Sheikh Mahmoud Barzanji: The Kurdish King Who Defied the British Empire (1878–1956)

When the British Empire emerged victorious from the First World War and was awarded the mandate over Mesopotamia, its strategists expected that the Kurdish population of the newly created Iraq would accept British tutelage with the same relative acquiescence as the Arab population of Baghdad and Basra. They were wrong. From the city of Sulaymaniyah in the heart of the Kurdish highlands, a man named Sheikh Mahmoud Barzanji looked at the new order being imposed on his people and decided it was unacceptable. He rose against it — not once but repeatedly, with a stubbornness that exhausted three decades of British colonial administrators — and in doing so became the first great political leader of modern Iraqi Kurdistan.

Sheikh Mahmoud Barzanji — also known as Mahmoud Barzanji or Sheikh Mahmoud Hafid — was a religious leader, a tribal chief, and a political visionary who declared himself King of Kurdistan in 1922 and led two major uprisings against British authority. He was defeated, exiled, and returned; was defeated again, and exiled again; and spent his final years watching the Kurdish political question become increasingly entangled in the complex politics of the Iraqi state that the British had created. He died in 1956, having never achieved the independent Kurdistan he had fought for — but having established, beyond any dispute, that the Kurdish people of Iraq were not willing to accept the erasure of their political identity.

Table of Contents

1. Part 1: The Barzanji Family and Sulaymaniyah

2. Part 2: The British Arrive — Promise and Betrayal

3. Part 3: The First Uprising 1919

4. Part 4: King of Kurdistan — The 1922 Declaration

5. Part 5: The Second Uprising and the Treaty of Lausanne

6. Part 6: Exile and Return

7. Part 7: Legacy — The First King of Kurdistan

8. Chronology

9. References

10. Frequently Asked Questions

Part 1: The Barzanji Family and Sulaymaniyah

Sheikh Mahmoud was born in 1878 into the Barzanji family — one of the most important Naqshbandi Sufi families in southern Kurdistan, with deep roots in the religious and social life of the Sulaymaniyah region. The Barzanji family had long exercised a dual authority in the region: as religious leaders whose spiritual prestige gave them influence across the Kurdish tribal world, and as landowners and political figures whose practical power in the Sulaymaniyah area was substantial. The family had a history of leading Kurdish political resistance, and this heritage shaped Sheikh Mahmoud’s consciousness from his earliest years.

Sulaymaniyah — founded in the eighteenth century as the capital of the Baban Emirate — was by the late Ottoman period a significant Kurdish cultural and commercial centre, with a population that was overwhelmingly Kurdish and a political consciousness that was more developed than in many other Kurdish regions. It was a city that produced intellectuals, poets, and political figures, and that had a tradition of Kurdish political organisation stretching back to the Baban princes.

Part 2: The British Arrive — Promise and Betrayal

When British forces occupied Mesopotamia during the First World War, their initial approach to the Kurdish regions was pragmatic: they needed the cooperation of local leaders, and they were prepared to offer significant autonomy to secure it. Sheikh Mahmoud was appointed by the British as governor (hakim) of Sulaymaniyah in 1918 — a recognition of his authority that carried with it the implicit promise that Kurdish self-governance would be respected within whatever new political framework emerged from the war.

The British promise, however, was not kept. As the shape of the post-war settlement became clear — as the Mandate system took form and the prospect of an independent or autonomous Kurdistan receded — Sheikh Mahmoud concluded that the British had no intention of delivering what they had implicitly offered. His response was characteristic: he would take by force what was not being offered by agreement.

Part 3: The First Uprising 1919

In May 1919, Sheikh Mahmoud rose in revolt against British authority in the Sulaymaniyah region. The uprising was swift and initially successful: British forces were defeated at several engagements, and Sheikh Mahmoud briefly controlled the region. The British responded with overwhelming force, including aerial bombardment — one of the earliest uses of air power against a civilian population in the Middle East. Sheikh Mahmoud was wounded, captured, tried by a British military court, and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to exile in India.

His capture and exile did not solve the British problem in Kurdistan. The region remained restive, and the British administrators who tried to govern it without Sheikh Mahmoud’s cooperation found it impossible. In 1922, facing continued instability and a Turkish threat to the Mosul region, the British made the remarkable decision to bring Sheikh Mahmoud back from exile and reinstall him as the governor of Sulaymaniyah. They calculated that his authority with the Kurdish population was the only practical basis for stable governance. They were right — and in bringing him back, they gave him the opportunity he needed.

Part 4: King of Kurdistan — The 1922 Declaration

In November 1922, Sheikh Mahmoud Barzanji declared himself King of Kurdistan — Malik Kurdistan — and established a Kurdish government in Sulaymaniyah. He issued proclamations, established courts, appointed ministers, and launched a Kurdish newspaper, Jihan — one of the earliest Kurdish-language newspapers in Iraq. For a brief, extraordinary period, a Kurdish state existed in Sulaymaniyah, with functioning institutions, a recognised head of state, and the political will to assert its independence.

The declaration came at a moment when the international situation seemed to offer opportunities. The Treaty of Sèvres had included provisions for Kurdish autonomy. The Kemalist victory in Anatolia had complicated the settlement, but the question of Mosul — which both Turkey and Britain claimed — remained unresolved, and Sheikh Mahmoud calculated that the uncertainty gave him room to manoeuvre. His calculation was not wrong in its premises, but it underestimated the British determination to maintain their position in Iraq.

Part 5: The Second Uprising and the Treaty of Lausanne

The British response to Sheikh Mahmoud’s declaration was military. RAF aircraft bombed Sulaymaniyah repeatedly — one of the most sustained uses of aerial bombardment against a civilian urban centre in the inter-war period. British and Indian ground forces moved against his positions. By July 1923, Sheikh Mahmoud had been forced out of Sulaymaniyah and was operating from mountain bases, conducting a guerrilla campaign that demonstrated his military resilience but could not overcome British military superiority.

The Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, which replaced the Treaty of Sèvres and extinguished the possibility of Kurdish autonomy in Turkey, was a severe blow to Kurdish political hopes more broadly. The League of Nations’ subsequent decision to award Mosul to Iraq in 1925 — rather than to Turkey — kept the Kurdish population of the Mosul region within British-controlled Iraq, but offered them no political protection. Sheikh Mahmoud continued his resistance from the mountains until 1927, when he accepted terms and went into exile once more.

Part 6: Exile and Return

Sheikh Mahmoud’s relationship with the British authorities was one of the most unusual in the history of colonialism: a man who revolted against them, was defeated, exiled, and brought back; who revolted again, was defeated again, and exiled again; and who nevertheless retained such authority among the Kurdish population that the British could never entirely ignore him. He returned from his second exile in 1930 and was permitted to live in Sulaymaniyah, where he remained until his death in 1956.

His final decades were those of an elder statesman without a state: a man whose political moment had passed but whose moral authority remained. He watched the Hashemite monarchy of Iraq consolidate its control over Kurdistan. He watched the Kurdish political movement reorganise around the figure of Mustafa Barzani. He was the living memory of a time when a Kurdish state, however briefly, had existed in Sulaymaniyah — and that memory mattered.

Part 7: Legacy — The First King of Kurdistan

Sheikh Mahmoud Barzanji died in Sulaymaniyah in 1956, aged seventy-eight. His legacy in Kurdish history is of the first order. He was the first Kurdish leader to actually declare and attempt to govern an independent Kurdish state in the modern era — not merely to aspire to one, but to take the practical steps of establishing institutions, appointing officials, and defending it by force against a great power. That he failed does not diminish the significance of the attempt; it was the failure of a man who tried to do something genuinely difficult against genuinely overwhelming odds.

In Sulaymaniyah, Sheikh Mahmoud is remembered as a founding father — the man who first gave the Kurdish people of Iraq a state, however brief and imperfect. His image appears on buildings and in public spaces throughout the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The newspaper he founded, Jihan, was one of the first Kurdish-language publications in Iraq. The political tradition he established — of armed resistance to the denial of Kurdish rights, combined with a willingness to negotiate when negotiation was possible — shaped the Kurdish political movement in Iraq for the rest of the twentieth century.

Chronology of Sheikh Mahmoud Barzanji

1878 — Born in Sulaymaniyah into the Barzanji family of Naqshbandi religious leaders.

1918 — Appointed governor of Sulaymaniyah by British forces.

May 1919 — First uprising against British authority; wounded and captured.

1919 — Sentenced to death; sentence commuted; exiled to India.

1922 — British bring him back as governor of Sulaymaniyah.

November 1922 — Declares himself King of Kurdistan; establishes Kurdish government in Sulaymaniyah.

1923 — British forces and RAF bombardment drive him from Sulaymaniyah.

1923–1927 — Conducts guerrilla campaign from mountain bases.

1927 — Accepts terms; second exile.

1930 — Returns to Sulaymaniyah; lives as elder statesman until his death.

1956 — Dies in Sulaymaniyah at the age of seventy-eight.

References

1. McDowall, David. A Modern History of the Kurds. I.B. Tauris, 1996.

2. Jwaideh, Wadie. The Kurdish National Movement. Syracuse University Press, 2006.

3. Sluglett, Peter. Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country. I.B. Tauris, 2007.

4. Edmonds, C.J. Kurds, Turks and Arabs. Oxford University Press, 1957.

5. Wikipedia contributors. Mahmud Barzanji. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmud_Barzanji

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Sheikh Mahmoud Barzanji?

Sheikh Mahmoud Barzanji (1878–1956) was a Kurdish religious leader and political figure from Sulaymaniyah in Iraq who led two major uprisings against British rule and declared himself King of Kurdistan in 1922. He was the first Kurdish leader to establish a functioning Kurdish state in the modern era, and is considered one of the founding figures of Kurdish political history in Iraq.

Why did Sheikh Mahmoud declare himself King of Kurdistan?

Sheikh Mahmoud declared himself King of Kurdistan in November 1922 after the British reinstated him as governor of Sulaymaniyah. He concluded that the British had no intention of honouring their implicit promises of Kurdish self-governance, and that the opportunity provided by the unsettled post-war situation — including the unresolved question of Mosul and the ongoing Turkish-British negotiations — gave him room to assert Kurdish independence. He established a government, issued a newspaper, and defended his position militarily until British forces expelled him.

What is Sheikh Mahmoud’s legacy in Kurdistan today?

Sheikh Mahmoud is revered in Iraqi Kurdistan as a founding father — the first leader who actually declared and governed a Kurdish state. His image appears throughout the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and he is taught as a national hero. The political tradition he established — of armed resistance combined with pragmatic negotiation — shaped the Kurdish movement in Iraq for the rest of the twentieth century and can be seen as a precursor to the political strategies of Mustafa Barzani and subsequent Kurdish leaders.