To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in disguise

by Ely Banister Soane

Sulaimania, from which the Aoraman range that marks the frontier may be seen, lies actually about sixty miles from the nearest point of Persia, and one hundred from the Aoraman peak, which is visible from the town. It lies at the foot of the Azmir system of mountains, which support the Persian plateau at this point. It is also the largest Kurdish town of southern Turkish Kurdistan, but despite the importance, commercial and political, that it once possessed, it is a place without any noteworthy history.

It owes its origin indirectly to one Mulla Ahmad, who 350 years ago assisted the Turks in a war. This person, a Kurdish priest, was a native of the village of Dara Shamana, in Pishdr, north of Sulaimania, and a member of the Nuradini branch of the Baban tribe. For his services he was granted certain lands and villages by the reigning sultan, and established himself at the village of Qal’a-i-Chwalan, now called Qara Chulan, a village north of the Azmir range, a day’s journey from Sulaimania. Here he reigned till his death, and his successors became powerful rulers, semi-independent, ruling over Surchina, where Sulaimania is now situated, and the lands about Qal’a-i-Chwalan. These chiefs were, like so many of the frontier chiefs of Sulaimania, by no means too faithful to the Turks, and transferred their allegiance to Persia when it suited them.

AORAMAN.

In 1779, in the time of Sulaiman Pasha of Bagdad, the government was transferred to the site of the present town, and a government house and other buildings were constructed, and the new town called Sulaimani—not Sulaimania.

HISTORY OF SULAIMANIA

Now a dynasty of Kurdish pashas ruled, beginning with Ibrahim Pasha, and followed by his descendants. These governed until the time of Abdulla Pasha, who was contemporary with Namiq Pasha of Bagdad.[50] The Sulaimani ruler, having come to Bagdad to visit the Vali, was seized, together with his brother Ahmad Pasha, and sent under a guard to Constantinople. This was in 1851, and was the end of Kurdish rule in Sulaimania. One Isma’il Pasha, a Turk, was appointed Qaim Maqam of Sulaimania, with a garrison, and Sulaimania has remained a Turkish government ever since. The two Kurdish pashas died about thirty years ago, and their sons live as pensioners in Constantinople.

The Kurdish Ibrahim Pasha, having gained the chieftainship of the district of Sulaimania, and Qaradagh to the south-east, built for himself a large house upon the hill-side—where the modern governor or Mutasarrif now resides. Around this and lower down, the town began to form. The old family of shaikhs, or religious leaders, established itself there also, and the construction of a bath and mosque gained for the place a certain importance. Kurds, however, are not good settlers, and the population of the new town began to form of the various classes of people who habitually follow trade. These are, in these regions, Turkoman of Kirkuk, Jews and Christian—Syrian and Chaldean, mainly the latter. It is said that out of a thousand houses constituting the town in 1825, eight hundred were occupied by Christians, Jews, and Turkomans.

As the neighbourhood is entirely peopled by Kurds of the Marga, Shuan, Hamavand, Bana, and Jaf tribes, the language of the place was from the first Kurdish. The shaikhs at the same time exercising their power for evil and fanaticism, made life so difficult for Christians and Jews that a large number each year deserted their own faiths to escape persecution, adopting after conversion the dress and speech of the local Kurds. From this very mixed material a people has sprung whose ancestors were the children of races widely different in sentiment and nature, mixtures of Aryan, Semitic, and Turkish stock, that possesses almost every one of the unpleasant qualities of each race, and a very lively fanaticism that has—under the inflammatory action of the shaikhs—never weakened, gaining for Sulaimania a name for the ignorant and savage isolation that has now brought about its own ruin.

Nevertheless, under the strong rule of the old pashas the priests were unable to gain or exert the malignant influence they ever hoped to do, and the town made very considerable progress, becoming an important market for the wool and skins of the tribespeople, and an entrepôt and distributing station for all goods imported into western Persian Kurdistan from Mosul and Bagdad. There was, on the land specially in the Qaradagh and Shahr-i-Zur, a population of Chaldeans and Jews, and these, whether retaining their own religion, or becoming included and intermingled with the Musulman population, furnished a keen and progressive business instinct.