Among the Others: Encounters with the Forgotten Turkmen of Iraq

by Scott Taylor

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1895896266
• ISBN13: 9781895896268
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Esprit de Corps Books
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

the 'Forgotten' Turkmen

The indigenous Turkmen population of Iraq have suffered tremendously political oppression and ethnic clensing first by Arabs and now by Kurds. Lets's thank Scott Taylor for opening our eyes to their suffering.

Down in the Weeds Among Iraq's Ethnic Minorities

Scott Taylor, a former NCO in Canada's Princess Patricia's Light Infantry, has been a military correspondent and journalist since Operation Desert Shield-Desert Storm in 1990-91. He produces the Canadian military Journal, "Esprit de Corps," and has written and published several insightful volumes on the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, including "Inat" about Kosovo, and "Diary of an Uncivil War," dealing with Albanian militancy and irredentism in Macedonia. Those are excellent works, redolent with Scott's from the foxhole insights. Based on several trips into Iraq between Feb 2003 and Sept. 2004 (when Scott was held hostage and tortured for five days by Ansar al-Islam), "Among the `Others,'" Scott scores another journalistic home run while providing vital insight into the open hostility between the Kurdish and Turkmen communities in Northern Iraq. The Kurds are busily trying to ethnically cleanse the Turkmens (close relatives of the Turks of neighboring Turkey) from their ancestral city of Kirkuk, which the Kurds also claim, and desire because of its large oil/gas deposits. In April 2003 when Kurdish militias (Peshmergas) entered Kirkuk, they promptly began burning property and other records of the Turkmen community to "erase" their claim to majority status in the city. -And this is another reason why the Turkish Army maintains its 7th Armoured Corps just north of Kurdistan, in case Kurds launch a formal ethnic cleansing or move towards secession and an independent Kurdistan. There are more than 2 million Turkmen in Northern Iraq, principally around Kirkuk and Tal Afar, a city of 400,000 where US forces have an increasingly difficult insurrection on their hands -the Turkmen fear the US has embraced the Kurds at their expense. Scott lays out the sources and consequences of this friction, while also drawing attention to the other minorities in Iraq, Chaldean and Assyrian Christians and the more obscure Yazidi sect. Just out in mid-October and with a Turkish edition already in production, Mr. Taylor has included a 16 page epilogue on his recent captivity and that of his colleague-translator, a female Turkish reporter, Zeynep Tugrul. In that misadventure, he had a close-up view of this "Culture of Death" hysteria that has spread among Islamic populations in recent years. In the case of the Turkmen, it is jihad against US occupiers, while the genocidal threat to them comes from the Kurdish Peshmerga.