Edmonds, Cecil John

(1889-1979)

   Edmonds entered the Foreign Service of Great Britain in 1912 and retired with the rank of minister in 1950. During his military career, he was honored by being mentioned in the dispatches three times. He was one of several British political officers posted to northern Iraq in the 1920s and served in the civil administration of Iraq from 1922 to 1945. In this role he acquired a profound knowledge of Kurdistan and wrote one of the best analyses available in English, Kurds, Turks, and Arabs: Travel and Research in North-Eastern Iraq, 1919-1925 (1957). In 1951, he became a lecturer in Kurdish at the University of London and also compiled with Tawfiq Wahby an early Kurdish-English dictionary.