By Ava Homa Contributor
Ava Homa is the award-winning author of “Daughters of Smoke and Fire” and faculty at California State University, Monterey Bay.

The passing of Henry KissingerHenry Kissinger has sparked conversations about a figure both revered and reviled. Who a nation venerates as its heroes speaks volumes about its values. While elite Americans extol him, millions worldwide recoil in disgust.
Kissinger’s Nobel Prize glossed over the countless shattered lives in Kurdistan, Cambodia, Chile, Timor, Bangladesh, and beyond. According to historian Greg Grandin’s calculations in “Kissinger’s Shadow,” his tenure from 1969 to 1976 led to the loss of three to four million lives due to his advocated policies. Yet, this figure barely encapsulates the immeasurable suffering of survivors, including my own family, the Kurds.
“My earliest memory is of an explosion down our street, shattering the windows, killing two women,” recalls my cousin, who was only 7 at the time. “We escaped. Saddam burned our village and many others. It’s all a fog now. But I still shake every time I remember.”
Kissinger’s family history bears scars of wartime tragedy too, with grandparents killed by Nazis, and parents barely escaping. Ironically, when positioned to protect the vulnerable, he ruthlessly overlooked lives resembling his ancestors, advancing his influence instead and justifying it as patriotism.
My family wasn’t as lucky as his. They were among the 200,000 displaced when Iraq attacked the Kurds in 1975. Children and elderly succumbed to dehydration; the adults clawed at the rough earth to bury loved ones — while fleeing bombs. My relatives in Iranian Kurdistan recall witnessing the haunting sight of war-stricken figures, their faces covered in dust hiding tear marks, the echoes of howling grief. Those who could offer a meal or a bed did so, only to be awakened by screams in the middle of the night. The company of the kin was short-lived as the Shah decided to forcibly move the displaced into camps.
The Algiers Agreement signed by Saddam and the Shah of Iran regarding the border between Iraq and Iran in the Shatt al-Arab waterway preceded this offensive, but the war-stricken weren’t certain how one led to the other at the time.
Decades later, while researching my book “Daughters of Smoke and Fire,” I uncovered the U.S.’s role in this tragedy. All the documents are public records now. In 1972, at the Shah of Iran’s request, Kissinger and President Nixon sanctioned a covert operation supporting a Kurdish insurrection against Saddam’s regime. This operation was intended to aid the Kurds’ fight for autonomy denied to them in the aftermath of the Lausanne Treaty.
Despite being one of the region’s largest ethnic groups, the Kurds were denied statehood by a stroke of colonial powers’ pens, left under the rule of hostile central governments in Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria. Survival meant struggling for rights denied to them by geopolitical decisions.
The CIA, under U.S. directives, funded the Kurdish resistance not to champion their cause but to manipulate conflicts and weaken Iraq. The abrupt withdrawal of support after the Shah’s deal with Iraq left the Kurds defenceless, leading to a devastating onslaught by Iraqi forces. Appeals for aid and asylum in the U.S. were disregarded.
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The Kurds’ plight stands as a glaring example of how political expediency eclipses human lives. Kissinger’s involvement in betraying the Kurds during the Nixon administration remains a distressing chapter in American foreign policy and initiation of a betrayal of Kurdish allies that was repeated most recently in October 2019, when President Trump pulled troops from northern Syria, allowing Turkey to attack Kurds, the same people who lost 11,000 lives to defeat ISIS.
Kissinger once referred to the Kurds’ fate as a “tragedy”; the man who served them up to Saddam Hussein. He never acknowledged the irreparable damage inflicted upon these communities.
Descendants of those broken by Kissinger’s actions need to speak up and be heard. Whether this becomes a reality depends on humanity’s willingness, amid eulogies, to heed the silenced voices of his victims and pledge never to repeat such atrocities.[1]