Kurds in Oil

General Salikh Pasha of Turkey, with horse, foot and artillery marched over the Persian frontier last week to surround the rebel Kurdish tribesmen who for the past two months have been holding out on the slopes of Mount Ararat against some 30,000 well-equipped Turkish troops (TIME, July 28). Persia protested the invasion formally, did nothing to stop it.

Kurdish rebellions are nothing new for Turkish soldiers. For 400 years Kurdistan, a district which overlaps the present boundaries of eastern Turkey, Persia and Irak, has been rising in revolt against its Turkish conquerors. Kurdish hopes for a free state were raised at the beginning of the Paris Peace Conference only to be dashed at its close. Last important Kurd uprising was in 1925.

Turkish leaders found one important difference between the present and other Kurd revolts. Kurds in the present uprising had money, modern arms. Other tribes not usually embroiled in the periodic Kurdish strivings for liberty were fighting against the Turks too. While Turkish military commanders proceeded with their tried and true formula in these affairs-- burning villages, ruthlessly exterminating men, women and children--Turkish diplomats accused Persia of backing and even fomenting the Kurds. Persia swore innocence, and last week the Turkish officials made more interesting accusations. The real cause of the trouble near Ararat, they said, was not the Kurds' perennial desire for independence, but their new desire for Oil. Year ago Djevet Eyoub. Turkish engineer who had spent 20 years in Texas oil fields, went prospecting along the Turko-Irak frontier. He found unmistakable traces of oil on Turkish territory not far from the British-owned Mosul oil fields of Irak. It is not impossible that Turkish wells on the new oil fields might. if driven, drain Mosul wells dry.* Succinct was a message from Angora last week:

"The Turkish Foreign Office has started an official investigation and has promised to provide documentary evidence of the complicity of at least one European power in the conflict . . . a plot centering around the organization of an independent Kurd republic which could grant oil concessions to European financiers."

Berlin's Vossische Zeitung was even franker. Its Angora correspondent cabled:

"Leaders of the Kurd movement have received money from England. The Kurds are using machine guns of British origin."

*Though the British mandated Kingdom of Irak has been promised complete independence in 1932, in the event of her scheduled admission to the League of Nations in that year. British interests will continue, under concessions, to develop Mosul's major oil fields to control dependent airports--a vital point in the British-India Airway.

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