Kurdistan: After Such Knowledge What Forgiveness by Jonathan C. Randal Bloomsbury 374pp, £25 in UK
On a number of occasions this century, the Kurds have stood on the brink of realising their national dream: the creation of a united, independent Kurdish state in the parts of Turkey, Iraq and Iran that they know as Kurdistan. It is an area the size of France, rich in oil and water resources, perhaps too rich for its own good.
During the first World War, US President Woodrow Wilson assured the Kurds (of whom there are estimated to be 25 million in the world) of a homeland, to be carved out of the carcases of the Ottoman and Persian empires. However, Wilson's undertaking was negated, first by the resurgence of Kemal Ataturk's Turkey; secondly by Britain, whose carve-up of the region forced the Kurds into a union with Baghdad; and thirdly by the self-appointed Shah of Persia, Reza Khan.
It was a pattern that was to recur. In 1943, in the midst of global turmoil, the Mullah Mustafa Barzani set up an autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq. It lasted only until the end of the war. In 1946, Barzani helped the Iran-based Kurds to establish the republic of Mahabad, but other Kurdish groups failed to rally to its defence and it was overthrown within months. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the Kurds were drawn into the fighting on both sides with promises from Baghdad and Tehran; however, their reward was once again violent repression. In 1987 and '88 Saddam Hussein put down Kurdish rebellions with a combination of mustard gas and cyanide, wiping out thousands of villagers and sending others fleeing towards the mountains.
A similar pattern followed the end of the Gulf War in 1991, when the Iraqi Kurds, following the urgings of US President George Bush and an uprising by Shias in the southern marshlands, struck for independence against a debilitated Saddam. The Republican Guards swept north, fierce fighting ensued and the Kurdish rural population, this time in full view of the world's television cameras, once more took to the mountains.
The human disaster that followed was visible evidence, if evidence were needed, of the tyranny that the Iraq-based Kurds lived under. The TV images ushered in a wave of quick-fix measures: the "safe haven" and no-fly zones, the crude parachuting in of aid, and the provision of tent villages on both sides of the frontier with Turkey - until the Turks panicked and closed the border. Before the eyes of the world thousands died, on the mountainsides and in the refugee camps, and the case for an independent Kurdistan never seemed so strong.
But instead of uniting in their nationalist cause, the old Kurdish demon of disunity - which some say is a curse from Mohammed - returned with a vengeance. A "civil war" between factions led by Massoud Barzani (son of the earlier leader) and Jalal Talibani was only resolved when Barzani, amazingly, sought aid from Baghdad to ensure his control of the Kurdish enclave.
Meanwhile, under less intense media focus, the Ankara-Kurd conflict has gone on, claiming some 60,000 lives since the mid-1980s and involving frequent Turkish incursions into Iraqi territory. Faced with a particularly virulent and ruthless guerrilla campaign on the part of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Turkey's military and its sinister militia allies have carried out what often amounts to a scorched earth policy in the Kurdish south-east.
In recent decades displaced Kurds have grossly swollen the populations of Turkey's major cities, a reflection of how effective Ankara's policy of forced assimilation has been. The recent refusal by Italian authorities to extradite PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan to Ankara perhaps reflected something of the West's little-voiced unease over the treatment of the Kurds by a major NATO ally and a state which aspires to EU membership.
Jonathan C. Randal has been for decades a Middle East correspondent for the Washington Post, and much of his fascinating book is taken up with clandestine meetings and interviews arranged in some of the most dangerous locations on earth. He convincingly manages to combine a personalised record of his own experiences with what is in effect an unfolding history. His book is an important addition to our knowledge of a people who, according to an old saying, "have no friends but the mountains".
Declan Burke-Kennedy is an assistant Foreign Desk Editor with The Irish Times