Kurdish WWII Vets to Trump: ‘Kurds Participated in the War’

Kurdish news service Rudaw on Sunday quoted Kurdish veterans of World War II responding angrily to President Donald Trump’s comment last Wednesday that the Kurds “didn’t help us in the Second World War – they didn’t help us with Normandy, as an example.”

Rudaw interviewed Amhad Mustafa Delzar, who will soon celebrate his 100th birthday, criticizing Trump for underplaying the Kurdish contribution to World War II. According to the report:

“Trump was not born then – that is why he does not know that the Kurds participated in the war,” Delzar told Rudaw’s Hiwa Jamal on Saturday.

Delzar, who was born in 1920 and is a well-known Kurdish poet, became a member of the Iraq Levies, a minority scout force established by the British during the First World War to control Iraq, in 1943.

“The levies were mainly Assyrians and Kurds and a smaller number of Arabs,” Delzar told Rudaw. “I was the 8,000th Kurd who joined the levies during the Second World War. I joined the levies on February 28, 1943.” 

Delzar went through intense training at Habbaniyah airbase in western Baghdad and then transferred to Palestine via Syria in December 1944. Dezlar and a number of other Kurdish levies stayed on in Haifa in Palestine until the war ended.

“There were around 40 Kurds who participated on the northern Italy front and one of them was Karim Abdulwahid Haji Aziz,” Delzar recalled. “Karim was a paratrooper and I remember he parachuted twice in Habaniyah.” 

Rudaw quoted some other Kurdish families who accused Trump of “lying,” and presented photos of their family members in uniform from the 1940s.

Trump did not deny that any Kurds fought in World War II during his controversial press conference on Wednesday. His point was that the Kurds were an ally of convenience against the Islamic State, having as much reason to fight them as the U.S. and its European allies did, rather than being a nation-state with ties to the United States reaching back to the global conflicts of the last century. 

For that matter, Trump claimed without a specific citation that he was citing someone else’s point about the relationship between the U.S. and the Kurds. The full text of the relevant remark by President Trump appears below:

Now, the Kurds are fighting for their land, just so you understand.  They’re fighting for their land. And, as somebody wrote in a very, very powerful article today, they didn’t help us in the Second World War.  They didn’t help us with Normandy, as an example. They mentioned names of different battles. They were there, but they’re there to help us with their land.  And that’s a different thing.

In addition to that, we have spent tremendous amounts of money on helping the Kurds — in terms of ammunition, in terms of weapons, in terms of money, in terms of pay.  With all of that being said, we like the Kurds.

Now you have different factions in there.  Again, you have PKK — that’s a different faction.  And they worked with us. It’s a rough group, but they worked with us.  But we’ve spent a tremendous — and they’re fighting for their lands. So when you say, “They’re fighting with us” — yes, but they’re fighting for their land.

The PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) is the separatist Kurdish party in Turkey, designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and its European allies. Turkey invaded Syria to attack Kurdish groups there because it accused them of being in league with the PKK.

Trump went on to mention President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famed 1961 warning about the “military-industrial complex,” which essentially argued that America’s transition from a prewar peacetime economy – “American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well” – to the footing necessary to win World War II had created a permanent war machine with its own political interests that would constantly search for excuses to get involved in more wars. 

“Now, if we go on the theory that some of the folks in Washington go by — who all do very well with the military-industrial complex.  I mean, you know, the military-industrial complex. Take a look at Dwight Eisenhower; he had it figured right many years ago. It’s got tremendous power. They like fighting. They make a lot of money when they fight,” Trump said last Wednesday.

Taken together, with allowances for President Trump’s garrulous speaking style, he was arguing the Syrian Kurds are not a nation-state that shares a permanent far-reaching defense treaty with the United States, so the U.S. is not obliged to defend them under all circumstances, and neither is Europe. 

This argument does not imply that no one of Kurdish extraction fought in World War II, a point conceded by the more careful “fact checks” of Trump’s remarks, such as the one published by CNN last week:

The Kurds are made up of many different tribes and families that primarily live in Kurdistan, a region that spans across five countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Armenia. During the Second World War there was no Kurdish government in any of these countries, so there was no way they could have assisted the US in Normandy or any battlefront.

Experts CNN spoke with said that since the Kurds were not (and still are not) a nation state, there would be no way for them to enter the war. However, because some Kurds migrated to the Soviet Union following the First World War and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, individual Kurds may have fought with the Soviets against the Axis, as noted by The New York Times.

CNN’s consultants went on to criticize President Trump for being insensitive to the Kurds because they have aided the U.S. during numerous regional conflicts. “To justify abandoning them on the basis of them not helping during the Second World War is outrageous,” said Bryan Gibson, assistant professor of history at Hawaii Pacific University.