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commended and assisted by Moscow. It wasreal-politik that was to triumph in
the end. When the Soviet government decided that its interests in Iraq might
be better advanced by cultivating the Baathists than by continuing its ambigu­
ous policy towards the Kurds, as it now did in the spring of 1974, it cast away
the ambiguity and joined wholeheartedly in the destruction of Kurdish resis­
tance. There followed a brutal and murderous campaign, which perhaps more
than anything else revealed the repulsive character of the Baghdad regime and
the shabby nature of the Russo-Iraqi alliance. Not, of course, that such
considerations bothered the Russians; they could afford to be insouciant about
them since the stakes for which they were playing in Iraq were very great -
access to Iraqi oil in increasing quantities and a corresponding diminution of
supplies to the West; a lodgement at the doorstep of Kuwait with its large oil
reserves and splendid harbour; an avenue to the Gulf and a base at Umm Qasr
from which to sustain a naval presence in its waters; the opportunity to turn to
good account the Iraqi Baath’s penchant for subversive activities against its
neighbours; and the chance to exploit Iraq’s animosity towards Persia to exert
pressure upon the shah.
A set-back, at least in the short term, to this last hope was afforded by the
accommodation reached between the Persians and Iraqis, through the media­
tion of the Algerian president, Houari Boumedienne, at the OPEC summit
conference at Algiers in March 1975, when the world was treated to the
affecting spectacle of the shah embracing before the assembled delegates
Saddam Husain al-Takriti, the Iraqi vice-president and the most ruthless
member of a government which the shah had previously seen fit to describe as a
group of ‘crazy, bloodthirsty savages’. At the heart of the rapprochement,
however, lay not so much the discovery of a mutual attachment as a cynical

agreement to resolve the differences between them at the expense of the Kurds.
In return for Iraq’s concession of the median line of the Shatt al-Arab as the
Perso-Iraqi frontier along that waterway, the shah agreed to cease forthwith
from assisting the Kurds with arms and supplies, and to close the Persian
border adjacent to the Kurdish-held districts in northern Iraq by the end of
March. It was the end for the Kurds. With their supply routes closed, they
could not keep up the spirited resistance which had kept the Iraqi army at bay
for years. Those who could not escape to Persia were hammered into sub­
mission by the Baghdad government, with a ferocity it had not dared (even had
it been able) to muster only a short while earlier. As a means of destroying the
last vestiges of Kurdish nationalism, thousands upon thousands of Kurds were
uprooted from their homes in the northern mountains and forcibly resettled in
the deserts and marshlands of lower Iraq.
The Kurdish struggle for autonomy, which has gone on for well over half a
century, is symptomatic of the political instability of Iraq, and of the cen­
trifugal forces within Iraqi society. Iraq is an artificial state, with no sense of
historical continuity between its previous existence as three distinct vilayets of