The Kurds were born to be betrayed. Almost every would-be Middle East statelet was promised freedom after the First World War, and the Kurds even sent a delegation to Versailles to ask for a nation and safe borders, the British journalist Robert Fisk writes in his article published in The Independent.

But they got a little nation in what had been Turkey but with  the coming of the Turkish nationalist Mustafa Kemal Ataturk were deprived even of it. “So the victors of the Great War met in Lausanne in 1922-23 and abandoned the Kurds (as well as the Armenians), who were now split between the new Turkish state, French Syria and Iran and British Iraq,” Fisk writes.

That has been their tragedy ever since – and almost every regional power participated in it. The most brutal were the Turks and the Iraqi Arabs, the most cynical the British and the Americans. “No wonder the Turks have gone back to bombing the Kurds,” the author writes.

According to Fisk, the Kurds didn’t learn their lesson and at the start of the first Gulf war to liberate Kuwait were urged by the Americans to rise against Saddam. The Americans let them die in their thousands again, only shamed weeks later into creating a “safe” zone in northern Iraq after tens of thousands of Kurdish civilians trekked under fire in a biblical exodus to the safety of Turkey. America’s “safe” zone eventually proved illusory.

The author reminds that the Iraqi Kurds fought Isis last year, when the Americans again decided that the Kurds had their uses. At that time Turkey watched impotently as Kurdistan became the vanguard of the West’s battle.

According to him, for this very reason Turkey decided to strike at the PKK under cover of an anti-Isis bombardment, while the Americans were to be kept sweet by the reopening of Incirlik air base.  And the world will forget that Islamist fighters have received free passage across the Turkish-Syrian border.