Farrar Straus Giroux. 356 pp. $25

KANGAROOING down some ghastly road on the Iraqi-Turkish border in the spring of 1992, I came to a stop and ran into some Western journalistic colleagues going the other way. There was the usual exchange of gossip and rumor and tradecraft and then: "Pity you weren't here an hour or two ago. Randal was passing through." These and similar words had become something of a mantra for anybody interested in the Kurdish situation. If you turned up to interview a Kurdish leader, or arrived in some desperate refugee camp, you were liable to be asked if you knew Randal (a distinguished foreign correspondent for this newspaper) or if you were aware of the fact that he had just left or was expected any minute. Others of us turned in our stories and in some cases finished our books, but the considered Randal view of the situation remained always in potentia. I blush to say that there were even some heartless jokes on the subject. But now we have the book, and the joke is on us.

Randal has brought the Kurds to life, if you will allow the expression, by describing both them and his long struggle to discover and understand them. His elephantine gestation time was put to good use. How many Americans know that the Kurds were given an American promise of self-government by President Woodrow Wilson? How many Americans know that Henry Kissinger used the Kurds as surrogates and mercenaries and then abandoned them in their hour of trial? How many Americans know that the Bush administration, which later yelled about the fact that the Kurds had been gassed by Saddam Hussein, had kept suspiciously quiet about that very gassing at the time when it occurred? In these pages, you can read someone who feels a quiet but definite sense of responsibility for what he is narrating: a feeling that these people do not live on some exotic planet but in the same international community as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Department of State.

The essential facts about the Kurds can be briefly stated. They are an ancient people, at least as old as the Karduchoi described by Xenophon in his Anabasis, who are neither Persians nor Arabs nor Turks. They dwell, however, in the mountainous confluence of the region covered by Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. This is not an ideal home for an ethnic or national minority, and was pretty rugged even before the discovery of oil. Numbering not less than 25 million, the Kurds are the largest people in the world to lack a state of their own. Their curse, apart from their geography, is their feudal and clan tradition and their gullibility when employed as proxies by seductive outside powers.

This book is, therefore, no romance. Randal is perfectly well aware of his subject's shortcomings. Many a Kurdish windpipe has been severed -- and they continue to be severed -- by a Kurdish blade. Most recently, in the semi-autonomous zone covered by the Pentagon's post-Gulf War "Operation Provide Comfort," the Kurds of northern Iraq reduced their foreign friends to despair by first holding an election and then settling remaining issues at gunpoint. Nevertheless, Kurdish forces and spokesmen have always been to the fore in democratic and reform movements in all four of their compulsory "homelands," and the future of civilized discourse in Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria is inextricably bound up with their fate. So, Randal says, pay attention.

He intersperses his historical and political observations in a travelogue of great charm. It's no joke for anyone to voyage into the Bekaa Valley and meet the quasi-Stalinist tough guys of the Kurdish Workers Party, or to wade through snowdrifts on the Iranian frontier and hike mountain paths in northern Iraq, and Randal is (as he reminds us with a minimum of self-deprecation) getting a bit old for this sort of thing. But he makes light of the fact once or twice by stressing the deference that Kurds show to veteranhood. In a time of general boredom and indifference, too, he shows a becoming sense of involvement, as an American, in Turkey's disgraceful use of U.S. military aid and the CIA's employment of Kurds as disposable "assets."

THE MOST STIRRING encounter in the book is the understanding formed between Randal and Abdul Rahman Qassemlou, leader of the Kurdish minority in Iran. Qassemlou had all the attributes of a potential national leader. He was not a tribal or religious or political sectarian, he had traveled widely and had a good ration of political experience (including in that great school of regional politics, ideological disillusionment), along with a sense of humor. Randal adds characteristically that he also had a taste for Scotch whiskey, and drank it on principle in order to show his contempt for the ayatollahs. Refused entry to the United States for many years because of his leftist opinions, he had just been granted a visa by Washington in the summer of 1989. He and Randal celebrated in Paris, in fine style. Two days later Qassemlou was lured to an apartment in Vienna by a purported offer of negotiations, and murdered in cold blood by some of Oliver North's Iranian moderates. About to break into a new world, and dragged back by the lethal and barbaric practices of an older one, Qassemlou was the emblematic Kurd. He and his people have been well-served by this finely wrought testimony of friendship.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Nation. With the photographer Ed Kashi he is co-author of "When The Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds."

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company