Quotes & Sayings About Kurds

Where were the peacekeepers? Where was the UN? Why was the entire world ignoring Saddam's attack upon his own people? Were we Kurds considered so unworthy, so disposable? I longed to stand at the top of the mountain and shout out, Where are you, world? Where are you ? — Jean Sasson

There's been so much bad blood between the Kurds and the Turks. — Ahmet Ertegun

If the Bahreini royal family can have an embassy, a state, and a seat at the UN, why should the twenty-five million Kurds not have a claim to autonomy? The alleviation of their suffering and the assertion of their self-government is one of the few unarguable benefits of regime change in Iraq. It is not a position from which any moral retreat would be allowable. — Christopher Hitchens

The Purpose of life is to thrive and save lives with passion! Save Yazidis today with love and compassion! — Widad Akreyi

I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE
AND THANK EVERYONE
WHO TRIES TO MAKE
A DIFFERENCE IN THE LIVES
OF VULNERABLE CIVILIANS — Widad Akreyi

If you go into Hasakah province in northeast Syria, that's an area that's as big as Lebanon. It's controlled by the Kurds, the Christians and the moderate Sunnis. And there are airstrips and hotels. You could settle a lot of people there.All we would have to do is be willing to provide them with some weaponry, some defensive weaponry. — Benjamin Carson

I used to be someone who would not even tread on an ant. But this is a war for honor and self-defense. A 100 percent elimination policy (by Ankara of the Kurds) has forced me to defense and it has become a glorious defense of a people. — Abdullah Ocalan

Nothing worse than Kurds in your milk. General, make sure i never see another Kurd again — Saddam Hussein

So the idea that you could put Kurds, Shiite Arabs, and Sunni Arabs in a nice, liberal, federal system in Iraq in a short amount of time, six months or a year, boggles the mind. — William Odom

Our values were under attacks, in Paris
Tell them:
We stand UNITED
We'll defend our values
We'll NOT be DIVIDED — Widad Akreyi

We don't want to have a child that has many illnesses, and that will pass away after a few months. A child must have a good environment, and parents that will take care of it.
[...] It [a Kurdish state] must be a part of stability in this area. — Fuad Hussein

We need to embed our forces - our troops inside the Iraqi military. We need to arm directly the Kurds. And all of that has to be done in concert with the Arab nations. — Jeb Bush

What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites? That's a huge question, to my mind. — Norman Schwarzkopf

The voices of peace can't be silenced by bombs, shootings, sieges, brutality and barbarism. Despite the challenges we face as peace-makers in a troubled region, all we want is peace and our campaign #WeWantPeace continues. — Widad Akreyi

There is a difference between Iraq, where you have Sunni, Shia, and Kurds put together after the First World War by the Western powers. It doesn't work. It needs to break up into three parts. — John Kasich

SHOW THE WORLD YOUR STRONG COMPASSION!
GIVE YOUR VOICE TO VOICELESS KOBANE KIDS! — Widad Akreyi

No torture has yet been devised that could get a liberal to mention the poor, beleaguered Kurds dancing in the streets because Saddam is gone. — Ann Coulter

I think that, given the threat that ISIS poses to the region and beyond, as we have sadly seen in our own country, it is important to keep the Iraqi army on a path where they can actually take back territory, to work with the Sunni tribes in Anbar province and elsewhere so that their fighters can be also deployed, to work with the Kurds to provide them the support, but they're doing the fighting. We're doing the support and enabling. — Hillary Clinton

Whenever a Kurd wants to measure the depth of some foreign leader's commitment to Kurdish autonomy, he listens for one particular word. That word is 'federal.' Anyone who will say he favors Kurdish federalism can be counted a friend of the Kurds. — Timothy Noah

Syria is a multi-confessional state: in addition to Sunni and Shia Muslims, there are Alawites, Orthodox and other Christian confessions, Druzes, and Kurds. — Sergei Lavrov

Back when Saddam Hussein was in power, the Americans didn't care about his crimes. When he was gassing the Kurds and gassing Iran, they didn't care about it. When oil was at stake, somehow, suddenly, things mattered. — Sam Richards

It is time to recognize the past and ongoing genocides to prevent new ones. Together we can build a better world! — Widad Akreyi

America sold VX nerve gas and anthrax to Iraq for years, even after the Halabja gas attack, which killed thousands of Kurds. — Henry Rollins

To move any regime you need to have co-operation and co-ordination between Kurds, Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs, the people and the army. Until we have this we cannot change the regime. — Jalal Talabani

The Arabs are victims. You have Shia Arabs, under Arabization under Saddam Hussein, who were forcibly moved up there ... You have Kurds who were displaced by these Arabs that were moved up there by Saddam Hussein. Kurds have been displaced from Kirkuk for hundreds of years. — Raymond T. Odierno

In Iraq #1 we stayed within U.N. mandates, limited our response, went home after Kuwait was freed - and were censured for allowing Shiites and Kurds to be butchered and not going to Baghdad when the road was open and the dictator tottering. In Iraq #2 we removed the tyrant at less cost than the liberation of Kuwait during the earlier war, stayed on to ensure freedom and fair representation for various groups - and are being castigated for either using too little force to ensure needed order or too much power that stifles indigenous aspirations and turns popular opinion against us. — Victor Davis Hanson

You have a chance to save lives! If you don't take it, you may regret it! — Widad Akreyi

At the end of the day ... if your army won't fight, it's because they don't trust their incompetent, corrupt generals, they don't trust each other. This is an enduring civil war between the Shia, the Sunni, and the Kurds. So I don't think we've got any options and we'd be ill-advised to start bombing where we really can't sort out the combatants or understand where the civilian population is. — Barry McCaffrey

The timing of this sudden interest in the plight of Iraqi women cannot be overemphasized. For decades, many Iraqi women activists in the US and UK had tried to raise awareness about the systematic abuse of human and women's rights under Saddam Hussein, the atrocities linked to the Anfal campaign against the Kurds, and the impact of economic sanctions on women and families ... 'We wrote so many letters and we organized many events ... They did not want to know. They were just not interested. It was only in the run-up to the [2003] invasion that the governments started to care about the suffering of Iraqi women. — Nadje Al-Ali

As far as the command centers are concerned in Raqqa and to a lesser degree Mosul, cut those off. Do the same kind of thing that we did with Sinjar , working with our embedded special forces with the Kurds, shut off the supply route, soften them up, then we go in with specials ops followed by our air force to take them over. Those are things that work. — Benjamin Carson

Critics of the war plans (including myself) have pointed to the disastrous political results that must be expected: Iraq would break into three parts (Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center, Shi'ites in the south), the Middle East would be exposed to the onslaught of Iranian fanaticism, pro-Western Arab regimes would collapse. Israel would be surrounded by aggressive Islamic fundamentalism, like the Crusader kingdom with the advent of Saladin. — Uri Avnery

Because the script was written referring not to Iraq as it was, but to a fantasy Iraq as Rumsfeld, Rice, and Bush et al. wanted it to be, or dreamt it to be, or were promised by their pet Iraqis-in-exile it would be. They expected to find a unified state like Japan in 1945. Instead, they found a perpetual civil war among majority Shi'a Arabs, minority Sunni Arabs, and Kurds. Saddam Hussein - a Sunni - had imposed a brutal peace on the country, but with him gone, the civil war reheated, and now it's ... erupted, and the CPA is embroiled. When you're in control, neutrality isn't possible. — David Mitchell

My time in the Middle East led me to realize that, with a few rare exceptions, the dominant political ideology there - whether you were talking about Sunnis or Shiites or Kurds, Israelis, Arabs, Persians, Turks, or Palestinians - was "I am weak, how can I compromise? I am strong, why should I compromise?" The notion of there being "a common good" and "a middle ground" that we all compromise for and upon - not to mention a higher community calling we work to sustain - was simply not in the lexicon. — Thomas L. Friedman

Let's stand against the killing of innocent civilians. It is time to make the future better than today. Together we can bring peace and unity to our communities. — Widad Akreyi

The U.S. cannot force Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds to make peace or to act for the common good. They have been in conflict for 1,400 years. — Peter DeFazio

The Kurds know - and never for a moment forget - what most people in the world have never understood. The nation of Iraq is not a centuries-old country with natural boundaries and an organically blended population. Instead, Iraq is a structure of artificial boundaries and unnaturally combined tribes and religions conceived by Europeans just after World War — Stephen Mansfield

By very conservative estimates, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of more than a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital, Diyarbakir, from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside. — Noam Chomsky

But since Kurdistan did not, as such, exist; since it was an imaginary land, stretching over scraggy mountains and deep valleys in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria; since they were as landless as the Palestinians and as nameless as the Liberians, the Kurds didn't really exist either, and so, officially, they were Turks. — Sophie Hardach

We're dealing with such enormous problems today that we have no other choice but to work together. If Iraq fails, if a religious civil war breaks out and the neighboring states are drawn into this conflict, if the Kurds declare independence and al-Qaida takes over an entire province - that's when the consequences will be dramatic. — Zalmay Khalilzad

A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel. — Hilary Mantel

We seem to be afraid to give the Kurds weaponry. We like to send it for some strange reason through Baghdad, and then they only get a tenth of it. — Benjamin Carson

The powerlessness of people with pure intentions, in the long run, can sometimes be more powerful than power in the hands of those blinded or depraved by evil tempers. — Widad Akreyi

When he was gassing the Kurds, he was gassing them using chemical weapons that were manufactured in Rochester, New York. And when he was fighting a long and protracted war with Iran, where one million people died, it was the CIA that was funding him. It was U.S. policy that built this dictator. When they didn't need him, they started imposing sanctions on his people. Sanctions should be directed at people's governments, not at the people. — Howard Zinn

Iraqi Kurds, out of desperate necessity, have forged one of the most watchful and vigilant anti-terrorist communities in the world. Terrorists from elsewhere just can't operate in that kind of environment. Al Qaeda members who do manage to infiltrate are hunted down like rats. This conservative Muslim society did a better job protecting me from Islamist killers than the U.S. military could do in the Green Zone in Baghdad. — Michael Totten

It cannot be an American fight. And I think what the president [Barack Obama] has consistently said - which I agree with - is that we will support those who take the fight to ISIS. That is why we have troops in Iraq that are helping to train and build back up the Iraqi military, why we have special operators in Syria working with the Kurds and Arabs, so that we can be supportive. — Hillary Clinton

Kurds are like fire, if approached kindly they will warm you, if approached badly they will burn you — Leyla Zana

Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who can't write their own language. — Luke Harding

We need to use overwhelming air power. We need to be arming the Kurds. We need to be fighting and killing ISIS where they are. — Ted Cruz

The UN should arrange, as US forces leave, for an international group of peacekeepers and negotiators from the Arab countries to bring together Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, and work out a solution for self-governance that would give all three groups a share in political power. Simultaneously, the UN should arrange for shipments of food and medicine, from the United States and other countries, as well as engineers to help rebuild the country. — Howard Zinn

If they make the deadline because the Shiites and Kurds essentially rammed a draft through over Sunni Arab objections, there will be hell to pay. — Wayne White

I will follow anyone ... and invite everyone ... too unite and defend the freedom of expression. — Widad Akreyi

It is time for the international community to work for the creation of an independent Kurdistan as they did once for the Jews after the Holocaust. The current war against ISIS, which is perceived by many as World War Three, can be compared to World War Two. After horrible wars, great changes can be brought about for those who have suffered extreme injustice. — Widad Akreyi

The victims of Ankara peace rally sacrificed their lives for peace and their only wish was We Want Peace. — Widad Akreyi

We need to do whatever is necessary to utterly defeat ISIS ... We're not using our overwhelming air power. We're not arming the Kurds. Those need to be the first steps. And then we need to put whatever ground power is needed to carry it out. — Ted Cruz

Nation building is our central task, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And states, nations can't just be built with military power. Despite all difficulties, it's very inspiring to see how the Kurds, the Arab Sunnis and the Shiites are coming together here, how they're jointly defining the basis on which their state is to be built, the political course this state will pursue and who is to receive which cabinet positions. — Zalmay Khalilzad

In the 20th century, the Muslim world created a vision of religious nationalism. Turkey, for example, had to be ethnically Turkish. Kurds, Armenians, other minorities didn't have a place in such a vision of a nation-state. — Feisal Abdul Rauf

Iraqi national identity under Saddam Hussein never truly incorporated Shiites or Kurds. Sunnis, who identified most closely with the Iraqi nation, remain in some ways disenfranchised relative to the other groups, or at least they perceive themselves that way. — Noah Feldman

The feeling of being an Iraqi unites all ethnic groups within this country. Even the Kurds, who have traditionally pushed for their own state, see the benefits of the current situation. They enjoy an autonomous status in Kurdistan, while at the same time participating in decisions in Baghdad. But if neighboring states were to push for a partition of Iraq, it would be a horrible mistake. — Zalmay Khalilzad

They were able to deduce from his reports that the sharbat was poisonous to Turks but not to Kurds; however, because of the official state position that Kurds and Turks are indistinguishable, they kept this conclusion to themselves. — Orhan Pamuk

This current government in Iraq has never fulfilled the commitments it made to form a unity government with the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shia. We have worked hard with them within the confines of our ability to do that but we can't dictate to them. — Chuck Hagel

Saddam's forces had leveled about four thousand villages and killed some 180,000 Kurds in Anfal - a "counterinsurgency gone wild," I wrote.16 Thousands had been shot and buried in mass graves. Others had starved to death in desert prisons, or been gassed in Halabja, Iraqi Kurdistan, where between 3,500 and 5,000 civilian adults and children had died on a single day in March 1988. Saddam had used chemical weapons against the Shiites in the south, but his attack in Halabja remains the world's largest chemical attack against a civilian-populated area in history. — Judith Miller

News is like the tilefish which appears in great schools off the Atlantic Coast some years and then vanishes, no one knows whither or for how long. Newspapers might employ these periods searching for the breeding grounds of news, but they prefer to fill up with stories about Kurdled Kurds or Calvin Coolidge, until the banks close or a Hitler marches, when they are as surprised as their readers. — A.J. Liebling

army. I am only sixteen. I never dreamed of this life. I wanted to go to university, to become a lawyer, to help women, who are doubly oppressed, firstly by the Turkish government because they are Kurds and secondly by the males in their families because they are women. I could not follow my path in a civilised way because I am facing an uncivilised opponent. I must resort to the gun, and if necessary, will die by it. — Kae Bahar

The Iraquis can see it. The Kurds can feel it. The jihadists are counting on it. — Charles Krauthammer

The free world cannot afford to accept any form of extremism, whether it is fascism, racism or religious extremism. — Widad Akreyi

There's a certain amount of sympathy here for the Bush administration's problem, which is they would like to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they would like to have the Kurds autonomous. — Les Aspin

Just ask the Iraqi Kurds and the Shia of the South. When the Kurds responded to US provocations, leaflet campaigns, and promises by rising up against Saddam in 1991, Bush Senior let them be slaughtered. I was in touch, occasionally, with someone in the DIA who'd taken part in getting the Kurds to rise up, and asked him how he could live with himself after that. He shrugged and said, "They're just animals." Which made me sick, actually. — Gary Brecher

I will follow anyone ...
And remind everyone ...
Of enslaved Yazidi women ...
Raped ...
And forced ...
To donate blood to ISIS men ... — Widad Akreyi

Generalization is the biggest challenge that must be dealt with if we are to create spaces for constructive dialogue where muslims feel they are welcomed. This is equally true with regards to Westerners! Not all Westerners are against muslims, and not all terrorist attacks in the West are linked to Islamic jihadists. — Widad Akreyi

The Kurds are the greatest fighting force and our strongest allies. They're Muslim. — Jeb Bush

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein had and used significant weapons of mass destruction on his own people, both the Kurds and the Iranians. — Curt Weldon

I Will Follow Anyone
And Ask Everyone
To Stand Together
As One Civilisation
Against Terrorism — Widad Akreyi

the Afghans were well aware of what happened in Iraq during the Gulf War, when the Shiites and Kurds believed the leaflets the Americans dropped urging them to rise up against Saddam Hussein. They did, and the Americans did not come. Saddam's forces had retaliated by massacring the insurgents. "The Afghans in the south fear the same fate - they need to be assured — Eric Blehm

The Kurds were the only people in Iraq who were completely unguarded in expressing their gratitude to the United States for setting them free. — Timothy Noah

What we would be committed to would be a representative government where all the Iraqi people decide who should lead their nation, and lead it in a way that keeps it together as a single nation and where all parts of the nation - Shia, Sunni and Kurds - are able to live free and in peace and believe that their interests are represented by the government. — Colin Powell