ABSTRACT
Broadly covering the earlier years of the Cold War and especially from 1958 until 1962, this chapter starts by presenting a background of the Kurdish Issue. It will then move on to demonstrate how from the start of the Cold War, Iran and Turkey sought to portray the Iraqi Kurds as a potential communist threat and a USSR client, posing an existential threat to the status quo of the political order in the Middle East. This chapter will assert that the threat of the USSR sponsoring a Kurdish state was inflated by the regional states with a Kurdish population to demonise the Kurds in the US perception due to their fear of a Kurdish state of any kind, and that the USSR at least did not have a committed plan to create a Kurdish state, if at all. The regional and international consequences of the Iraqi Revolution of 1958 are then examined and their effects on the Iraqi Kurds looked at. It will be argued that after the Revolution, the regional states, Iran in particular, started to view the Iraqi Kurds as a card to be used to shape developments in Iraq. In addition, relations between the Iraqi Kurdish liberation movement and Nasser are looked at. Lastly, the bases of the US policy to view the Kurdish Issue in Iraq as an Iraqi matter is explored together with the broader global US Cold War foreign policy from Truman to Kennedy, and by correlation the Kurds' place in this.
