1946 Kurdistan et groupements Kurdes isolés (detail of Iraqi Kurdistan)

Map of Kurdistan from 1946. The map was published by Elias Modern Press in Cairo by elements of the Kurdish diaspora in Egypt.According to Maria T. O'Shea's 2004 Trapped Between Map and Reality: Geography and Perceptions of Kurdistan, p. 153, the map was "the first Kurdish projection of the whole of Kurdistan to be aimed at the outside world" and "unique in that it had an accompanying text to justify the positions taken."According to the map's French legend, "Les frontières ethniques du Kurdistan sont indiquées par une zône de hachures d'autant plus mince que la délimitation est plus netteLes autres zônes hachurées indiquent la position et l'étendre appoximative des groupements isolés."According to the accompanying explanatory pamphlet in English "Areas marked by hatchings are those about which information is indefinite."Subsequently, the uncertainty indicated by the hatching has frequently been ignored. The inclusion of lands that would have granted a putative post-WWII Kurdish state access to the Persian Gulf was a characteristic of other maps, produced for diplomatic purposes, in 1945 and 1946.See the discussion in O'Shea's Trapped Between Map and Reality, pp. 150–156. The map is reproduced in blank-and-white outline as figure 12.5 on page 151.