Shut the fuck up. All you're doing is dodging when I answered your stupid question with evidence. You wanted it, you got it. When I showed you that you were wrong, you just said a line that made no fucking sense and then tried to play it off like those countries were somehow all secretly on "the US payroll" as though they were little juntas.
So the Assyrians who live among the Kurds tend to have a positive view, those further away in Baghdad a more ambiguous one, and the diaspora out of the country have the worst view.I don't know where the hell you get that load of propaganda from, but the Assyrians actually living in the north have a very positive view on their Kurdish neighbors, most likely because of how well they are treated in the past decades and have long consider their ways of life to intertwine with the Kurds.
Choosing between living free in an independent Kurdistan (with reserved seats for them in the Kurdish Parliament) or being massacred by the Islamic Caliphate while waiting for the Iraqi Government to help is an easy choice, and most Assyrians sure as hell don't want to go at it alone like you're insinuating, knowing they would quickly ends up in an ISIS mass grave.
The Assyrians of northwest Iraq and northeast Syria can legitimately lay claim to being one of the oldest indigenous peoples of the Middle East. Christian speakers of Aramaic, they trace their culture, history and collective identity to the Assyrian empire that collapsed in the 7th century B.C.. With the exception of the Jews and the Persians, few peoples in the region can clearly trace their community to such ancient roots. The Assyrians are also sometimes referred to as Syriacs or Chaldeans, among other names (generally depending on their particular approach to Christianity).
While groups such as the Palestinians claim descent from Canaanites, and the Kurds claim roots in the Medes civilization, such links appear tenuous because the Palestinians and Kurds only “discovered” these lineages recently (for instrumental reasons in all likelihood), and they hardly kept Canaanite or Medes culture and identity alive over the centuries. Assyrians, Jews and Persians, in contrast, maintained a clear ideational link to the ancient cultures, languages and national territory of the Assyria, Israel and Persia. They did so since long before modern nationalism gave them a reason to.
In more modern times, the fate of the Assyrian people turned tragic. From the time of the Islamic conquests to the present, the Assyrians suffered continuous massacres and repression. Often working as tools of Ottoman, Persian or more contemporary Arab, Persian and Turkish states, Kurdish tribes carried out raids, massacres and conquests against Assyrian communities. In my course on political violence, I give my students a short article by Nuri Kino about “Seyfo” (Sword), the period around World War One when the Ottoman Empire pursued a “final solution” against the indigenous Christian communities of Anatolia. Almost without exception, the students have never heard of this terrible episode in history.
Whereas mainstream Turkish, Arab and Iranian societies likewise remain willfully ignorant of this history, most Kurds acknowledge the terrible role their forefathers played in these events. Kurdish leaders in both Iraq and Turkey have referred to this era as a source of shame for them, and worked hard to acknowledge the Assyrians’ identity, language, culture and place in today’s society. Kurdish-run municipalities in Turkey went to the trouble of publishing materials in Aramaic for the area’s remaining Assyrians, and the pro-Kurdish parties there even recently elected the first Assyrian member of Turkey’s parliament. In Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurds have reserved seats for the Assyrian community in their parliament since they established it in 1992. They went out of their way to assure the protection of modern Assyrian communities, culture and language. In Syria, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) insisted that Assyrians be included in the various cantons’ top administrative bodies, and the People’s Protection Units (YPG) incorporated and armed many Assyrians into their fighting force.
Assyrians I have known in Iraq and Syria were all well aware of this. Their attitude towards the Kurds was thus largely positive, although often still ambivalent as well given their difficult history. While living in Iraq in 2003, I spent a lot of time with Assyrians and Chaldeans in Duhok, Mosul, Qaraqosh and Baghdad as I conducted a capacity and needs assessment of their NGOs (in order to help them receive a large sum of financial aid from a Christian charity in Canada). The Assyrians in the north saw a future for themselves with the Kurds, although some of those I spoke to in Baghdad had different views. For the most part, their attitude was a realistic, moderate approach, focused on safeguarding their communities and being part of whatever political institutions (including those of Kurdistan) that would help them do so.
In contrast, the diaspora Assyrian community could not seem more different. Their politics appear to be made up of bitter nationalist victimhood, mired in past injustices. A perusal of their publications and activities shows a movement focused on blaming the Kurds for almost everything. Article after article published in English by the Assyrian diaspora portrays a saintly, peaceful Assyrian community perpetually attacked by Kurdish savages, with condemnation of the Islamic State and other jihadis coming almost as an afterthought.
Let us set aside for a moment inconvenient truths, such as the Assyrian empire’s myriad conquests (dispersing the 12 tribes of northern Israel into oblivion, for example), Assyrian raids on neighboring communities in the 19th century and before, or how the British and French colonialists recruited Assyrian troops to help them quell rebelling Muslims (including the Kurds). The elderly Assyrian men I met in Iraq, some of whom served in the Royal Air Force, may well have helped bomb the likes of Sheikh Mahmoud Barzinji’s villages (although I would never be so impolite as to ask that question to an elder of that age).
The Assyrians do their community no good when they deny the Kurds’ own tragedies, or even reject the notion of a Kurdish land, identity and language (referring instead to “scattered tribes that spoke dialects of Persian”). The discourse often borders on racist, with sentences like “Deception is an art and the Kurds have perfected it.” They even pedal fantastic conspiracy theories, accusing the Kurds in Syria of having purposefully provoked the Islamic State into attacking Assyrian villages so that the YPG could come in and present itself as the Assyrians’ saviors. They take isolated political incidents, such as a quarrel over a piece of property or a skirmish between a pro-Assad Assyrian militia in Qamishly and the YPG, and cast them as part of an endless story of Kurdish depravation.
Such attitudes seem more than a little ironic, since without the YPG and the Peshmerga, the Assyrians of northern Syria and Iraq would all likely be dead, lying in some jihadist-dug mass grave. The diaspora Assyrian community should thus consider doing what their relatives still living in the homeland are increasingly busy with – taking the hand of friendship and reconciliation that the Kurds have extended. They need not forget their history in the process, of course, and deeper reconciliation takes a lot of time and effort from everyone concerned. A lack of empathy for the other and a discourse unable to rise above victimhood will get the Assyrians nothing, however. In the sorry neighborhood that the Middle East has become, the Kurds are probably the Assyrians’ best friend, neighbor and hope for the future.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.
http://www.rudaw.net/english/opinion/21012016
Your average Kurd is more religious than your average Turk but the Kurds who form the regional governments and fight for them are likely more attuned to the official Kurdish ideology which is secular. For the first few electoral wins for Erdogan I remember reading that more Kurds voted for the AKP than for the Kurdish nationalist party in Turkey because the latter are like nonviable third parties in the US and since they're more religious the AKP was more their style than for an urbanized and secular Turk.
Can't blame them. We supported the Shah and constantly antagonize them. Remember "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran"? We put them on the so called axis of evil and were beating the war drums when we invaded Iraq. I feel for the US soldiers killed but the Iranians and Syrians were acting completely logically from a self preservation standpoint by fucking us over in Iraq. Making Iraq a quagmire means we were less likely to invade either of those countries and it basically worked, American appetite for war died with the headache of Iraq.
I get them acting in their own interests and all, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to forget about what they did to us. Just because it's logical doesn't mean that I'm on board with it. And truth be told, I don't think we could have managed fighting wars in 3 countries simultaneously, much less pay for it all. Shit, fighting 2 was more than difficult enough, and the results weren't great.
By any reasonable standard we started it. As I said, we're the ones that supported a vicious dictatorship that had few qualms about using extreme violence against its own people. We overthrew their democratically elected government to make sure said dictatorship survived so we even betrayed our own values. We supported a maniac in his war against them in which produced 1 million deaths on both sides. As far as the tally goes, we've done them worse then the reverse.
Iran isn't innocent but they've been far less aggressive in the region than the US. Israel has legit beef with them so if they don't want to ally with Iran then fine. But we shouldn't let a junior partner like them ruin our chances of establishing warmer relations with Iran. If anything in a more perfect world better relations between Iran and the US can lead to better relations between Israel and Iran.
Foreign policy doesn't need to be dictated by asking ourselves what we would have done in their shoes either. Foreign policy is about one thing: promoting our interests. That requires long-term strategic thinking, and does being friendly to Iran promote those interests? I'm skeptical.
Right but as Undying said our frigid relations has more to do with our alliances in the Middle East than their government. Their form of government is arguably the result of our meddling in their affairs and the use of our regional alliances to fuck them over. And yet even still the few democratically accountable institutions in their country show the people slowly turning towards better relations with the West. There are even clerical factions that support more moderate approaches to FP and back the Rouhani government.
So this is more game theory. Do you open your arms for an embrace and accept that someone may take the opportunity to shoot you in the chest? Or do you play it safe and keep your defensive posture, knowing that they’ll do the same thing? Personally, I’m comfortable waiting for them to make the first move towards peace with us. They can drop the whole hardline Islamist thing whenever they want, and I don’t feel compelled to risk our safety or the safety of our allies. This system and it’s problems aren’t good, but trading it for a new set of problems may be considerably worse.
I'd say the first has been made with the nuclear deal and the people of Iran support that as evidenced by their reelection of Rouhani. We can look at that and remain defensive and antagonistic, which if history is any indication only empowers the radicals, or we can try to oblige them and work towards better relations, which would seem to empower the moderates.
But how many nuclear deals will it take to get them to a place of normalcy? I think that we could eventually get to a place that you’re describing, but I think we’d be making a ton of concessions along the way. I think we would be giving too many concessions for a prize that honestly isn’t worth the price, and probability of success is far too low. And what would our allies think? Our favorable treatment of Iran may lose us influence or favor in places that we need it more than in Tehran.
I knew you’d say the word triggered. It’s the defense of someone who is honestly too stupid to come up with a legitimate argument.
What kind of concessions are you talking about?
