278 A Short History of the Middle East
Middle East, and have a powerful influence over the Lebanese
trades-union movement. The Syrian and Lebanese governments
were reported to have detained some 500 suspected Communists
in the summer of 1946; but during 1947 the propaganda made by
the agents of King Abdullah of Transjordan for his Greater Syria
project, in which no Arab can believe that he does not have at least
the tacit approval of the British government, caused the ruling
clique in Syria to seek the support of the Communists, who are
naturally hostile to Abdullah as an ally of Britain.l
In Iraq there are two Communist parties which appear to differ
over personalities rather than policy. Some fifty members were
arrested in January 1947 and seven leaders were sentenced to long
terms of imprisonment for 'conspiracy to overthrow the govern-
ment by force, and inciting members of the armed forces and the
police to bear arms against the government5. The left-wing press
appealed to Arab nationalist sentiment in strongly attacking'the
Turcolraqi Treaty. The main instrument of Russian policy in Iraq
has, however, been not the class-struggle, but the discontent of the
Kurdish minority in Northern Iraq, which is nearly one-fifth of the
total population of the country and has been neglected by the Arab
politicians of Baghdad. This discontent has periodically found
expression in tribal revolts, duly countered more or less effectively
by Iraqi military expeditions. This normal routine was given a new
direction when in 1945 the leaders of the rebellious Barzani Kurds
escaped into Persian Kurdistan and joined forces with Kurdish
rebels against the Persian central government who were receiving
strong Soviet encouragement from Azerbaijan.2 Iraqi fears of a
Soviet-inspired Kurdish irruption from Persia into Iraq in the
spring of 1946 did not, however, materialize; and the collapse of the
'national government' of Persian Kurdistan in December, follow-
ing the Persian government's assertion of its authority in Azer-
baijan, eased the tension in Iraq. In April 1947 the Persian authori-
ties executed three of the Persian Kurdish rebel leaders, and drove
the Barzanis back to the Iraqi frontier, where their deputy-leader
Sheikh Ahmed surrendered to the Iraqi authorities. Some 1,500,
however, escaped back into Persia, and a thousand with their leader
Mullah Mustafa crossed into Russian territory.
1 The World To-Day, January 1948, 25.
2 On this movement, see Archie Roosevelt Jr., in Middle East Journal, I
(Washington, 1947), 247 ff.