[…contd.]

As Turkiye mends its fences with a long-running Kurdish insurgency led by the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (PKK), the first part of this two-part series focused on Kurdish activity in and immediately after the First World War, where European powers occupied much of the former Ottoman realm only to be driven from Turkiye. This second part will focus on the first major Kurdish revolt against the modern Turkish state, the revolt of Naqshbandi preacher Mehmed Said in 1925, and its aftermath.

From Independence to Subjugation

Having fought the European powers to a standstill in the early 1920s, by the mid-1920s the Anatolian resistance was in a much stronger state and recognized as the government of Turkiye, seen as both an independent power and a useful bulwark to the Bolshevik Soviets who had taken over Russia and northern Eurasia. This gave Kemal Atatürk tremendous room to manoeuvre; rather than live up to the rhetoric of jihad and Muslim brotherhood that had marked the independence war. However, he would resort to far more limited and limiting aims of forming a Turkish nation-state.

At the 1923 Lausanne Accord, Atatürk agreed to relinquish Iraq and Syria, with the ownership of Mosul deferred till later. Muslims, Arabs, Kurds, and Turks outside Turkiye who had fought under an Islamic banner were left to their own devices. The rise of nation-states over the next decades would automatically split up the Kurds between Turkiye, Iraq, and Syria in addition to the prior frontier with Iran. An early step in the consolidation of the Turkish nation-state was the removal of Vahdettin Mehmed VI (Wahiduddin Muhammad) as sultan and then his successor, Abdulmecid (Abdul-Majeed) II, who had supported the resistance against the occupation, as caliph.

These measures, coupled with an increasingly open secularism and centralization of power around his own personage, alienated many of Atatürk’s original colleagues in the revolt against the occupation. An astonishing number of these Turkish leaders, in fact, went into opposition: they included Kazim Karabekir, Fuat Cebesoy, Ibrahim Refet, and Huseyin Rauf – who had most recently served as Atatürk’s “prime minister” in the last years of the war. Other dissidents included Nurettin Konyar, corps commanders Tayyar Egilmez, who resigned from the army to join this party, and Deli Halit (Deli Khalid)- who was bizarrely killed in a fight at parliament by Atatürk’s enforcer Ali Cetinkaya.

The Kurdish uprising leader Sheik Said Efendı

These were not the only quarters of discontent. Kurds had supported the new Turkish state against an Assyrian revolt, led by a Christian minority whose leaders were heavily supportive of Britain in both Iraq and Turkiye at this time, now Kurdish officers, including Halid Cibran (Khalid Jibran), from the Cibran clan, and Ihsan Nuri, planned a revolt. Halid’s brother-in-law was a revered Naqshbandi preacher, Mehmed Said (Muhammad Saeed) of Piran, who in early 1925 mounted a revolt in the region around Diyarbakir.

The revolt employed both Islamic and nationalist characteristics: Said abhorred Ataturk’s abolition of the caliphate and secularization, but echoed the nineteenth-century sheikh Ubaidullah Khalidi in his advocacy of Kurdish separatism. Said’s brother Sheikh Abdurrahim engaged an army patrol ahead of schedule, but once lit, the fire spread rapidly. Notably and unusually, not only the sheikh’s followers but also chieftains from various clans -including Begs Kadir, Mustafa, Rashid, Salih, and Yado Aga- joined the revolt. Said himself was influential among the region’s Zaza Kurds, and one major follower, Sheikh Serif (Sharif), was both a religious and clan leader. There were, of course, exceptions: Musa Beg opposed the revolt and was killed in battle. The minoritarian Alevi Kurds in Dersim also opposed the Sunni rebels, and longstanding Kurdish activists such as the Cemilpasazade family also kept their distance. Said’s attempt to contact Mahmud Ibrahim, the son of the Millan chieftain and Ottoman militia commander, went unanswered.

Nonetheless, the revolt initially captured Bingol, Elazig, and Palu to lay siege to the region’s major city Diyarbakir. The city’s tough corps commander was Hakki Mursel, a veteran of the wars with Russia who styled himself “Baku” after his battlefield experience in Azerbaijan. He held out for reinforcements against the Kurdish siege, which were soon dispatched under Ataturk’s aide, Kazim Dirik.

In the aftermath of the revolt, Atatürk cracked down hard. His loyalists, including Ali Cetinkaya and a Kurdish officer called Ali Saip, set up a show trial that accused Said of treasonous collaboration with Britain. That some other Kurdish elites had recently entertained relations with Britain might have contributed to this impression, but there is no evidence of this in Said’s case: in fact, Britain was increasingly coming to see Atatürk’s Turkiye as a bulwark against the Soviets. Just before his hanging, Said signed off to the Kurdish judge Saip with the chilling words, “I like you. But you and I shall settle our account on Judgement Day.” Saip himself would be falsely accused of attempting to assassinate Atatürk a decade later. 

This marked the start of a long crackdown on Kurdish elites: also executed was Seyid Abdulkadir, who by all accounts had nothing to do with the revolt. But the crackdown extended elsewhere as well: the opposition led by Kazim Karabekir was implausibly accused of having conspired in the revolt, and their party was immediately banned. A year later, when Atatürk survived an attempt on his life, Kazim and the other dissident leaders were systematically hounded out of public life.

Said’s revolt was a watershed moment not only for Kurds in Turkiye but for Turkiye itself: it marked the start of a progressive concentration of power around a foreign concept of the nation-state. Though he abjured the extraterritorial ambitions of Turkish nationalists, Atatürk shared the common nationalist idea that heterogeneity was a weakness and sought to fashion a new, modern type of Turkish citizen: the Kurds were simply treated as backward specimens of “mountain Turk” who would have to be “civilized” by force. This provoked revolt, notably led by Ihsan Nuri at Agridag, which was crushed with greater brutality in the early 1930s. Led by such hardline Kemalists as Kazim Dirik, the regime began a policy of social engineering that, while not restricted to Kurds, was particularly violent in their case. Repression, including against as basic a fact of life as the Kurdish language, was ferocious; in the late 1930s, the Dersim Alevis, who had opposed the 1925 revolt, were themselves brutally crushed.

A Long Shadow

Kazim Karabekir and Kemal Ataturk

It is often claimed that Kurds are the world’s largest nation without a state; this, however, internalizes the same nationalist logic that produced nation-states in the early twentieth century, that each ethnic group must have a distinct state. More to the point is the overwhelmingly harmful impact that nationalist homogenization and government centralism throughout the region have had on Kurds, who have been split between four states in Turkiye, Iraq, Syria, and Iran–respectively known as Bakur (North Kurdistan), Bashur (South Kurdistan), Rojava (West Kurdistan), and Rojhilat (East Kurdistan).

Experiences often varied: in Syria and Iraq, the atmosphere grew increasingly fraught with the emergence of Arab nationalism led by rival wings of the Baath party. Iraq, originally been relatively open, but where Barzani leader Mala Mustafa remained one of several charismatic rebels, and Iran in the 1970s backed one another’s Kurdish opposition as the two neighbours entered a major war that lasted through the 1980s. A particularly brutal assault by Iraq’s Baath regime on its Kurds ensured that when an opportunity came in the 1990s, the Iraqi Kurds set up a practical American protectorate in Bashur, a duopoly led by the feuding Barzani and Talabani cliques. Though they maintained links with Kurds abroad, they also had complicated relations with the governments that other Kurdish activists opposed.

Though Turkish politics opened up after the Second World War, the deep state maintained a close watch on politics and jealously sought to guard Atatürk’s legacy. Crackdowns on Kurds resumed in the 1980s when Abdullah Ocalan, a Stalinist activist who formed a personality cult, led a new revolt that differed in style from previous Kurdish revolts but shared their aim of throwing off rule by a military-led Turkish government, and worked closely with the Syrian regime of Hafiz Assad. Ankara eventually persuaded Assad to relinquish Ocalan, who was captured in 1999 even as his organization was repeatedly pursued into Bashur. Though many Turkish officials, including Prime Minister Turgut Ozal, were themselves Kurds, they could not shake a solidly uncompromising military and bureaucratic establishment that again domestically reared its head in the late 1990s, when it cracked down on Islamic practice with the close support of the United States and Israel. 

As a consequence, Islamic activists in Turkiye came to see this ideological autocracy as a shared enemy with the opposition Kurds. The Islamic-leaning AK party that came to power in 2002 repeatedly sought to bury the hatchet with Kurdish insurgents, meanwhile taming the military. This process stuttered in the mid-2010s when American support for the Karkeran’s Syrian wing emboldened the main organization in Bakur to return to insurgency. That provoked yet more cross-border Turkish incursions, this time into northern Syria (or Rojava, West Kurdistan). Only a decade later, with Washington losing interest in the Syrian misadventure and a pro-Turkish Islamist government in Damascus, did negotiations resume, with the ethnically Kurdish Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan playing a major role.

Importantly, it was Turkish nationalist leader Devlet Bahceli, whose party has traditionally abhorred concessions of Kurdish rights, who opened up negotiations with Ocalan. The Turkish parliament proved similarly receptive, and in May 2025, Ocalan announced the disbandment of the Karkeran in return for cultural rights. It remains to be seen whether this will play out as negotiated, but it marks a rare opportunity to end a century of injury for the Kurds of Turkiye and take a more organic approach to Kurdish rights in the region.

Related:

– Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire: Trade Across an Inverted Imperial Divide – MuslimMatters.org

– Part I | The Decline of the Ottoman Empire – MuslimMatters.org