'IRAQ AND THE PERSIAN GULF' [‎211v] (427/862)

310 HISTORY
when he joined hands with his deadly enemies, the Surchi Kurds,
to murder some Political Officers. In 1928 a local mulla in Ahmad’s
service announced that the Shaikh was God and he himself his
prophet. The mulla toured the country preaching his faith, per
suading the village muezzins to substitute his name and Ahmad s
for those of Mohammed and Allah in the daily call to prayer. Finally
he was murdered by Ahmad’s more orthodox brother Sadiq, and
Ahmad’s grievances against the Government at this time led to no
outburst. In 1931 Ahmad announced his conversion to Christianity,
and ordered all his tribesmen to kill pigs and eat pork as an initiation
to the new faith. This caused a local inter-tribal war in the adjoining
Baradost area, and Ahmad had the best of it. Iraqi forces were sent
to seize Barzan village and to restore order, but a sharp reverse was
inflicted on them in October and a serious defeat in March 193 2 cu ^“
minated in rout. Only vigorous action by R.A.F. planes discouraged
the tribesmen and caused Shaikh Ahmad to cross the frontier into
Turkey.
The Kurds as a whole, however, began to co-operate with the
mandatory government after 1923, when by the Lausanne Treaty
between Britain and Turkey the idea of a united Kurdish state
was abandoned and the Turkish claim to the Mosul vilayet was ap
parently neglected. Kurds sat in the Constituent Assembly in i9 2 4>
and in 1925 Kurdish notables were regularly elected to the new
Parliament for Erbil, Kirkuk, Mosul, and Sulaimaniya, while there
were Kurds both in the Cabinet and the Senate. Reconciliation was
furthered by the use of Kurdish, both in schools and for local official
correspondence, and by the employment of a majority of Kurdish
officials in Kurdish districts.
The League Commission and Turkey. After the Peace Treaty of
Lausanne (1923) the Turks made one last attempt by diplomacy to
recover the Mosul vilayet. The treaty had arranged that the frontier
between Turkey and Iraq should be fixed by friendly arrangement
within nine months and that if agreement failed, the dispute should
be referred to the Council of the League of Nations. When in 1924
the unsettled dispute was thus referred to the League, the Turks
sought not merely a delimitation of frontiers but the reopening of
the whole issue, to which the British agreed. A Commission of
Inquiry was sent out by the League to Iraq in i 9 2 5 > a provi
sional frontier line, known as the ‘Brussels line’, had been fixed for
the interim; this corresponded fairly closely with the old frontier
of the Mosul vilayet. The Commission soon discovered that the