Editors' Introduction: Palimpsestic Genocide in Kurdistan

The Kurdish-inhabited lands of the Middle East—spanning territories in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey as well as the Caucasus—have hosted a complex ethno-religious mosaic of civilizations since ancient times. The region's fertile soils bear witness to centuries of social cohesion and intercommunal harmony, punctuated by persecution, war, genocide, and atrocity committed against its peoples by internal and external historical agents. In the modern era, genocidal strategies have been employed against ethnic Kurds as well as Armenians, Assyrians, and Ezidis,¹ among other groups, as part of the rise of nationalism and nation-states within a larger global context characterized by regional competition and Russian, European, and North American imperial interests.

At times, Kurds have found themselves caught up in genocidal processes as perpetrators, bystanders, and rescuers, as was the case with the Ottoman Empire's genocide against its Christian (and Ezidi) populations during and after World War I. At other times, and more frequently, Kurds have found themselves targeted by genocidal violence, to the extent that they have been referred as "a nation of genocides."² The enduring trauma of genocide and of the historical processes of erasure, as well as the trauma associated with the unfinished project of creating a sovereign homeland in which Kurds can find protection, is palpable to anyone who visits the region.

This special issue of Genocide Studies International engages with the question of genocide in the variously defined territory known as "Kurdistan" and in the Kurdish diaspora. We have focused on "Genocide and the Kurds" rather than "in Kurdistan" to emphasize the shifting nature of claims to the land as well as the diversity of peoples that have inhabited it historically, whose presence is still so definitive of the region and its politics. The articles published here help to give shape to the overlapping experiences and discourses of genocide for different Kurdish communities and their neighbors in the unique landscape of palimpsestic genocide. They do so with a view to better understanding genocide's impact on the spatial and temporal dynamics of identity construction and the long-standing question of Kurdish self-determination in the Middle East, and at times touch upon the complex politics of genocide memory and genocide recognition in the region.

In planning this issue, we were very much influenced by the contemporary, and in some cases ongoing, genocides committed by the Islamic State (also known as ISIS/ISIL/Daesh) against various minority communities in northern Iraq and Syria. These actions have placed multilayered pressures on communal relations, as well as the capacity of local authorities to respond to the needs of the survivors and displaced population. Most notably, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has accepted close to 1.5 million internally displaced people, including Ezidis, Christians, Shabak-Shia, Turkomen, Mandean, and Sunni Arabs since 2014, which has placed an immense burden on an already contracting economy.³ Nevertheless, the stories of persecution and displacement told by these traumatized communities are very familiar to the host society, which experienced genocide most recently from 1986–1991, and have been incorporated, in some instances, into Kurdish articulations of their own need for and right to self-determination, and sometimes to an independent state.

Nowhere is this trauma more clear than in what is often referred to as the 74th Ezidi firman (literally "edict" or "royal decree" in Persian and Turkish, but generally translated in the Ezidi case as "genocide"), which began in August 2014, when ISIS overran the Sinjar/Shengal region and the Nineveh Plain.⁴ The Ezidi count between 73 and 74 firman against them, with the ISIS genocide of 2014 to the present being the most recent. The ISIS attack on the Ezidi was preceded by the fatal, and seemingly planned, withdrawal of Kurdish Peshmerga troops from the Ezidi homeland of Sinjar on the Iraqi border with Syria. This left the Ezidis completely unprotected when ISIS arrived some hours later. The withdrawal has been experienced by many Ezidis as an abandonment and a betrayal, leading to tensions between Ezidi IDPs and the Kurdish authorities, often expressed through disputed identity claims...