About 200 olive trees planted in Erbil to honor Kurdish leader

Shafaq News/ The city of Erbil in Iraq's Kurdistan Region has planted 200 olive trees in honor of the late Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani. The trees were planted in the town of Ankawa on Thursday, the anniversary of Barzani's birth. The move is part of a larger campaign to plant 120,000 trees across the semi-autonomous region. The campaign is organized by the Kurdistan Regional Government's Ministry of Municipalities and Tourism, Shafaq News Agency correspondent said. "Olive trees are a symbol of peace and prosperity in Kurdistan," KRG's transportation minister said. "They are also well-suited to the region's climate, which is hot and dry in the summer and cold and wet in the winter." For many Kurds, Mullah Mustafa's personality and journey serve as a unifying force and genuine inspiration throughout the 20th century for the Kurdish struggle. His symbolic and tangible journey on foot for 50 days, after the failure of the Mahabad Republic experiment in 1945, heading towards Soviet territories, marked the beginning of a new era of struggle. It is known that Mullah Mustafa remained in the Soviet Union until the revolution toppled the monarchy in Iraq, established by Britain in July 1958. He then returned from exile to lead the KDP, which attracted a diverse group of intellectuals, activists, nationalists, leftists, and conservative tribal leaders. Russian researcher Anna Borshchevskaya published a study in 2023 titled "Russia and the Kurds: A Soft-Power Tool for the Kremlin", stating that despite the rapid fall of this republic, Kurdish nationalist figures remained committed to the idea of their own state, including Mullah Mustafa, who founded the KDP in 1946. After the republic's fall, Barzani and his comrades sought refuge in the Soviet Union, where the leader Barzani stayed for over a decade before returning to Iraq, where he led a revolution against the central government. Mullah Mustafa worked towards the hope that emerged after the fall of the monarchy in Baghdad, especially through negotiations with Abdul Karim Qasim. However, these negotiations collapsed later, as he sought to secure Kurdish rights in the post-monarchy constitution, including making Kirkuk the "capital" of Kurdistan. The conflict then shifted to the military field between the two parties. Even with the fall of Qasim's regime in 1963, Mullah Mustafa's options did not improve, as subsequent regimes in Baghdad treated the Kurds with the same hostility, despite the ongoing negotiations that Barzani attempted to conduct. This situation persisted until the historic settlement with the Ba'athist regime that seized power in Baghdad in 1968, where an agreement was reached with the regime's second man at the time, Saddam Hussein, in March 1970, known as the Autonomy Agreement for the Kurds. However, the Shah of Iran's agreement with the Baghdad regime at that time to redraw the Shatt al-Arab border by offering Iraqi concessions, and the Shah's pledge to withdraw his support for the Kurds under the "Algiers Agreement", reopened the door to war on the Kurds. Large Iraqi military forces moved to attack Kurdish villages and areas, forcing over 200,000 Kurds to flee to Iranian territories. At the same time, Washington was trying not to provoke its ally, the Shah, and ignored his agreement with Baghdad, failing to prevent the large-scale attacks on the Kurds. After the Algiers Agreement in 1975, Mullah Mustafa left Iraq to Iran and then to the United States, where he underwent treatment at George Washington Hospital before passing away on March 1, 1979.