Kurdistan

For nearly 3,000 years the Kurds have lived along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the cradle of civilization. This places their beginnings at the very source of the nations and in the immediate vicinity of history's most important events. (A few selections would include the creation of man, the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark on Mt. Ararat in northern Kurdistan, The Tower of Babel, the calling of Abraham, the Babylonian Exile, and much more.) The Kurdish belief that they are the descendants of the biblical Medes reflects this rich background. They base this claim on geographical, linguistic and cultural factors, and they have a strong case.

The most significant biblical passage about the Medes is the prophecy of Isaiah found in chapter 13 and 14, a judgment against Babylon. This is followed up in the fifth chapter of the book of Daniel, the famous text concerning the mysterious handwriting on the wall. Daniel, in his eyewitness report, tells us that the Medes overthrew Babylon on the night of the feast: "That very night Belshazzar, the Chaldean king, was killed, and Darius the Mede received his kingdom, being about 62 years old."

Perhaps the most unique and striking feature in the historical development of the Medes and the Kurds was the advent of their religion, a very early form of Zoroastrianism. The Mede's ancestors were garden-variety pagan polytheists, worshiping a gaggle of war gods called deavas. About the fifth or sixth century BC, perhaps earlier, a prophet named Zoroaster (sometimes called Zarathustra) gained prominence in what is now Kurdistan. Zoroaster did not claim to be anything special himself. His emphasis was on the natural revelation found in creation and on the conscience. He maintained that anyone could know the truth about God through these means, an argument very similar to that put forth by Paul in Romans 1:18ff.

Zoroaster also taught that "one who embodies all truth" would be born of a virgin and would become the eternal King of Kings, bringing justice for the oppressed and finally putting an end to the Lie and all its horrible consequences. Ultimately, there would be a resurrection of the dead to judgment and an everlasting "new day," a strikingly similar concept to the Bible's teaching on the Kingdom of God.

His followers became known as the "Maz Maga" meaning "Great Benevolence," reflecting the newfound truth that the true God was good and trustworthy. The Zoroastrian priestly class were called the Magi, and it may be reasonably surmised that the birth of Jesus was revealed to them because of the teachings of their religion. Thus the New Testament opens with a visit from these "wise men:" "After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi came from the east to Jerusalem and asked, 'Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.' " (Matt. 2: 1-2 ) .

The Kurds and Islam

It has been said that Kurds "hold their Islam lightly," meaning that they are not so vehement about Islam and do not identify as closely with it as the Arabs do. This is perhaps due to two factors: First, many Kurds still feel some connection with the ancient Zoroastrian faith, and feel it is an original Kurdish spirituality that far predates the seventh century AD arrival of Muhammad. Secondly, their principal oppressors and antagonists for over one thousand years have been fellow Muslims, who have showered far more pain than pleasure upon the Kurds.

Nonetheless, most Kurds are Muslims, and about 75% today are at least nominally members of the majority Sunni branch. As many as four million Kurds are Shiites, living mostly in Iran where the Shiite faith predominates. However, the Kurds generally strive to express their Islam in a distinct fashion. For example, the Sunni Muslim Kurds of Turkey have adopted the Shafi'i legal code, ignoring the general rule among the surrounding Arabs and Turks, who adhere to the Hanafi school. Mystical practices and participation in Sufi orders are also widespread among Kurds. Many of these orders are considered heretical by rigid orthodox Muslims. Drawing heavily on shamanism, Zoroastrianism and elements of Christianity, Kurdish mysticism places emphasis on the direct experience of God through meditation, ecstatic experiences and the intercession of holy men or sheiks. Most Kurds possess a tangible sense of the supernatural, readily acknowledging demonic activity in the form of evil spirits and curses; they often worship at shrines or other holy places.

The rest of the Kurds are followers of several indigenous Kurdish faiths of great antiquity and originality. The most notable of these are the Yezidis. Although often charged with worshiping Lucifer, the Yezidis embody a distillation of the Jewish, Deavic, Zoroastrian, Christian and Islamic beliefs which have consecutively ruled their mountainous homeland for three millennia. Central to the Yezidi cosmology is the Heptad, a group of seven archangels through which God is said to delegate his authority. Although statistically small in number, the Yezidis are a source of great pride for Kurds of every tradition.

Throughout the Middle East, smaller communities of Jews, Christians and Baha'is also consider themselves Kurds. Israel's 150,000 Kurds constitute the greatest concentration of these non-Muslim groups. The Kurdish Jews emigrated to Israel in the 1950s, having lived in Mesopotamia since the Assyrian exile: "The king of Assyria carried the Israelites away to Assyria, settled them in Halah, on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes." (2 Kings 18:11) Like the Yezidis, the Israeli Kurds are highly regarded throughout Kurdistan.

Kurdistan Today and Tomorrow

Like most of the Mideast, Kurdistan is in turmoil. Among the four countries where most of the Kurds reside, the situation is as follows:

Turkey. There are about 13 million Kurds in Turkey, and this represents about 55% of the total Kurdish population. Following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the Kurds of Turkey have lived in a consistently hostile environment. Since the mid-1920s the Kurds have witnessed the banning of their language and severe restrictions on any open expression of their distinctive culture. In the name of Turkish nationalism and cultural hegemony, the Kurds were denied any separate ethnic identity, being described instead as "mountain Turks" who through poverty and isolation lost their Turkic mother tongue. Systematic intimidation and the widespread application of draconian security measures have been used to enforce this policy of assimilation.

In recent years the Marxist Kurdistan Worker's Party (known as the PKK), a violent separatist guerrilla movement based in Syria, has grown substantially, causing a brutal border war that has resulted in thousands of deaths on both sides, tying up the Turkish Army in constant skirmishes. International pressure has forced Turkey to repeal some of its cultural restrictions on the Kurds, but the government has stepped up its military activity against them at the same time. The current death toll in this vicious war stands at 21,000. The fighting has also created a massive internal refugee problem: some two and one half million Turkish Kurds have fled their homes in recent years. Prospects for peace in the area are dim.

Iran. With a population of 5.7 million, Iran contains about 23% of the Kurdish nation. Compared with Turkey's brutal assimilation policy, Iran's method could be characterized as seductive. This is consistent with Teheran's general approach to its minorities, who are encouraged to cooperate with the central authorites, receiving fairly broad freedom of cultural expression in exchange. However, the Kurds of Iran have not been happy with this state of affairs, and have on a number of occasions attempted to set up an autonomous state.

The most recent of these attempts was after the triumph of the Islamic Revolution and the ascent of Ayatollah Khomeini. The Kurds were not interested in being part of an Islamic State and found the upheaval generated by the collapse of the central government to be an opportune moment to establish their own sovereignty. It was not to last; on August 17, 1979 Khomeini declared a holy war against the Kurds and proceeded brutally to put down the rebellion in Kurdistan. Entire villages and towns were wiped out in an attempt to force the Kurds quickly into submission. Although the rebellion was snuffed out, the Kurds were able to control the countryside and occasionally hold towns for brief periods during the Iran-Iraq war.

Iraq. The 4.2 million Kurds in Iraq constitute about 17% of the Kurdish total. Although the number of Kurds in Iraq is smaller than in Turkey or Iran, the extent of the atrocities committed against them have thrust this group to the forefront of world media attention, as has been noted above. Their future looks quite bleak.

Syria and Lebanon. A much smaller group of Kurds live in Syria, perhaps about one million, but it is a strategic center, as the PKK guerrillas are given protection by the Syrian government and allowed to train in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. It is not that the Syrian government likes the Kurds; rather, they are used as pawns by Damascus to get back at Turkey, who has built dams on the rivers north of the Turkish-Syrian border, depriving Syria of much-needed water for irrigation and city use. In reality the Baathist government of strongman Hafez Assad is just as ruthless as that of Iraq, and could turn on the Kurds at any time. Thus, in all of their host countries, the future of the Kurds is still fraught with uncertainty and peril.

The Church in Kurdistan

The Kurds have been called one of the world's largest groups of unreached peoples. However, the Book of Acts indicates that this was not always the case, recording the presence of "Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia" at Pentecost. Precisely how many Kurds followed in the footsteps of the Magi is unknown. Most early Zoroastrian converts to Christianity gradually lost their ethnic identity and merged with the Aramaic-speaking milieu of the early Eastern church or with the Armenians, another Zoroastrian nation turned Christian. However, as late as the 10th century, the Arab geographer al-Masudi wrote about tribes of "Christian Kurds."

Whatever the extent of early Christianity in Kurdistan, the dust cloud of Islamic conquest has forever obscured it from our view. Faced with fierce resistance in Kurdistan, Muhammed's successor, Omar, embarked on a ruthless campaign of what can only be described as spiritual genocide. Omar destroyed some 4,000 churches, synagogues and Zoroastrian temples in and around Kurdistan, slaughtering religious leaders as he went. He also ordered the destruction of all non-Muslim literature. "If these documents are contrary to the Qur'an they are bogus," he declared to his generals, "and if they agree with the Qur'an, they are irrelevant; in either case, they should be destroyed." Thus, the spiritual famine of Kurdistan was ensured for more than a millennium.

It was only in the late 1800s that Christianity finally awoke to Kurdistan's need for the gospel. This concern found expression at the historic Edinburgh missions conference of 1910. This conference, the first to examine the cause of completing the Great Commission, assigned the Kurdish field to the Lutheran Church. Consequently, the Lutheran Orient Mission Society was formed, and the first missionary team to the Kurds was dispatched to Mahabad, in Iranian Kurdistan. The New Testament was translated into Kurdish for the first time, and several small Kurdish fellowships were established before political circumstances and war conspired to uproot the Christian missionaries. LOMS continued to operate in Iraq through the 1950s and also in Gorve, Iran, until the Ayatollah Khomeini forced them out in the late 1970s. This effectively closed all Christian work among the Kurds.

In spite of these setbacks history seemed to be preparing the Kurds for a strategic convergence with the Kingdom of God. In the 1980s, thousands of Kurds began to express a strong disaffection for Islam. The youth especially gravitated to communism and agnostic ideologies, while Islam was increasingly seen as a tool of Arab and Turkish oppression. That this widespread alienation could be translated into an opportunity for the gospel was demonstrated in the aftermath of the Gulf War, when Kurdistan suddenly opened to Christian relief agencies. The next five years witnessed the birth of a modern church, indigenous leadership and a restoration of the Bible to Kurdish soil. At the same time, the majority of Kurds, who live outside of Iraq, also began to respond to the gospel in unprecedented numbers. Today, thousands of New Testaments are in use by Kurdish seekers and converts.

However, the church is still small and vulnerable throughout Kurdistan. The number of baptized church members is only in the low hundreds, yet thousands have responded to literature campaigns and personal evangelism. Therefore the challenge of discipleship and forming an appropriate church structure is especially critical at this stage of development. The thousands of active seekers, many of whom already consider themselves Christians, have to be brought along to the point of baptism and fellowship. If this can be achieved, the potential of Kurdistan to impact the Middle East is tremendous.

Mission strategists long ago recognized that the Kurds are a regional catalyst. Their native Mesopotamia has driven the events of the Middle East since the dawn of recorded history. Straddling political and cultural borders and equally comfortable in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Hebrew, the Kurds could well become the evangelists of the Near East. "The air is pregnant with change," said a leading Kurdish politician, who is now a Christian. He is the son of a Yezidi who converted to Islam and became a Muslim priest before his conversion to Christianity. "If you are willing to make a genuine commitment of personnel, time and money, you will see a hundred thousand Kurds come to Christ in less than five years." Let's hope that his assessment of the church in Kurdistan is accurate, and that we can meet his call to action.

SOME ARTICALS ABOUT KURDS

No Friends but the Mountains
By Matthew Hand and Mark Brockman

"Kurdistan" is a country that has never had an official existence with recognized international boundaries. This is despite the fact that the Kurdish people comprise a large ethnic group of about 25 million that have always lived in the same place, and trace their roots back to the Medes of ancient Persia more than 2,500 years ago. In fact, the Magi, or "wise men" who traveled from the east to deliver their gold, frankincense and myrrh to the newborn Jesus at Bethlehem were most likely Zoroastrian priests, forbears of the modern Kurds.

The Kurds are tribal people, many of them living a nomadic lifestyle in the mountainous regions of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. This somewhat ill-defined and nebulous area is what the Kurds call Kurdistan, and it is just this longing for an ethnic homeland that has been the source of their problems. As a large and distinct people group with their own language, they are neither Arabs, Turks, or Persians, and are therefore seen as a political threat by all four of the countries in which they are concentrated. As a result, they have been harassed, discriminated against, attacked, slaughtered and otherwise pushed around and marginalized for many centuries. Their refuge has always been the mountains, with their steep pastures and fertile valleys.

Thus the history of the Kurds has often been called tragic; a recent TV spot on them by CBS' 60 Minutes dubbed them "history's losers," and their suffering has been well documented by the news media in recent years due to their brutal treatment at the hands of Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

In the 1980s Saddam carried out a genocidal campaign against the Iraqi Kurds, systematically wiping out villages and towns with guns, poison gas and bulldozers (some 4,000 settlements destroyed), with one-half million people displaced and some 200,000 still missing and presumed dead. A 1991 UN report on the Iraqi genocide concluded that the atrocities committed were "so grave and of such massive nature that since the Second World War few parallels can be found." Even many recovered bodies of children bore evidence of torture.

After Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War, the Allies established a free area for the Kurds above the "no-fly zone" north of the 36th parallel. For five years this small area became a sort of de facto miniature Kurdistan, and many western relief agencies operated in the area. It was also the headquarters for the CIA-backed Iraqi National Congress, whose real purpose was the overthrow of Saddam.

However, the plan backfired in late August of this year. The CIA apparently did not realize how deeply fractured the Kurds were politically. The two main groups, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), had been at odds for decades, and now that some semblance of a real Kurdistan was appearing, the stakes were raised. A bloody clash between the two forces erupted in 1994, but the Americans forced a cease-fire which held until the KDP decided to ally themselves with Iraqi troops to counter Iran's support of the rival PUK.

Suddenly, on Aug. 31, Saddam's forces moved rapidly into the Kurdish "safe haven" area above the 36th parallel, and a major international crisis erupted. The U.S. felt it had been betrayed by the Kurds, since the major factions were drawing up alliances with America's two least favorite nations, Iran and Iraq; the Americans suddenly pulled all operations and support, both civilian and military, out of northern Iraq. This left hundreds of thousands of Kurdish civilians at the mercy of the fighting and marooned many of the Kurds and Iraqi Arabs who had worked for the CIA; many of these collaborators were hunted down by Iraqi security goons and tortured and killed, although the U.S. did manage to evacuate some 3,000 friendly Kurds to Guam at the last moment.

The United States, in a public hand-washing reminiscent of Pontius Pilate, issued a statement saying that "We gave the Kurds every opportunity for five years...and the Kurds failed to meet this great historic opportunity for the Kurdish people. It's their responsibility for what's happened in the north." They then used the Iraqi aggression as an excuse to attack military targets in southern Iraq with two salvos of cruise missiles. As this report goes to press in mid-October, the KDP and PUK continue their civil war, with the PUK gaining back some of the ground they lost to Saddam's forces in August and September.