Kurdistan is a territory spread over five countries: Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Armenia, and its population is the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East
Kurdistan is the Middle East region comprising southeastern Turkey, southern Armenia, northern Iraq, western Iran and northeastern Syria. This territory is the scene of one of the conflicts that shake the region and the world, and whose consequences transcend borders, affecting the relations of the countries involved with other Asian, European and American states and with the international community through numerous international organizations.
The Kurds, a people of Indo-European origin of the Iranian group with Median, Assyrian and Armenian roots, constitute one of the largest stateless "minorities" in the world; approximately 25 to 30 million people, of whom 12 to 15 million live in Turkey –20% of the total population–, 5 million in Iran –10% of the country's population–, 4 million in Iraq –25% of the Iraqi total– and the rest in Armenia, the surrounding regions or in exile.
KURDISTAN, PEOPLE FIGHTING FOR ITS RECOGNITION
The existence of Kurdistan dates back to approximately 612 BC and its history has always been marked by conquest, since in its beginnings the Ottoman, Arab and Persian Empires have tried to invade the region.
In the early 18th century, during the war between the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire, the Kurds supported the Ottomans because they were promised more autonomy, as well as for religious reasons. Both empires disputed for a long time the Kurdish territory until, finally, Selim I –Ottoman Empire– defeated Shah Ismail of Persia in 1514 and Kurdistan came under Ottoman rule.
However, it was not until the end of the First World War (1918) that the Kurdish region underwent major changes, as the cessation of this international conflict meant the end of the great European empires and the birth of new states such as Turkey, which emerged following the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, leaving the Kurdish territory divided into several countries. This creation of new countries fueled the Kurds' desire for a state of their own, but the Turkish government –which had initially supported the Kurds to gain their support against the Persians– was now unwilling to cede part of its territory and sovereignty.
The yellow areas represent places that would belong to Kurdistan
In 1920, Britain, France, Italy and the defeated Ottoman Empire signed the Treaty of Sèvres, which provided for a Kurdish autonomous zone east of the Euphrates that could become independent within a year. This agreement led the military leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk to displace Sultan Mohammed VI, a signatory of the agreement, and to negotiate and sign a new treaty –called the Treaty of Lausanne– in 1923 that kept the Kurdish territory carved up and fixed the borders of modern Turkey. The Allies had promised Kurdistan autonomy in exchange for its help during the war and that promise was quickly forgotten, as large sources of oil were found in the area, so the Western powers were not interested in leaving. The Kurds turned out to be the pawns in the geopolitical chess game of the time.
KURDISH OPPRESSION IN TURKEY
From the Treaty of Lausanne onwards, the republican government of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk promoted the Turkish ethnic element as a cohesive factor among the citizens of the new country. Although the 1924 constitution clarifies that "Turk" is any citizen of the country, regardless of language or religion, it establishes only Turkish as the "language of Turkey."
The struggle of the Kurds living in Turkey to gain independence for their territory provoked numerous riots throughout the 20th century. The first of these was in 1925, when Sheikh Said, a group of former Ottoman soldiers also known as Hamidies and two Kurdish subgroups –the Zaza and the Kurmandjis– led a rebellion called the Said Revolt or Genç Incident to gain independence for the territory, but this was crushed by Turkey. Two years later, in 1927, the Kurdish nationalist Joibun party initiated the revolt of Ağrı, a region in eastern Turkey, declared independence from the Republic of Ararat and maintained control over a large part of Turkish Kurdistan before being defeated in 1930. A final Kurdish riot was that of the Zaza population of Dersim in 1937, which had no independence aims but opposed the Turkish government's attempt to do away with local social structures, language and customs.
In 1978, a group of Marxist-Leninist Kurdish students in Ankara, led by Abdullah Öcalan, formed the clandestine Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). At this time, different groups, many of them extreme right-wing, were murdering thousands of people in Turkey for political reasons. This party, which had its headquarters established in exile in Lebanon and then in Syria, transformed itself in 1984 into a guerrilla organization and launched extensive armed activity in southeastern Turkey. In response, the Turkish government established a corps of "people's guards" (korucular in Turkish), arming Kurdish peasants who were theoretically volunteers, but often forced to bear arms, since anyone who refused would be considered a PKK sympathizer, so that the population was caught between a rock and a hard place.
In 1998, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan was expelled from Syria and in 1999 he was kidnapped in Kenya in an operation by the Turkish and American secret services, later transferred to Turkey and sentenced first to death and then to life imprisonment. Öcalan then asked for a truce and the intensity of the war in Kurdistan decreased in the following years.
Turkey is currently engaged in a peace process with the PKK, marked by a March 2013 ceasefire agreement, which many hope will represent the end of an armed struggle that began in 1984 and has claimed more than 40,000 lives. Abdullah Öcalan has already warned that if Turkey lets Kobane fall into Islamic State hands, the talks will come to an end.
Another impediment to the peaceful coexistence of Kurds and Turks in Turkey is the President of the Republic of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Turkey's leader has openly positioned himself against the Kurdish population and has attacked them on several occasions. On October 9, 2019, he initiated a series of attacks towards the Kurdish population located in northern Syria, sheltering his attacks in the quest to rid the area of Kurdish militias and the creation of a safe zone to displace Syrian refugees living in camps in Turkey.
On November 13, 2022, a bomb exploded on Istiklal Avenue in Istanbul, leaving six people dead. The Turkish Minister of the Interior, Süleyman Soylu, declared that the alleged perpetrator of the attack was of Kurdish origin, as the evidence at their disposal pointed to the PKK because the alleged perpetrator was a native of a region in northern Syria controlled by the YPG (People's Protection Units) militias, to which the PKK belongs. Before they limited access to social networks to avoid disinformation, they were ablaze with blaming the Kurds for the situation, reflecting the rejection by part of the Turkish population of the Kurdish minority.
Recently, Erdoğan accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of perpetrating genocide against the Palestinian population, stating that he is "no different from Hitler." This is not the first time that the Turkish leader has compared the Likud party leader to the German dictator, although it is the first time that Netanyahu has responded so forcefully to these insinuations: "Erdoğan, who is committing genocide against the Kurds and who holds the world record for imprisoning journalists who oppose his regime, is the last person who can preach morality to us", Netanyahu posted on his profile on the social network X (formerly Twitter).
IRAN, THE MOST PUNISHING COUNTRY
As in Turkey, the Kurds of Iran have been fighting for their independence since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the course of Kurdish-Iranian history has been very similar to that of Turkey.
In 1941 there was a major riot that led to the creation of an autonomous administration led from the city of Mahabad by the jurist Qazim Mohamed. This event was supported by the Soviet Union, which also encouraged an Azeri independence movement in northern Iran. This independence movement was strengthened when the Kurdish-Iraqi leader Mustafa Barzani went into exile with his militias to Iran and created an army in the service of Qazim Mohamed in 1945, who founded the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) in the same year. However, it was not until 1946 that the first attempt at Kurdish independence in Iran took place, when Qazim proclaimed an independent republic, known as the Republic of Mahabad and that same year the Soviet troops withdrew; shortly after, a counterattack by Tehran defeated the Kurdish militias and reintegrated the territory into the Iranian state.
In 2004, members of the PKK, Turkey's Kurdish guerrilla group, created the Pejak (or PJAK), a militia of about 1,500 members headquartered in the Qandil Mountains on the Iraq-Iran border. Beginning in 2006, the Pejak carried out several bombings and mostly frequent attacks on Iranian military patrols and helicopters near the border. In response, the Iranian military regularly shelled this mountainous area. According to some journalists, the Pejak operated with the approval or even support of the United States, which would use this militia to put pressure on Iran, and the support of Israeli instructors. Washington denied any involvement, but the Pejak headquarters are located north of Suleimania, in a territory controlled by the PUK Peshmerga, the best allies of the United States in Iraq, and the Pejak militiamen assured the press that they were serving Washington's geostrategic interests. The close link between the Pejak and the PKK –which has its headquarters in the same area and even shares the same infrastructure– would make this link controversial because the PKK is considered terrorist by the U.S. government.
In November 2008, a few days after Barack Obama's election victory, the Pejak announced that it would end the armed fight against Iran and would confront Turkey. However, an attack on an Iranian police station took place in April 2009, killing 18 policemen and 8 guerrillas, so Iran counterattacked a week later, bombing an Iraqi Kurdish village. In July 2011, Iran launched a broad offensive against the Pejak, without drawing criticism from the Iraqi Kurdistan administration, and in September the Pejak announced that it had negotiated a truce, thus ceasing its armed activity against Iran.
Since then, the Kurdish population has suffered great repression in Iran, being the victim of repeated marginalization, despite the fact that it represents about 10% of the Iranian population. This has also resulted in the exile of thousands of Kurdish-Iranians, since the political activities of groups opposed to the Islamic Republic are completely banned and their members exposed to arrest, torture or assassination.
IRAQ, THE MOST OPEN WITH THE KURDS
Northern Iraq is the main place of refuge for Kurdish groups exiled from Iran and Turkey, countries that consider their activities as terrorist, and whose conflicts have been dragged beyond their borders.
After decades of conflict, persecution and massacres, the Kurdish Iraqis enjoy freedoms and rights that do not exist for this ethnic group in other countries. In fact, the Iraqi Constitution recognizes Kurdistan as an autonomous region, determines that its capital is Erbil and empowers its regional parliament to pass laws.
The Kurdish-Iraqi fighters, known as Peshmerga, led the campaign against the Islamic State in northern Iraq and were one of the main allies of the United States, a country with which they maintain a close bilateral relationship.
However, the rift with Baghdad has not yet healed, especially because of the relations between Kurdistan and Turkey, the main tormentor of the Kurds but which Erbil allows to maintain some thirty military bases on its territory. Ankara uses them in its fight against members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and has recently launched a new military campaign against the guerrillas. On the other hand, the four main Kurdish-Russian parties opposed to the regime of the Ayatollahs also have their bases in northern Iraq and are attacking them as they consider that these "terrorist" groups are organizing the mass protests that are shaking Iran.
The bombings have already resulted in dozens of deaths and injuries since the end of September, while the Kurdish-Iranians accuse Tehran of wanting to divert attention from the protests with these attacks.
PEACE FOR THE KURDS IN SYRIA
Until the 2012-2013 civil war, Kurdish claims in Syria had rarely led to bloody conflicts, unlike in Turkey, Iraq or Iran. The use of the Kurdish language in public was not persecuted during the regime of Hafez Assad and his son and successor Bashar Assad, but the publication of books in Kurdish was.
AANES, formed in 2018, brings together several areas of northern and eastern Syria seized from the Islamic State during campaigns to end the "caliphate" and, while it is a Kurdish-led administration, it is based on the coexistence of a myriad of religious groups and ethnicities.
As is the case with Ankara and Tehran, the Syrian central government opposes the Kurdish authorities, although Damascus has agreed to collaborate with them to make a common front against Turkey, the supporter of the Syrian opposition and who is threatening to launch an offensive against AANES areas.
Some components of the self-proclaimed autonomous administration, mainly the People's Protection Units (YPG), which act as a security body in their territory, are considered terrorists by the Turkish Executive, as it sees them as a Syrian branch of the PKK.
In recent years, Ankara has managed to seize several areas that were in the hands of the Kurdish-Syrians in a series of cross-border operations and there have come fears of an imminent launch of a new "anti-terrorist" offensive against areas controlled by these forces, as it has threatened.
THE FIGHT FOR INDEPENDENCE WILL CONTINUE
The long-desired independence brought with it the emergence of several independence movements that fought for the creation of a state of their own within Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. After years of conflict the result is nothing more than tens of thousands of dead and displaced Kurds who are still searching for an independent state. Today they are a huge community united by race, culture and language, but, despite their struggles, they are not yet consolidated as Kurdistan.
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