Bradost


Bradost or Baradust is a name of a Kurdish tribe, region, mountain range, river, and emirate. The tribe inhabits a vast geographical area located in the region between Iraq and Iran's borders. The Battle of DimDim in 1609 was fought between the Bradost Prince Amir Khan Lepzerin and Shah Abbas.

Geo-History of Bradost

According to Bedlisi, the tribe must have been much larger, occupying the entire region to the west of Lake Urmia.
The region comprised, in the early 11th/late 16th century, several sub-districts including Targavar, Margavar, Dol, Sumay, and Urmia. The Ottoman-Persian frontier of 1639, which survived until World War I and forms the present boundary of Iran with Turkey and Iraq, divided Bradost territory into two parts. In the late 13th/19th-century administrative division of the Ottoman empire, Bradost was a nahia of Rawanduz qaza, shahrazur sanjaq, Mosul weleyat.

Bradost amirate

The formation of Bradost amirate was part of the process of the rise of Kurdish political power in the form of small dynasties and numerous independent amirates that appeared all over Kurdistan in the 10th-11th/15th-16th centuries, Bedlisi related the founders of the principalities to the Hasanwayhid dynasty and divided them into two lines—the amirs of Somay and those of Targavar and Qala Dawud . At the climax of its power, the amirate’s domain extended from the western shores of Lake Urmia to parts of the welayats of Arbil, Baghdad, and Diyarbakır.
The hereditary rule of Bradost, like that of other amirates, was, however, soon threatened by the centralizing and expansionist policies of the Ottoman and Safavid empires, which turned Kurdistan into a battlefield for more than three centuries. To protect their sovereignty, Bradost princes put up continued resistance to both empires though they often relied on one against the other. Thus, after initial opposition to Shah Esmail’s efforts to establish his authority over the area, the powerful Bradost amir Ghazi Qeren rallied to the Safavids.

The Gold-Hand Khan

initially recognized the hereditary rule of Bradost princes though relations deteriorated and Amir Khan Bradost revolted against the shah in the fortress of Dimdim in 1017/1609. The neighboring Mokri principality joined forces with the Bradost throughout the revolt, which has become a major theme of Kurdish folklore and literature and is also described in an eyewitness report by the shah’s chronicler Eskandar Beg.
To undermine the growing power of the Kurdish element, the Safavid and Qajar monarchs sent numerous punitive expeditions to the area, massacred the population of Mokrī principality, transferred thousands of Kurds from the western lake area, and resettled there the Turkish tribes of Afshar and Qarapapagh.