The phenomenon of politico-economic dysfunction known as the “oil curse” began to emerge in the 1950s and 1960s to describe the challenges faced by the governments of oil-producing countries. However, the Kurds suffered from the “curse of oil” much earlier. After Western states discovered that natural resources were in abundance under Kurdish lands, a ruthless race began between some of the great powers to win access to these underground oceans of wealth. 

The documentary book entitled Kurdistan Oil in the Ottoman Era is an effort to dig deep into the piles of archives that reveal the untold stories about the birth of the oil industries and their role in drawing the current political borders in the Middle East. It presents a considerable number of unique maps, photographs, and handwritten documents about oil and other mineral resources in the Kurdish areas within the borders of the Ottoman Empire before its dissolution in 1923. 

The book resulted from more than two years of extensive research by Botan Tahseen and Sedat Eroglu, who studied mountains of documents from both the Ottoman Archive and Gertrude Bell Archive. The book was published in 2022 in both Kurdish dialects — Sorani and Kurmanji, English, and Arabic. 

In 1905, then British Ambassador to Istanbul Nicholas O’Conor wrote a brief telegram to inform policymakers in London that extracting and transporting oil from the Baghdad and Mosul vilayets was possible by sea. The message marked a turning point in the competition between Britain and Germany, as the latter was already working to transport oil by rail. Sent nine years before the outbreak of World War I, it revealed the greed of the great powers, including Britain, Germany, and France, for the oil of Kurdistan. 

At that time, the Ottoman Empire was sagging under the weight of large international loans, and a major portion of its fertile lands was held under the custody of the Duyun-u Umumiye, an institution that oversaw the payment of international loans issued to the Ottoman Empire. These financial challenges opened the arena for a fierce competition in which diplomats, major oil companies, and undercover spies were main players. 

One of the key actors on the ground was a German engineer identified in the documents as Grosskopf. In early 1900, the Civil List of the Ottoman administration hired Grosskopf to survey the oil reserves and prepare a map of the oil fields across the vast areas of Kurdistan. In October 1901, Grosskopf submitted his first report to Abdulhamid II’s office, which consisted of only three pages. 

Less than five months later, on 5 March 1902, Grosskopf asked for permission to leave his duties, citing familial issues that required him to return to Germany. In fact, the real reason for his sudden trip was to deliver the large cache of maps and documents that he had prepared about the oil reserves of the Ottoman Empire.  

He shared the most minute details of his research with the company that was then planning to construct the Berlin-Baghdad Railway. This was a perfect heads-up for the company which soon after studying the documents asked Abdulhamid II for permission to explore oil for one year. 

This, together with several other turns of events in early 20th century, profoundly shaped the long-term strategies that Britain, Germany, and France later prosecuted in the Middle East. In other words, the oil-rich lands of Kurdistan and Western power’s interest in these massive resources were one of the key factors that drove decisions in different European capitals. 

To prove this point, the book’s co-authors underline another key player, who is rather a familiar name for the Kurds: Mark Sykes, best known as the architect of the Sykes-Picot Agreement that demarcated the Middle East region between France and Britain. Before becoming British Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Sykes used various identities to travel for 15 years between Mosul, Kirkuk, Sulaymaniyah, and Aleppo. These lands later became central in the long negotiations between Britain and Turkey that led to the Treaty of Lausanne.

The documents presented in the book prove that certain territories that are currently disputed between the Kurdistan Regional Government and the Federal Government of Iraq are indeed the ancestral lands of the Kurds. Those areas mainly lie in today’s Nineveh, Kirkuk, Salahaddin, and Diyala provinces, which back then fell within the administrative borders of the Mosul and Baghdad vilayets. 

Kurdistan Oil in the Ottoman Era is also a valuable source of statistics. The population of each Kurdish town, their religious and ethnic diversity, number of households, mosques, churches, synagogues, public baths, shops, police stations, and army headquarters are all accounted for based on official archival documents. 

Finally, the book details the process of archive building in the Ottoman era. Since the empire’s beginning, the documents and correspondence in the Ottoman Archive were quite significant; every detail about Ottoman territorial expansion is preserved in them. The Ottomans, we know, would immediately register every new land that they controlled, keeping the documents to testify to the state’s ownership. 

The archive also includes imperial decrees, administrative rulings, court verdicts, official correspondence, treaties with other states, relationships and obligations of the state and citizens towards one another, and more. There are nearly 150 million official documents from the “Paper Treasury” of the Ottoman Empire, and this book was the first step to bring some of them to the light for historians, policymakers, and anyone interested in authentic documents that once determined the fate of millions of people.

Sardar Sattar is a translator and journalist based in the Kurdistan Region. He has an MA in English Studies from the University of Lodz, Poland. He has translated several books and political literature into Kurdish and English. He writes regularly for local and international newspapers and journals.