Word: kurdistan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...panic-stricken Hellenes, got them to elect five new leaders-himself included-and fight their way to the sea. The heavily armed Greeks moved laboriously across the plain, while clouds of Persian cavalry showered them with arrows. The only way out was to turn north into the mountains of Kurdistan, whose warlike inhabitants had just chopped to pieces a Persian army of 112,000 men. In seven days of ceaseless fighting with the Kurds, the Greeks suffered more than in all their battles with the Persians...
Since 1950, with the help of foreign experts (a U.S. and a British economist are full members of the board), Iraq's unique agency has built, started or planned 16 dams between the snow-veined mountains of Kurdistan and the steaming shores of the Persian Gulf. It has completed two great barrages that this year caught the flood waters of the Tigris and Euphrates and led them into new $30 million lakes at Wadi Tharthar and Habbaniya. Downstream its contractors are digging drainage ditches and scooping silt from the ancient Babylonian water-distribution canals, now scheduled to be used...
Along the Arab-Israeli border, gangs of workers went on shoveling ditches for pipes to water new fields in the Negev, while soldiers dug out gun emplacements, trenches and foxholes. Troops joined with raw settlers from Morocco and Kurdistan to turn farm communities into flimsy fortresses. In Tel Aviv thousands of white-collar workers left their desks and went to the borders to help dig defenses. At the annual convention of the powerful Israeli General Federation of Labor (Histadrut), there were no ringing calls to arms in the labor leaders' speeches. "I prefer even this miserable peace to either...
...secret patriotic organization called the Committee for Kurdish Youth, and promptly sent two agents, in the guise of horse traders, to offer "help." The youth organization grew into a full-fledged Communist party and, by the end of 1945, into a Communist puppet regime. At Mehabad, in Persian Kurdistan, the "Kurdish People's Republic" was proclaimed under the watchful eyes of Red army Tommy gunners...
What They Are Like. In Kurdistan, snow caps the highest mountains all of the year, and the wind whines down the sharp valleys. The Kurds are men to match their forbidding mountains. The sight of a Kurdish horseman plunging down the side of a hill and breaking out on to the valley floor to gallop in a rising cloud of dust is unforgettable. Stop a car along one of the lonely, untraveled roads of Kurdistan, and you're almost sure to attract such a visitor. He comes thundering down on you as though he were leading a cavalry charge...