The Kurds comprise the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East. As such, they have had a considerable influence on the international relations of a number of Middle Eastern states and their internal politics. Conversely, regional and international politics have had their own effects on the political status of that people. This thesis focuses especially on the Iraqi Kurds, examining the impact on them of regional and international politics in terms of the Cold War and focusing on US policy during the period 1958-1975. Given Iraq’s location in a sensitive area of the world, this is a surprisingly under-explored area, both geographically, at country level, and specifically at this time, during the Cold War. That is the gap in the literature, therefore, that the present research fills. It takes 1958 as its starting point as this was the year of the overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy and the establishment of the Republic, which had a profound effect on the Cold War in the Middle East, and it takes 1975 as its end point, since this saw the signing of the Algiers Accord between Iran and Iraq, which, widely perceived as a betrayal amongst the Iraqi Kurds, constituted a major setback for the Kurdish national liberation movement in the country. The thesis approaches this topic through the examination of several issues, including American policies, Iraq-Iran relations and the impact of regional politics on the Kurdish Issue in the new Republic, analysing the impact of these not just as discrete factors but also in terms of their complex and dynamic interplay.

‘Thus I beheld, at last, the goal of my journey from Luristan, and was not disappointed. Glorious indeed is this Kurdistan world of mountains, piled up in masses of peaks and precipices, cleft by ravines in which the Ashirets and Yezides find shelter, every peak snow-crested, every ravine flaming with autumn hints; and here, where the ridges are the sharpest, and the rock spires are the imposing, is the latest refuge of a Church once the most powerful in the East’. Isabella Lucy Bird was one of a number of travel writers and missionaries, whose attraction to the allure of the Orient or whose sense of evangelical mission, had led them to traverse the mountainous and largely impervious regions of Northern Kurdistan in the Nineteenth-Century. Her travel diaries, like so many of the accounts of this Kurdish world of mountainous peaks and precipices, would describe a land of ‘antique heritage’, one which had been isolated as a consequence of its physical geography, and insulated from the influences of the Mesopotamian plains by the ‘fierce behaviour’ and ‘lawless habits’ of its marauding Kurdish tribes. Up there in the mountains of Kurdistan was a window into what was perceived to have been a far older Mesopotamia; a landscape which in its antiquity “presented to the eye so many of the aspects of the biblical Eden”. Indeed, to travel through the environs north of the city of Mosul had been like ‘traversing lands of biblical scenes’, to view the mountains of Hakkari ‘like being carried back thousands of years on the wings of time’. This ‘Mesopotamia of the mountains’, would seem to have preserved a rich and evocative landscape for the imaginations of those familiar with the narratives and landscapes of Old Testament narratives, but as Bird and a number of other travellers were to imply, the isolation of this seemingly ‘antique’ landscape had also confined and thus preserved the remnants of an equally antique community, one which had professed a belief in Christ for Fourteen centuries. According to journal entries and missionary reports, those remnants of an antique Christian community among the mountains of Hakkari were ‘a very different people’ to those who had professed a faith in Christ upon the alluvial plains of the Mesopotamian valley; both on account of the nuances which defined their various doctrines, and the seemingly primitive quality of their customs, rituals and speech. Where the promise of association with a European power had converted a large number of those living on the Mesopotamian plains to the doctrines of Catholicism, this forbidding and largely inaccessible landscape of mountain peaks and precipices had seemed to preserve fragments not only of a distinctly Oriental Church, but of a Church which had maintained tangible links to the earliest threads of Christianity in Mesopotamia.5 Bird’s journals would describe largely ‘unintelligible conversations’ peppered with a vocabulary similar to that which had been spoken by Christ, and a variety of customs which had been a ‘touching reminiscence’ of those to be found within Old Testament narratives: the fantastically romanticised accounts of a Victorian orientalist perhaps, but Bird was by no means alone in suggesting that she found there to be ‘something strikingly biblical’ about so many of the customs and rituals of these ‘mountain Christians’. 6 Austin Layard, a contemporary and fellow traveller, would similarly assume that their ignorance of the ‘superstitions of the Church of Rome’ and their ‘more simple observances and ceremonies’, may ‘clearly be traced to a more primitive form of Christianity’; one which in its simplicity, seemed uniquely untouched by the ecumenical councils and creeds which had elsewhere defined the Christian faith during the centuries of its founding. Where the missions of the Catholic Church had been entirely confined to the urban areas of the Mesopotamian plains, particularly Amida or modern day Diyarbakir, the mountains of Kurdistan were seen by those 19th Century missionaries and explorers to be the last refuge of a Nestorian, and Oriental Christianity, one which had preserved links to a more primitive expression of the faith. 6 Bird, (1891), p.242. The same assumptions were also made of those Jewish communities living within the remote and mountainous world of Kurdistan. Owing to the rugged nature of the area, as well as the al constant threat of brigandry on the few and potentially perilous roads which penetrated this otherwise inaccessible world of mountain peaks, the Jews of Kurdistan were assumed to have preserved a primitive, though somewhat debased expression of a more ancient Judaism. Those few Jewish travellers who visited Kurdistan in the 19th Century, such as I. J. Benjamin, would describe their regret at the shallow knowledge expressed by these communities in matters of Jewish Law, especially when compared with their relatively near metropolitan communities of Baghdad and Damascus, but also their excitement at the seemingly ancient practices and customs with which they expressed their Jewish faith. Benjamin writes of his excitement at having witnessed one seemingly biblical custom in particular, suggesting, ‘where I went during harvest time, I found a custom strictly observed by the Jews which brought to my mind the precepts of the bible. Neither the ears of corn, nor the grapes, nor fruits are wholly collected, but the portion of the widows and orphans is always left, it is even allowed to go into a ripe cornfield to break the sheaves, and there and then to boil the corn in water, but the ears of corn must not be cut, neither may they be carried away’. Practices such as these had derived from ancient oral traditions, and had been transmitted from generation to generation, rather than in learned abstract precepts. Theirs was an ancient story - one which spoke of the legacy of a man whose doctrines had rocked the Christian world in the Fifth Century. His name was Nestorius, a Patriarch of Constantinople, whose doctrines had attempted to negotiate some of the provocative questions facing the Christian church in its formative period, quite controversially, how one was to understand the humanity of Christ, and how one was to refer to his relationship to the Virgin Mary. At the first iii Contextualising Syriac Anathema After the lapse of a long history defined by schism, excommunication, Muslim conquest and more recently Catholic mission, here was a Church and a community high up in the mountains of Kurdistan whose ways spoke of the legacy of an entirely independent and ancient Oriental Christian tradition, one which had been born in the theological environment of Late Antiquity, and as a consequence, at least in part, of adhering to the beliefs of a ‘heresy’. Its preservation was deemed to have been nothing less than ‘a matter of wonder’; a story of almost unprecedented ancient Christian survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

A few days after signing the Armistice of Mudros on 30 October 1918, British forces occupied the Ottoman province of Mosul, after which its future was a central factor in the formulation of post-war British policy in the region. In general, the studies of this period suffer from discontinuity and lack cohesion. We are dealing with partial accounts and imperfect narrations written from the standpoint of ideological, ethnic and political interests. By means of an examination of the factors influencing British decision-makers, this study seeks to answer the question why British policy came to support the inclusion of the Mosul vilayet within Iraq, rather than to be restored to the new Turkish republic or to be allowed to become a separate Kurdish state in south Kurdistan, although the Kurds were supposed to have self-determination. This study contests the common argument that the oil was the crucial factor, and instead it explores the contribution of all of the economic, political and strategic arguments considered by British policy-makers. It concludes that the security priority of stabilizing the newly-created state of Iraq was the most significant element in British decisions on the Mosul question. The geo-strategic, economic and racial position of the Kurds in southern Kurdistan were critical to both the British perspective and the League of Nations‟ decision for the inclusion of the Mosul vilayet in Iraq. It became clear that British policy towards the Mosul question was quite successful in achieving its interests in both the internal and external arenas, but it left the political and territorial question of the Kurds unresolved, and this can be described as the unexploded bomb in the region.

The migration of the Armenian people into Cilicia in the late 11th century AD was caused by an agreement of several Armenian princes with the Byzantine emperor to leave their homelands to the north in return for imperial military appointments in Cappadocia, Mesopotamia, and Cilicia. Following the defeat of the emperor, Romanos Diogenes, at Manzikert by the Seljuk Turks in 1071, however, the Byzantines gradually lost control of these territories, allowing the Armenians to establish more or less independent chieftaincies there. This culminated in 1198 in the establishment of an Armenian kingdom in the region of Cilicia, which lasted until the Mamluk conquest in 1375. A dearth of historical sources makes it difficult to establish a definite framework for the political history of the period. This doctoral thesis focuses on the origins, development, and spatial distribution of fortified sites in the Armenian Kingdom (1198-1375). Through the examination of known and newly identified castles, this work increased the number of sites and features to be associated with the Armenian Kingdom. Furthermore, it examines the historical landscape of medieval fortifications and analyzes their relationship with several variables, such as nearby un-surveyed rural settlements. Despite the abundance of archaeological remains, little work had focused on the Armenian heritage. In his 1987 book, Robert Edwards argued that the organization of the Armenians in Cilicia represented the triumph of a non-urban strategy. According to Edwards military architecture developed as a primary alternative to urban organization. It is my aim with this work to refine his ideas with new archaeological evidence. It is an attempt to develop a comprehensive and flexible model that explains the role of the military fortifications not as just the product of one particular strategy. Although many of the sites are still relatively well preserved, the project is also timely, as the continuing expansion of the population into the Cilician Highlands is causing archaeological remains to be plundered for building material.

The dissertation seeks to address three sets of questions: Why have the United States and France become involved in the issue of the Armenian genocide several decades after the genocide? How and why do the American and French debates have different outcomes? What conclusions can be drawn from these differences? It examines how the unresolved conflict between the competing Turkish narrative of denial and the Armenian narrative affirming the reality of the genocide has led the Armenian diaspora and the Turkish state to influence political actors in the United States and France to support their arguments for and against the reality of the genocide. This thesis focuses on the debates in the United States in 2007 and 2010 on a Congressional Resolution to recognise the genocide. It also traces the progress of French legislation from French official recognition of the genocide in 2001 to the passage of legislation to criminalise denial of the Armenian genocide in 2012, ultimately ruled unconstitutional by the French Constitutional Council. The contribution to knowledge this thesis makes is to demonstrate that recognition of genocide is a political question that involves more than the perpetrators and victims. Just as genocide does not only involve these two actors, recognition of genocide also involves other states and societies. Just as bystander states have to think about what they do when a genocide is being perpetrated when it comes to recognition they have to evaluate what to do, particularly when they have been involved from the outset.

The problematical notion of the ‘Armenian question’ has become a political and linguistic tool for the official genocide denial ever since the foundation of the Turkish Republic, and has come to stand for the controversy that exists around the denial and recognition of the Armenian Genocide at both national and international levels. This research explores how the ‘Armenian question’ in Turkey opens up a discursive space in which various forms of Turkish nationalism are constructed and reproduced, and addresses multifaceted narratives from members of the Armenian community. By employing this term I aim to challenge the attempt to decontextualize collective acts of violence against Armenians, restricting them to the period of the Ottoman Empire, and indicate how this issue goes far beyond the politics of genocide. The objective of my research is to point out particular production and consumption phases of the Armenian question in Turkey. The production side focuses on three national newspapers in order to unveil overlapping and divergent discursive strategies in their coverage of three recent incidents, namely the assassination of Hrant Dink, the murder of Sevag Balıkçı, and the public protest against the Khojaly Massacre. In contrast, the consumption side embraces the perceptions and experiences of particular members of the Armenian community in Istanbul with respect to past and present occurrences. This research thus uncovers consistencies and contradictions between news discourse and the responses of the Armenian interviewees concerning three particular events and sheds light on the asymmetrical production and consumption patterns of the Armenian question in Turkey. Drawing on data from both a critical discourse analysis of three cases in three Turkish national newspapers and forty-five semi-structured interviews with Armenians, this qualitative study seeks to contribute to the growing body of research on the Armenian question and Turkish nationalism.

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