In Jeremiah 50:41-42 and Chap. 51:27-28, we are told by God's prophet that the present war in Iraq will not reach its conclusion until a northern confederation of nations comes against it without mercy.
As of Aug., 2004 the two major wars fought against Iraq by a confederation of nations has been exercised with a notable measure of merciful restraint and on both occasions the major thrust has come from the south and not the north.
We are also told by Jeremiah that Ararat, Minni, Ashkenaz and the Medes will be involved in this final assault. These northern located peoples, who had no major part in the previous two coalition wars, are found in the geographical areas that are now populated by the Turks, the Russians, the Iranians and the Kurds.
God makes particular strong mention of the Medes zealous involvement in the destruction of Babylon, Iraq in Jer. 51:11 & 28. Their prominent contribution to this merciless war is emphasized by the Scripture's revelation that God will raise up the spirit of the kings of these Medes.
That God is going to raise up a spirit that will influence the present day proliferation of leaders over the Kurds is foreboding for Iraq. Quoting verses 11 & 28 of Jer. 51 we read, "Make the arrows bright! Gather the shields! The Lord has raised up the spirit of the kings of the Medes. For His plan is against Babylon to destroy it, because it is the vengeance of the Lord, the vengeance of His temple...Prepare against her the nations, with the kings of the Medes, its' governors and all its' rulers, all the land of his dominion." (Please see our Rapture Watch message, "The vengeance of His Temple" for further information.)
The revelations made in these Scriptures verify that the day of their fulfillment is near. Between 605 and 562 B.C. the Median kingdom reached the height of its power. During this period the empire included what today is part of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Armenia. The Medes were subdued by the Persians about 549 B.C. The Medo-Persian merger became a mighty empire until the conquest of Alexander the Great in 330 B.C. After Alexander's death it became part of Syria and constituted a part of the Persian Empire as it faded from history geographically.
In the primary land area where the Median kingdom was located, that is south eastern Turkey, northwestern Iran and north eastern Iraq, resides the modern-day Kurdish people whose ancestry traces them back to the historical Medes.
The end time prophecy of Jeremiah, which foretells of a re-emergence of the Medes, also foretells that the Medes of these last days will have an active governmental structure. This would in turn suggest that there would be plans for an eventual restoration of a land to govern.
In past Rapture Watch messages concerning the last days prophecies for Iraq found in Chapters 50 & 51 of Jeremiah we have emphasized that we are told in Jer. 50:10 that all who participate in the plunder of the Chaldean land of Iraq after this war will be satisfied with their share.
Presenting, in light of Bible prophecy, the desires of the Kurdish people along with current events, makes a fascinating case to an unbeliever for the infallibility of God's Word.
The Kurdish people as a whole have two driving desires that would need to be met if they were to be numbered among the satisfied northern spoilers of Iraq. First and foremost would be the establishment of their own homeland and then secondly, to take revenge for the horrible atrocities that have been committed against their people by the Iraqis in the past. These, I believe, will be the driving desires manifested by the spirit of the Medes.
A homeland established in northern Iraq by the United Nations would not only satisfy the Kurds, but would also be a major step towards ending the ongoing conflicts for independence that Turkey, Iraq and Iran have had with their Kurdish populations.
At present there is resistence to the formal establishment of a Kurdistan in Iraq for fear of even greater tensions being created within the Kurdish populations, but the tide of events may well change that perception in the not too distant future when the spoilers partition Iraq.
As we shall see by the following articles the Kurds are in fact swiftly establishing a de-facto nation for themselves in northern Iraq with retaliation in their hearts; and also just as prophesied, these modern-day Medes have already created a flourishing, unique quasi-state with two kingly leaders, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, ruling over functioning governmental institutions.
Quoting first from the June 20, ‘04 Denver Post which headlined, "Kurds reclaiming land in the north" we read, "Thousands of Kurds are pushing into lands formerly held by Iraqi Arabs, forcing tens of thousands of them to flee to refugee camps and transforming the demographic and political map of northern Iraq.
The Kurds are returning to lands from which they were excelled by the armies of Saddam Hussein and his predecessors in the Baath Party, who ordered thousands of Kurdish villages destroyed and sent waves of Iraqi Arabs north to fill the area with supporters.
The new movement, which began with the fall of Hussein, appears to have quickened this spring amid confusion about U.S. policy, along with political pressure by Kurdish leaders to resettle the areas formerly held by Arabs.
It is happening when Kurdish officials are threatening to pull out of the national government if they cannot maintain enough autonomy.
In Baghdad, U.S. officials say they are struggling to keep the displaced Kurds on the north side of the Green Line, the boundary of the Kurdish autonomous region.
Americans agree that the Kurds deserve to return to their ancestral lands but American officials want an orderly migration to avoid ethnic strife and political instability.
But many Kurds appear to be ignoring the U.S. orders. New Kurdish families show up every day at camps that mark the landscape here, settling into tents and tumble-down homes as they wait to reclaim their former lands.
The Kurdish migration appears to be causing widespread human misery, with Arab-settlers complaining of forceful expulsions and even murders at the hands of Kurdish returnees.
Many of the Kurdish refugees themselves are gathered in crowded and filthy refugee camps.
U.S. officials say as many as 100,000 Arabs have fled their homes in north-central Iraq and are now scattered in squalid camps across the center of the country.
The Arab refugees appear to be receiving neither food nor shelter from the Iraqi government, relief organizations or American forces.
"The Kurds, they laughed at us they threw tomatoes at us," said Karim Qadam, a 45-year-old father of three, now living amid the rubble of a blown-up building in Baquba.
"They told us to get out of our homes. They told us they would kill us. They told us, ‘You don't own anything here anymore.'"
The shift in population is raising fears in Iraq that the Kurds are trying to expand their control over Iraqi territory at the same time they are suggesting that they may pull out of the Iraqi government."
Then from a July 12, 2004 Colorado Springs Gazette article which headlined, "Kurds determined to keep self-rule as country unifies" we read, "Karzan Kanabi, whose clothing shop attracts young men with its cheap bell-bottom pants, never went to Baghdad, never learned Arabic and never felt the desire to go anywhere he would have to mix with Iraq's Arab population.
"We want Kurdistan to be an independent country, Kanabi, 18, said.
He does no business with the rest of Iraq.
"We only need Kurdistan," he said.
The nationalist sentiments voiced by Kanabi and many others in this prosperous Kurdish city 200 miles north of Baghdad have become the edge of a storm looming over Iraq.
After 13 years of quasi-independence the 4 million Kurds living under their own government in the grassy plains and jagged mountains of historical Kurdistan have resolved never to relinquish the self-rule bestowed on them by the United States after the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
"Iraq is made up of two nationalities, Kurds and Arabs," Massoud Barzani, one of the regions' two legendary leaders, said Thursday in nearby Salahuddin. "Kurds have no less place than Arabs in Iraq."
Kurdish determination has runup against a resolve widely shared by Iraq's new leadership and its backers to preserve a unified country without the iron fist of former president Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.
Iraq, they have pledged, will become a majority-rule democracy, which would redistribute power among its 25 million inhabitants - about 60 percent Shiite Arabs, 20 percent Sunni Arabs and 20 percent Kurds.
With a bloody anti-U.S. insurgency their primary concern, the new leaders in Baghdad and their sponsors in the Bush administration have postponed the showdown over the Kurdish issue, hoping a crisis can be avoided.
Kurds said, however, with elections scheduled for January, the time has drawn near to deal with some of the most explosive issues, particularly the status of the city of Kirkuk.
Plans to write a permanent new constitution after the January elections, Kurdish leaders said, likely will bring the country fact to face with the question of Kurdistan's long-term legal relationship with the central government in Baghdad.
Kirkuk, about 150 miles north of Baghdad, lies just outside the Kurdish region as defined during the past decade.
The Kurdish leadership, citing historical ties, has demanded that the city and its surrounding oil fields be incorporated into the autonomous Kurdish zone and its special rule.
The demand is opposed by leaders of the Arab majority and has been under discussion since U.S. troops overthrew Saddam and occupied Iraq 15 months ago.
With the organization of elections about to begin, the Kurdish demand has gained urgency.
Who lives and votes in Kirkuk, Kurdish leaders point out, is a question that will help determine the outcome of the vote - and who is at the controls - in a region they regard as theirs.
"This issue is a time bomb," Barzani said.
Vice President Ibrahim Jafari, a Shiite Muslim of the Dawa party, said in a recent interview that the rights of Kurds must be respected in the new iraq.
The history of their oppression must be taken into account in whatever arrangement is worked out, he added, but he also said Iraq must remain a unitary nation, true to its history and traditions and said the rules of democracy must be followed.
Behind his comment lay a tension that has run throughout the debate about what to do about the Kurds and the north.
For Iraq's Shiites, long overshadowed by the Sunnis who dominated the Baath Party, representative democracy is a way to gain a measure of power proportionate to their majority share of the population.
There is no reason, in their view, for the country's Kurdish minority to oppose majority rule now that Saddam's tyranny has been eliminated.
For more than a decade, U.S. warplanes flew regular patrols to prevent Saddam's forces from venturing into the Kurdish-controlled zone of northeastern Iraq.
Left alone for the first time in generations, Kurds constructed a flourishing quasi-state with democratic elections and institutions to underpin the traditional leadership of Barzani and his Kurdistan Democratic Party, and his rival to the east, Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
Along the road north from Baghdad, what they built is readily apparent.
The Iraqi flag has disappeared, and Arabic has been replaced by the Kurds' own tongue.
Security checkpoints to control traffic have been erected by Kurdish fighters, called pesh merga.
"We will not agree to having the Iraqi army here," said Mohammed Sharif Ahmad, head of the law and political science department at Salahuddin University. "We have our pesh merga. They are organized like an army."
By coincidence, printed right next to the Kurdish Gazette article was the headline, "Former [Iraqi] army may return." It is of profound interest that we find plans are being made to reinstate the former army of Saddam Hussein back into service. Especially at this time when the Kurds are forming their own nation in Iraq and are prophesied to one day soon join in a merciless war against their old nemisis' regime.
Quoting from this article we read, "Iyad Allawi, Iraq's interim prime minister, wants to reconstitute three or four divisions of the army - as many as 40,000 troops, about 10 percent of the huge force maintained under the ousted Baathist government of Saddam Hussein...His approval last week of legislation permitting martial law and military governors makes an army recall "imperative," said Ray Salvatore Jennings, an expert in postwar transitions with the government-financed U.S. Institute of Peace...recalling Iraqi units risks setting the state for collisions between U.S. and Iraqi troops.
Whether the U.S. command will welcome an Iraqi army recall remains to be seen. It could prove a test of Iraq's limited sovereignty.."
Don't ever doubt for a moment that you are living at the very close of the age. The same Lord Jesus Who is the Spirit of prophecy and has foretold us of all these things that are happening, is the same Lord of the believers whom He will soon be calling out of this present world to glory.
On a day that will probably appear just as any other day the trumpet of God will sound, as is prophesied in His Word, and every dead and living follower of Jesus Christ will be forever changed and caught up to Heaven (I Thess. 4:15-18).
I was once asked by my Muslim father why I wanted to read of all the horrible things that are coming upon the earth. I explained to him that if all of the terrible things recorded in the Bible have come to pass and continue to come to pass just as was prophesied, then we can rest assured that all of the good things written of are going to just as assuredly happen, just as God has promised.
There is a real place called Heaven prepared and waiting for the arrival of every born-again, blood-washed child of God that have had their sins forgiven by the Risen Lord Jesus Christ.
It's all true and it is all going to happen just as God has declared in His Word. Heaven or Hell awaits every human being that has ever lived and their eternal fate rests on their decision to either accept or reject the sacrifice Jesus made of Himself upon the cross.
We all really do have a choice - it really is just that pure and simple.