The Times | Octobre11 2019 | Richard Spencer Middle East Correspondent

In an outburst unusual even by his own standards, President Trump gave one reason why he could not regard the Kurds as long-term partners: their failure to help the US and its allies in the Normandy landings.

“The Kurds are fighting for then- land,” he told reporters. “As somebody wrote in a very powerful article today, they didn’t help us in the Second World War, they didn’t help us with Normandy as an example... But they were there to help us with their land, and that’s a different thing.”

In spirit, he seems to have been making a point about the difference between a longstanding alliance, such as the West’s with Turkey, and short-term cooperation with people the West has a passing common interest with.

His comments were ridiculed, however, with critics pointing out that on D-Day the Kurds, landlocked in the Middle East and Central Asia, were not flush with Marines and landing-craft.

Neverthless the Kurds did help the British, US, and Allied efforts in Normandy, albeit obliquely.

Akil Awan, an academic at Royal Holloway, University of London, pointed out that the Kurds played a key role in the British occupation of Iraq during the Second World War, fighting with British troops to block a pro-Nazi coup.

Britain had been given responsibility for Iraq after the First World War under the Sykes-Picot Agreement and, while the country won notional independence in 1932, London kept a strategic eye on it. It maintained a military presence, particularly on the RAF Habbaniya airbase west of Baghdad, where foxhunting British officers were supported by the so-called Iraq Levies.

This force, first raised to support British rule at the end of the First World War, contained Iraqis of all sects and ethnicities but was dominated by minorities, particularly Assyrian Christians, Kurds and Yazidis.

When a pro-Nazi politician seized power in 1941, the British invaded from Basra in the south. RAF Habbaniya was surrounded by pro-Nazi Iraqi forces, but the RAF, supported by contingents of the Iraq Levies, broke out, pushed back and eventually reversed the coup.

Dr Awan estimates that by 1942 Kurds made up 25 per cent of the fighting force of the Levies, and certainly in records from a year later ten of the 44 companies were said to be Kurdish.

The Iraqi front was, of course, a long way from Normandy, and Hitler’s crack Panzer divisions were not involved. But Iraq was important because of oil.

Britain insisted on control of the key northern Iraqi city of Mosul, which Sykes-Picot initially gave to French- controlled Syria. With major wells struck in the 1920s in nearby Kirkuk, the city the Kurds regard as their spiritual capital, the Kurds came to play a central role in world history for the first time, even if they benefited little. The Americans and the British did benefit, however: not least as they fuelled the D-Day landing-craft.