Word: sanandaj
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Dates: during 1979-1979
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...late afternoon sun still seared the dusty streets of Marivan, a scramble of mud and stucco houses on a mountain slope near the Iraq border, as "solidarity" marchers arrived from Sanandaj, the Kurds' provincial capital (pop. 150,000). The more than 2,000 men, women and children had walked the 90 miles of gravel roadway from Sanandaj in four torturous days just so they could, as one of them bluntly put it, "tell the Tehran government to go to hell...
...Major General Vali Ullah Gharani, 65, who had been gunned down in the courtyard of his house by three unknown assailants. The first chief of staff of the army after the revolution, Gharani had been fired from his post in March after his harsh campaign against Kurdish rebels in Sanandaj; nonetheless, he was given full military honors. During the funeral procession, which drew a throng of 50,000 mourners, security guards seized a young man in an air force uniform who was running toward Bazargan with a hand grenade and an Uzi automatic. The government denied that there had been...
Late last week there were reports from Sanandaj that the Interior Minister had worked out a tentative agreement with the Kurds that would grant them some degree of local autonomy. How long the accord would last was uncertain. A proud mountain people whose kinsmen fan out across the border into Iraq, Turkey, Syria and the Soviet Union, the Kurds have been in rebellion against their overlords in Tehran for generations. During the early 1970s, the Shah aided the Kurds, who were fighting a guerrilla war to gain autonomy for their sector of northern Iraq. The U.S. tacitly backed the rebellion...
During the February revolt against the hapless government of Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar, the Kurds took advantage of the chaotic situation to rearm. They stormed army garrisons in northern Iran, seizing huge quantities of weapons. The latest outbreak apparently began over the appropriation by the army garrison in Sanandaj of a large portion of the city's flour supply, as well as the bulk of the town's bread. Feelings among the city's population, which is mostly Sunni Muslim, were already running high because the local revolutionary courts were dominated by Shi'ites loyal...
Reported TIME Correspondent Paul Witteman from Sanandaj: "At Ghanzeh Hospital a man sat holding the severed head of his three-year-old daughter, who along with her four brothers and sisters was killed when a mortar round dropped into the yard where they were playing. As doctors worked in a makeshift operating room on the floor of the hospital corridor, flights of helicopters fluttered overhead, ferrying army reinforcements to the garrison from Kermanshah, an hour to the south. The fighting took a vicious turn the next day when the army moved tanks to the city center. Kurdish guerrillas dashed from...