'Operation Kurdistan'

Historian Sevtap Demirci notes that the Chester project and the proposal of referendum were also among the reasons why the British so violently quelled the Kurdish riot:

There was an 'O.K.' in the archive that no one knew or wrote about. I stumbled upon it unexpectedly during my research. So I started looking to find out what that 'O.K.' meant. I thought to myself that it couldn't mean 'okay', because the reports were intricate. If that was an okay, they wouldn't have put dots in between. It was 'O' dot, 'K' dot. It was in a small place. So days, months passed, and I caught it not in the documents of the Foreign Office, but in the documents of the Secretary of State for the Colonies. Turns out, it was short for 'Operation Kurdistan'... Britain had put into motion the 'Operation Kurdistan' project. If you ask, what is this operation, there is no detail. No information, no documents, just O.K.…

Within the scope of Operation Kurdistan, the British heavily bombarded the area. It was a very covert operation, no one knew about it. One person from the British army headquarters and one person from the Prime Ministry… No one was privy to this. Not the parliament, not the allies, no one. For two straight days, British ceaselessly pounded Mosul, Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah. The second round of negotiations in Lausanne was supposed to start on April 23, 1923. The operation ended at 12.00 pm on April 22. The next day, when the second round of talks started in Lausanne, Turkey no longer had people in the region that could participate in a referendum. That operation completely ended the possibility of a referendum. If you ask, how many people died, I don't know, too many civilians died. What did Britain want to say? You give these privileges to the USA, but you cannot make these decisions on these lands without my involvement. And the second outcome was, in a sort of, taking captive the Turkish-supporting Kurdish tribes and the indigenous people that wished to join Turkey. So when the second round started, Turkey was no longer able to suggest that there should be a referendum.³⁹¹

The British deep state was aware that, only if it martyred everyone in the region, would it have control over Mosul. For this reason, it stuck to its centuries old tradition and didn't refrain from brutally slaughtering thousands of innocent people, the indigenous population of a region. Clearly the massacre had a purpose other than the oil or trade routes. 'Operation Kurdistan' was the reason behind the Mosul persistence of the British deep state. Indeed, that's why it was so secret, why there were no official documents proving that it ever existed. As the Lausanne talks were underway, the British deep state was carrying out its Kurdistan plan, devised a long time ago. At the center of it was Mosul, which had to be taken from Turkey. Kurds coming under British rule marked the first step towards building the artificial Kurdish issue, which would continue for another hundred years. The British deep state was convinced that Gladstone's dream of 'driving Turks back to steppes of Central Asia' could be realized that way. Even destroying a whole people seemed trivial if it meant goals were achieved.