Word: kurd
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Kurds are a fiercely independent people who inhabit the rugged mountains of northern Iraq as well as parts of Turkey, Syria, the Soviet Union and Iran. Many of them have long yearned to have an independent nation, called Kurdistan, and in 1970, after years of bruising clashes with the Iraqi army, they finally won an agreement that guaranteed regional autonomy by March of this year. As the date approached, neither side could agree on what autonomy meant, and when the pact finally came unstuck, a key problem was a familiar Middle East issue: oil. The Kurds took literally violent exception...
Nevertheless, the movie is vile and brutalizing. Indeed, in many ways it is worse than the book, although it spares us the Gethsemanic agonies of Blatty's metaphors ("the Kurd stood waiting like an ancient debt"). A famous movie star (Ellen Burstyn) and her daughter are on location in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., when the daughter is possessed by a raging demon-the Devil himself. To depict the permutations of this evil spirit, Director Friedkin and Writer Blatty go in for cheap shocks and crude novelty. There are gruesome details of an encephalogram being taken...
More ominously, the situation may strain an already uneasy truce between Baghdad and the dissident Kurds of the north, who claim ownership of the Kirkuk oilfield, which has been shut down ever since it was nationalized. "If there is to be a stoppage of national development, you can be sure the Kurds will be the first to feel it," said Dara Towfik, editor of the Baghdad-based Kurdish paper Al Ta'Khee, last week. Besides complaining that they have been shortchanged on development funds, Kurds feel that Baghdad has cheated on the terms of their truce. Kurd Leader Mustafa...
...Iraq has no contiguous border with Israel, but its fanatically anti-Israel Baathist government maintains an 18,000-man expeditionary force in Jordan and Syria. The Baathists might have sent more troops but for the fact that the Iraqi army has been preoccupied for nearly nine years with rebellious Kurd tribesmen. The Kurds, who occupy most of the northern quarter of Iraq with an army of 10,000 men, have been demanding autonomy. Last week, convinced that the endless war was futile, Lieut. General Ahmed Hassan Bakr, Iraq's President, granted the country's 1,500,000 Kurds...