He crowned himself king three times. Each time, the British took the crown back. Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji, a Sufi leader of the Qadiriyyah order and the most influential figure in southern Kurdistan, spent the years between 1919 and 1931 fighting for an idea that the Great Powers had briefly entertained and then discarded: an independent Kurdish state. The Kingdom of Kurdistan, declared in the city of Sulaymaniyah in the chaos following the Ottoman Empire's collapse, lasted in various forms from 1921 to 1924. It was, on paper, territory under the British Mandate of Mesopotamia. On the ground, it was something else entirely.
The end of the Ottoman Empire was supposed to bring self-determination to its subject peoples. The Treaty of Sevres, signed in 1920, even contemplated an autonomous Kurdish region. But treaties are paper, and the political map was being redrawn by the victors. Britain, awarded the Mandate for Mesopotamia by the League of Nations, had oil interests and strategic calculations that left little room for Kurdish sovereignty. The Kurds, a distinct people with their own language, culture, and mountain homeland, found themselves divided among the new states of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Mahmud Barzanji, the Shaykh of the Qadiriyyah Sufi order appointed governor of the former Ottoman sanjak of Duhok, saw through the arrangement. In May 1919, he declared an independent Kurdistan. He was defeated within a month.
Barzanji's moment came again through British miscalculation. When a Turkish military detachment, the Ozdemir force, penetrated into the Sulaymaniyah region in 1922, the British needed a local strongman to counter the threat. They reappointed Barzanji as governor in September 1922, apparently believing they could control him. By November, he had declared himself King of the Kingdom of Kurdistan. He assembled a cabinet: Shaikh Qadir Hafeed as Prime Minister, Abdulkarim Alaka, a Christian Kurd, as Finance Minister, and Zaky Sahibqran as Defence Minister of the Kurdish National Army. The government included ministers for customs, justice, labor, education, and interior affairs. It published an official newspaper, Roji Kurdistan. For a brief period, the apparatus of statehood existed in Sulaymaniyah.
Britain did not negotiate away the Kingdom of Kurdistan. It bombed it. The Royal Air Force's Iraq Command, acting on behalf of the Iraqi government in Baghdad, played a central role in ending Kurdish self-rule. The RAF had developed a doctrine of "air control" in the colonies, using aircraft to police territories that would have required expensive ground forces to subdue. Kurdistan became one of its proving grounds. In July 1924, the British sent an Assyrian levy force to capture Sulaymaniyah. Barzanji was defeated and exiled. In January 1926, the League of Nations formally awarded the mandate over the territory to Iraq, stipulating special rights for Kurds, a provision that would prove largely symbolic.
Barzanji was not finished. In 1930 and 1931, he made his last attempt at rebellion. It failed. But the idea he embodied, a Kurdish homeland governed by Kurds, proved more durable than any of the political arrangements imposed upon the region. The Kingdom of Kurdistan lasted barely four years. The Kurdish aspiration for self-governance has now lasted more than a century. Today, Sulaymaniyah sits within the Kurdistan Regional Government, an autonomous entity within Iraq that exercises many of the powers Barzanji fought and failed to claim outright. His tomb rests in the Great Mosque of Sulaymaniyah, alongside his grandfather Haji Kaka Ahmad. The kingdom is gone. The question it raised has never been answered.
Located at 35.55N, 45.42E, centered on the city of Sulaymaniyah in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The modern city fills a broad basin surrounded by mountain ridges. Nearest airport is Sulaymaniyah International Airport (ORSU). Best viewed at 8,000-15,000 feet AGL to see the full basin. The Zagros Mountains frame the eastern horizon. The city grid and its relationship to surrounding terrain illustrate why this location has been strategically significant for centuries.