurds have also been influential in classical Persian music, including Said Ali Asghar Kordestani (1882 – 1936), Shahram Nazeri, Kayhan Kalhor ,Mohammad Jalil Andalibi, Mojtaba Mirzadeh, and Jamshid Andalibi.

Morad Kaveh is living in Sweden and is a new successful singer and musician.

Iraqi Kurdistan

Until Saddam Hussein rose to power later in the 20th century, Kurds in Iraq were allowed to perform as they wished, so long as music did not encroach on politics. Ali Merdan (1904 – 1981), a well known singer and composer, arose during this period. Restrictions on recording grew slowly, and censors banned anything with a hint of subversion. A black market flourished, and some of the Kurds’ most popular musicians were executed, including Erdewan Zaxolî. Year 1974 saw a degree of autonomy being achieved for the Kurds, but it was short-lived. After siding with Iran during a war, many Kurds were murdered with chemical weapons by Hussein’s government, and the Kurds became highly repressed until the Gulf War and US invasion of Iraq. When the Kurds restored their autonomy in 1991, they started rebuilding their region. Artists now enjoy a good support from the regional government in Iraqi Kurdistan, and Kurdish artists and writers are encouraged to move and work there.

Kurdish singers from Iraqi Kurdistan had sometimes the opportunity of performing and recording with Arab orchestras, which is the reason why Kurdish music from this part is somewhat influenced by Arabian music. Some of the best-known classical musicians of the past generations here are Tehsîn Taha, who was renowned for his beautiful voice, Ali Merdan, Anwer karadaghi, Karim Kaban, Eyaz Yûsif, ‘Îsa Berwarî, Kawîs Axa, Shamal Sayib and violin players Anwer karadaghi, Dilşad.

Zakaria Abdulla have been particularly famous in pop, he’s the Kurdish King of Pop.

Syrian Kurdistan

Despite the lack of any musical educational infrastructure, several famous Kurdish musicians arose from Syria.

Gerabêtê Xaço was a great classical stranbêj, Muradê Kinê (Miradko) was another great stranbêj and kemençe player. Se’îd Yûsif (known as “prince of the biziq”) is acclaimed for his unparalleled virtuosity on the biziq and his authentic teqsîms and beautiful song melodies. Mihemed Şêxo was a master of symbolic nationalistic lyrics who was imprisoned several times for expressing his political opinion through his songs. Some other important figures are Aram Tîgran, Mehmûd Ezîz – along with his brother Mihemed Elî Şakir -, Faris Bavê Fîras, Bangîn (Hikmet Cemîl), vocalist Miço Kendeş and biziq player Ehmedê Çep. Ciwan Haco has been famous in pop/Westernized Kurdish music, “Şeyda” is locally known for his love songs, Nizar is known for its special texts, music and poetry. Nȗhat is known for his soul music. Adnan babê Hêco is a singer of the many articles written about love.

Academic Studies of Kurdish Music

The earliest study of Kurdish music was initiated by an Armenian priest, Vartapet Komitas in 1904. The first academic center for Kurdish music was founded in Yerevan, called The Malikian School of Music, which studied the old dengbêj. Kurdish academic, Cemîla Celîl published two collections of popular Kurdish songs in 1964 and 1965. In Iraq, a center for study of Kurdish music was founded in 1958. An academic study of Kurdish music, dance and musical instruments in Hakkari was published by Dr. D. Christensen in 1963. The music of Kurdish Jews has also been studied in the 70s, and published by the Jewish Music Research Centre in Jerusalem

Further reading

Skalla, Eva and Jemima Amiri. “Songs of the Stateless”. In Broughton, Simon and Ellingham, Mark with McConnachie, James and Duane, Orla (Ed.), World Music, Vol. 1: Africa, Europe and the Middle East, pp 378-384. Rough Guides Ltd, Penguin Books. ISBN 1-85828-636-0
Izady, Mehrdad. “The Kurds, a Concise Handbook”, Taylor & Francis, p 256 – 268. ISBN 0-8448-1727-9.
Dr. D. Christensen, “Tanzlieder der Hakkari-Kurden”, Eine material-kritisch Studie, in Jahrbuch für musikalische Volks-und Völker-Künde, Berlin i, pp. 11-47, 1963.
Edith Gerson-Kiwi, “The Music of Kurdistan Jews. A synopsis of their musical styles”, in Yuval, Studies of the Jewish Music Research Centre, ii, Jerusalem 1971.
Vartabed Comitas, “Quelques spécimens des mélodies kurdes”, in Recueil d’Emine, Moscow 1904, and re-edited in Erivan in 1959.