These self-same tribesmen who received us so hospitably in their villages, and gave us entertainment of their best—treating us in friendly fashion according to their laws, because we had come trusting to their honour in the guise of friends and without hostile intent—would, when they took the "war path" and raided a British post, put up a spirited fight, fully bent on killing or being killed.
Persian Kurds are largely pastoral and nomadic. There are the sedentary tribes who are the tillers of the soil and never move very far away from home. The nomads, on the other hand, roam with their flocks and herds and womenfolk from winter to summer quarters and vice versa, and it is during these periodical migrations that the inherited predatory instincts of the Kurds are given free rein. Many are the armed forays made on a peaceful Persian neighbour's stock. Often there is resistance, and occasionally an attempt at reprisals; so a respectably-sized Persian-Kurdish hill-war may have had as its origin the theft of half a dozen goats by Kurdish robbers. Stray bands of brigands who had made life more than usually interesting for some Persian village or other, if pursuit became too vigorous and they were threatened with capture, were always able to escape the consequences of their depredations by slipping over the frontier and seeking bast (sanctuary) in Turkish territory.
Whether the Kurds are, or are not, the descendants of those first-class fighting men of long ago who opposed the retreat of the Ten Thousand through the bleak mountain passes of Kurdistan, they undeniably are imbued with a certain pride of ancestry which manifests itself in various little ways. No pure nomadic Kurd will ever engage in manual labour, which he looks upon as a disgrace, and a job fit only for helots, nor will he become a Charvadar (muleteer).
The Kurd undoubtedly possesses an unenviable reputation for lawlessness amongst the more law-abiding Persians and Turks of this wild and turbulent frontier land. He is handicapped, perhaps, to this extent, that, being an alien to the Turk in language, and to the Persian in religion, he is looked upon as a pariah, and the hand of both is ever raised against him. Being resentful and overbearing, if not arrogant, in manner, and knowing no legal code beyond that which a rifle imposes, he seeks to enforce his own arbitrary ready-made justice, to call it by that name. So the merry game goes on, and up amongst the snows of Kurdistan Persian and Kurd and Turk kill each other on the slightest pretext, and often for no ascertainable cause.
The Kurd is always well armed, and usually well mounted—often at the expense of some lowland Persian villager. He invariably affects the national costume, which is an abbreviated coat and enormous baggy trousers, with a capacious Kamarband of coloured silk in which he carries pipe, knife, and odds and ends.
Ten armed Kurds riding into Bijar, a town of 10,000 inhabitants, would start a panic in the Bazaar. Shutters would go up and shopkeepers would vanish as if by magic, while the small force of Persian police in the place, who were usually suffering from the combined effects of malnutrition and arrears of pay, would discreetly go to cover, and not be seen again until the visitors had departed. Usually a British military policeman, armed with a stout stick, would be sent to handle the delicate situation, to see that there was no looting, and that the King's peace was preserved inviolate by these quarrel-seeking, pilfering rascals from beyond the hills.
Bijar itself, unhappily for the peace of mind and pocket of its shopkeeper-citizens and wealthy agriculturists, is unhealthily near the "Bad Man's Land" of the nomad Kurds. It is built in a cup-shaped hollow surrounded by barren peaks, and its altitude (5,200 feet) gives it a rigorous winter climate. The enclosed gardens which usually lend a touch of picturesque embellishment even to the meanest and dirtiest of Persian towns are lacking at Bijar. It grows wheat and corn in abundance on the long, wide plateau which stretches unbrokenly for miles between the bare, rugged hills. The arable land is so fertile, and its acreage so abundant, that but one-third is cultivated yearly. The average wheat yield is enormous, yet the people are always hovering on the border-line of starvation, the result of mismanagement, misappropriation, and all the other evils which may be grouped together under the head of Persian official maladministration.
When the British marched into Bijar in the summer of 1918 anarchy and disorder were paramount. The Persian Government is supposed to keep a garrison here, but the oldest inhabitants had never seen it. If it did exist, it was carefully hidden away and not allowed to meddle in such troublesome affairs as Kurdish forays. The Turks during their occupancy looted Bijar very thoroughly, and roving Kurds, too, when short of supplies—and that was often—never forgot to extend their unwelcome patronage to the local bazaars, on the principle of "Blessed is he that taketh, for he shall not want."
The Governor was a local resident, and his office an unpaid one as far as the Persian treasury was concerned; but his power was great and his rule arbitrary, and the post brought him considerable emoluments. He was a timid and vacillating but well-meaning individual, who always trembled at the knees when brought face to face with the unusual. The mere brandishing of a loaded pistol anywhere in his immediate vicinity would throw him into a paroxysm of terror. He spoke halting French, and was afflicted with the prevailing Persian mania for verse-writing. Still, he never allowed his literary pursuits to clash with or nullify his keen commercial instincts; and he grew daily in affluence.
But even a Persian peasant has his limits of endurance when he finds himself being ground to fine powder in the mill of oppression and corruption. Those of the Bijar district were no exception. After having been systematically looted all round, by Turk, Kurd, and dishonest local officials, they rose in revolt when a demand was made upon them for the payment of the Government Maliat, or grain tribute. They followed up an emphatic refusal by threatening to duck the Governor and his coadjutor, the Tax-collector, in the local horsepond. The latter fled the town, while as for the terrified Governor, he promptly shut himself up, seeking bast (sanctuary) with an ill-armed following within the sacred precincts of his serai. From the roof, one of his retinue, using his hands for a megaphone, sent out an urgent S.O.S. call to the British, with the result that a compromise was effected; the Governor was rescued from his undignified plight, and the angry peasants were appeased by his promise that the collection of the unpopular tax would rest in abeyance until Teheran gave its decision on the subject.