ABSTRACT
In a hoary Oriental punishment the Ottomans in the late nineteenth century deported the entire Hamawand tribe from what is present-day Iraqi Kurdistan to Libya as punishment for its boundless truculence and unbridled high-way robbery. Kurdistan declined into an isolated mountainous irrelevancy" until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. The Kurds foreign overlords have historically followed a "dumbing down" strategy, rooting out anything smacking of a Kurdish elite able to generate first-rate leadership. Kurdish society is multilingual, multiracial, and multireligious, Kurds nonetheless share a long common historical experience and collective aspirations. Kurdish nationalists have understandably exaggerated the numbers, much as their elders claimed uninterrupted territorial continuity from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf in a map prepared to impress the inaugural San Francisco session of the United Nations in 1945. In Syria publication in Kurdish was encouraged under the French mandate but forbidden after Syrian independence in 1946.
