Word: iraq
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...plagues in the world," says an old Arab proverb-"the rat, the locust, and the Kurd." While Arab opinion may be biased, it is true that through the centuries the Kurds have deserved their reputation as troublemakers. Living in the grandly forbidding mountain country that straddles the borders of Iraq. Turkey, Syria, Iran and Russia, they have always been in a state of rebellion against outside discipline. After World War II, Russia happily used the disgruntled Kurds to harass the other "host" countries. Last week the Kurds were at it again, waging war against the Iraqi government and the country...
...revolt could not be dismissed as merely another example of Kurdish cussedness. The rebels have moved steadily south out of the Zagros Mountains to within 70 miles of Baghdad, now have a quasi hold on sizable parts of Iraq. Their continued victories have also aroused non-Kurdish, democratic opponents of Premier Karim Kassem. The opposition ridicules Kassem's claim that the revolt is the fault of "British imperialists and their American stooges." blames his own bumbling for provoking the Kurds into war. Buffeted within and without, Kassem's regime is in danger of collapse...
...Kurds is veteran pro-Communist Mustafa Barzani, a onetime mullah (religious teacher) and military boss of a Red-supported puppet republic of Kurdistan just after the war. After the puppet state was dismantled in 1946. Barzani fled to Russia, returned only after Kassem staged his Communist-blessed revolution in Iraq in 1958. Kassem tried to curry favor among the Kurdish tribes to solidify his own power. He promised them Kurdish schools, Kurdish newspapers, a Kurdish political party. So that the Kurds would not get too strong, however, Kassem armed rival Kurdish clans, playing them off against each other in cutthroat...
...longer content with mere equality with the Arabs, he now insists on an autonomous Kurdish state within Iraq, running along the mountaintops from southern Turkey to the Persian Gulf; for this state he demands minority rights similar to those enjoyed "by minorities in such liberated countries as Switzerland, Yugoslavia, India and Czechoslovakia." The Russians are delighted to back Barzani's plan, which would give them access to the Middle Eastern Arab states and bring them closer to the Mediterranean...
...competing Beirut banks by cutting loan rates from 9% to 6%. To gain stature for his upstart bank, he convinced Bank of America that it should come into his trade-financing op erations, became correspondent for New York's venerable Chase Manhattan Bank, and opened branches in Syria, Iraq, Qatar and Jordan. In 1958, when near civil war halted Lebanese banking for more than three months and most of his competitors sat brooding over their ill fortune, Bedas took advantage of the lull to set up a branch in London and an affiliate bank in Geneva...