Israel Endorsed Kurdish Independence. Saladin Would Have Been Proud.<br />. Sagi said such sentiments stirred a reciprocal feeling in him: "I became a patriotic Kurd." He was not alone: The story goes<br />that Israeli soldiers and Mossad agents wept when the shah of Iran double-crossed the Kurds by signing the Algiers Accord with Iraq, a 1975 resolution of border disputes that ended the Kurdish rebellion and forced the pesh merga to retreat into Iran. that Mr<br />In the winter of 1966, Mr. Sagi’s commanders sent him on a secret mission, via Israel’s then-ally,<br />Iran, to aid Mullah Mustafa Barzani and his pesh merga rebels in Iraqi Kurdistan.<br />Mr. Sagi, who returned to aid the pesh merga against Iraq in 1974, said he traveled around Kurdistan quite a bit in<br />those years, posing as a British journalist despite what can generously be called a tenuous command of English.<br />Mr. Netanyahu, who endorsed not only the referendum<br />but also the establishment of a Kurdish state, had ample strategic reason: A breakaway Kurdistan could prove valuable to Israel against Iran, which has oppressed its own Kurdish population.<br />"The young man answered, ‘I am Masoud Barzani, son of Mullah Barzani, and if Mullah would hear<br />that I took a watch, he would hang me!’" Mr. Shemtov recalled.
