The Kurds and Kurdistan
Why the Kurds don't have their own state and why the dream of a greater Kurdistan will not be realised any time soon
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The Kurds are widely regarded as one of the world's largest ethnic groups without a country of their own.
There are some 35-40 million Kurds living today in the heart of the Middle East, and their ancestors have inhabited the mountainous geographical region of Kurdistan for millennia, preserving their own language, dialects and rich culture.
But despite their considerable number and historical significance in the region, the Kurds are locked in an ongoing struggle for some form of recognition and autonomy because the region of Kurdistan has never existed as a sovereign state.
The territory traditionally inhabited by the Kurds is now split between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, and Kurdish people have faced varying degrees of oppression and marginalisation in each of those countries.
For more than a century, many Kurds have clamoured for the creation of a modern-day 'Kurdistan' - a sovereign homeland where their people could live in peace, free of the social and political agendas of other governments who seek to oppress them.
But there are many reasons - some obvious and others less so - as to why the creation of such a state would be so fraught with difficulty.
Let’s take a look at the plight of Kurds in each of those aforementioned nations - Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria - examine some of the most prominent Kurdish movements striving for independence or greater autonomy, and assess whether a sovereign Kurdistan is likely to become a reality in the near future.
A BRIEF history of the Kurds
Before we get stuck into the Kurdish question in 2023, we should first take a quick look back at the history of the Kurds to understand how today's circumstances came about.
The Kurds really have inhabited the same place for pretty much all of recorded human history. Their presence has been traced to Mesopotamia - modern-day Iraq - as far north as the Taurus mountains of Anatolia - modern-day Turkey - and as far west as Iran's Zagros mountains.
For centuries the Kurds were made up of nomadic tribes of shepherds who roamed the Mesopotamian plains and mountains, and throughout the Middle Ages they were part of various dynasties which frequently collapsed and were remade amid constant conflict.
From the 1500s, the Ottoman Empire gained control of vast swathes of Kurdish territory, though it was forced to fight battles with various Persian dynasties to the East. Still, despite the Kurds living under Ottoman or Persian rule for centuries, no empire or dynasty managed to assimilate them and stamp out their language or culture.
The fall of the Ottoman Empire amid World War I was a watershed moment in Kurdish history essentially set the scene for the ongoing struggle of the Kurds today. As the empire collapsed, its constituent ethnic groups sought to shape their own destinies and the dream of a united Kurdish homeland emerged.
US President Woodrow Wilson was a staunch advocate for self-determination, and in his 14-point programme for World Peace declared that the ethnic minorities of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire must be granted the 'unmolested opportunity of autonomous development'.
With Britain and France unwilling to sacrifice any territory in their respective mandates in Iraq and Syria, the pair agreed to assign a region of what is now southeastern Turkey to the Kurds. This was far from perfect, as the proposed region did not include the Kurds of Western Iran, Iraq and Syria - but it would have been an autonomous Kurdish state nonetheless.
Article 62 of the Treaty of Sèvres, signed on August 10, 1920, by the likes of Britain, France, Italy, Greece, and Armenia, proposed a Kurdish state which would have its own government, military force and control over local administration.
But the prospect of an independent Kurdish nation dissolved three years later, when troops led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish National Movement, successfully resisted the partition of Turkish land in a fight for independence against the Allied forces.
Atatürk's victory led to the creation of modern-day Turkey and forced Western allies back to the negotiating table. The result was the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, which established the new Republic of Turkey with Atatürk as its first president - and saw the promise of an autonomous Kurdish region disappear.
Consequently, the geographical region of Kurdistan was divided among newly formed nation-states, leaving the Kurdish population dispersed and without a unified homeland.
Meanwhile, in the British mandate of Iraq, an organic Kurdish attempt to declare an autonomous region was swiftly stamped out.
Sheikh Mahmud Barzani, a Kurd who was installed as the governor of Sulaymaniyah by the British, led a series of revolts from 1920-1924 and set up the Kingdom of Kurdistan.
Britain’s earlier commitment to granting Kurds autonomy was exposed as bogus when British troops in 1924 ousted Barzani and crushed the Kingdom, regaining control of Iraq.
Kurds in Turkey
Turkey is currently home to the greatest number of Kurds, and in turn, the Kurds are Turkey's largest ethnic minority.
Some 10-15 million Kurds are living in Turkey, constituting about 20 per cent of Turkey's population, yet it is there that the Kurdish people have faced some of the most systematised oppression.
Once Atatürk cemented modern-day Turkey in 1923, his newly formed government quickly set about crushing any potential for uprisings in the Kurdish-dominated southeast, instituting martial law and introducing policies designed to assimilate the Kurds into a homogenous secular, Turkish identity.
Kurds were forbidden from speaking their mother tongue, Kurdish cultural dress was banned and thousands upon thousands of Kurds were forcibly displaced and subjected to human rights abuses for decades.
After a military coup in 1960, Turkification efforts were intensified and the labelling of Kurds as 'mountain Turks' was popularised - a term that had been used for decades but became common parlance for Turkish ministers in what amounted to a total denial of the Kurdish ethnicity.
This mistreatment led to the emergence of the Kurdistan Workers' Party - the PKK - in 1978, when a group of Kurds harnessed the Marxist-Leninist ideals of Communism to consolidate Kurdish separatist movements into an armed uprising.
The PKK's militant fight against repression only heightened the Turkish government's response and brought about the introduction of harsh counterinsurgency measures which saw Turkey's southeast spiral into a vicious circle of violence and reprisals that has resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths and mass displacement.
The PKK's founder, Abdullah Ocalan, has been behind bars since 1999 and his movement was labelled a terrorist state in Turkey. The PKK is also considered a terrorist state by the European Union and, amusingly, the United States - a point which we will revisit very shortly.
When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, the AKP, came to power in 2002, there was hope among Kurds that the authorities in Ankara would pursue a more conciliatory approach towards the Kurdish issue.
But relations never really warmed and Erdogan in recent years has sought to crack down not only on his own nation's Kurdish population, but also those across the border in Syria. At home, he has replaced elected Kurdish mayors with handpicked 'trustees', detained thousands of Kurds as political prisoners and cracked down on Kurdish media outlets and prominent online commentators. Meanwhile, Turkish forces have launched a string of military offensives in northern Syria to target PKK-affiliated forces they see as a threat to the border.
In 2023, Ankara's treatment of Kurds shows no signs of abating, with Erdogan having just scored a narrow presidential election victory against longtime foe Kemal Kilicdaroglu - whom most Kurds supported in the run-off. Turkey is also the only remaining obstacle preventing Sweden from becoming a member of NATO, with Erdogan accusing authorities in Stockholm of protecting a list of individuals he says are 'terrorists' affiliated with the PKK.
Kurds in Syria
Roughly 2-2.5 million Kurds live in Syria and constitute Syria's largest ethnic minority, making up around 10 per cent of the population.
Unlike Turkey, Syria remained colonised by France after the First World War until 1946. France did not grant Kurds full autonomy during the colonial period… But French authorities did not persecute the Kurds either, and granted them full Syrian citizenship - an offer which enticed thousands facing oppression in southern Turkey to flee across the border and settle in northern Syria.
Even after Syria became an autonomous republic in 1946, Kurds were able to live in relative harmony compared to those in Turkey, but in 1962 the Syrian government held a census in the north in an attempt to crack down on the ongoing migration of Kurds from Turkey.
Those who did not participate or could not prove residence in Syria prior to 1945 were immediately stripped of their citizenship. Ultimately, roughly 1 in 5 Kurds - about 120,000 people according to the Council on Foreign Relations, lost all their rights, including the ability to buy property or gain employment.
Later in the 70s and 80s, members of the PKK in Turkey fled to take refuge in Syria amid their battles with Ankara, and their presence began to encourage Syrian Kurds, who were subjected to repressive policies, to organise politically also.
Eventually in 2003, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) was formed, and although the organisations are distinct from one another, it is widely seen as the Syrian branch of the PKK. The PYD quickly became the foremost organisation advocating for greater rights and equality for Syrian Kurds, but Syria's descent into civil war off the back of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 afforded the PYD an opportunity to seize control in the north.
With Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces locked in fierce conflict with Syrian opposition rebel groups, the PYD and its armed People's Protection Units, known as the YPG, forced its way into the power vacuum and in 2012 established a de-facto autonomous administration, which is officially known as the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES).
Then in 2014, just two years after the YPG and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) - a multi-ethnic militia led by the YPG - carved out control of Rojava, they were forced to face another foe - the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. ISIS launched major offensives across Iraq and Syria in 2014, but the YPG and SDF proved to be incredibly effective in fighting off the jihadists and ultimately maintained control.
Remember when I said it was funny that the PKK in Turkey is considered a terrorist organisation by the United States?
That's because the YPG - the militarised units of what is essentially Syria's version of the PKK, enjoyed strong support from Washington and is considered a key strategic ally in the fight against terror.
In 2023, Syria's Kurds enjoy a much greater degree of autonomy than their counterparts in Turkey. By and large, the YPG and SDF still have control over their autonomous region in the north, and retain a degree of US support.
But as soon as US forces reduced their presence in the region in 2019, Turkey launched a series of armed incursions into and aerial bombardments of Rojava, and Erdogan remains committed to weakening the SDF along Syria's northeastern border with Turkey.
Kurds in Iraq and Iran
The plight of the Kurds in Iraq and Iran is extremely complex and developments in the two countries are closely intertwined.
The end of the Second World War was a major flashpoint as 1946 saw the creation of what was, briefly, a fully independent Kurdish state.
The Republic of Mahabad was established in Iran by Qazi Muhammad who, with the backing of the Soviet Union, managed to secure self-governance for Kurds in a small section of Western Iran surrounding Mahabad city. But the success was very short lived, because one year later the USSR withdrew its support and Iranian forces swiftly retook Mahabad - and hanged Qazi for his trouble.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) was founded by Mustafa Barzani, setting the stage for organised Kurdish political activism across the border.
The 1960s witnessed a major uprising by Iraqi Kurds demanding greater autonomy and cultural recognition against the central government. The Iraqi government responded with military force, leading to a protracted conflict that lasted until 1970 when both sides entered into a brief autonomy agreement.
However, this agreement collapsed in 1974 and hostilities were reignited. This time though, Iraq's de-facto leader, Saddam Hussein, launched a campaign of Arabisation in Kurdish Iraq, forcibly displacing Kurds for Arab settlements. Then, Saddam struck the Algiers Accord with Iran's Shah Reza Pahlavi, who had been arming and assisting Iraqi Kurds in their fight against the government.
Without Iranian support, Kurdish rebellion collapsed, triggering a period of infighting among Iraqi Kurds when Jalal Talabani split from the KDP to make his own party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).
The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 brought initial hope for the Kurds, who initially supported the fall of the Shah and for a short time enjoyed relative freedom and autonomy. But tensions quickly escalated and the new leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini declared a holy war (jihad) against Kurdish political parties, which of course meant Kurds faced even greater repression.
But things were only going to go downhill from there.
Iraq and Iran went to war in 1980, and Kurds on both sides were disproportionately affected by the fallout. Saddam enlisted Iranian Kurds to fight against the Islamic Republic, while Khomeini supported Iraqi Kurds in a new uprising against Saddam. The conflict did absolutely nothing to support either group's push for greater autonomy and instead turned them on each other.
The war came to a close in 1988, but the worst was yet to come. In what is one of the darkest chapters of Kurdish history, Saddam launched the genocidal al-Anfal campaign which sought, in the words of one of Saddam's cousins and party members, 'to solve the Kurdish problem and slaughter the saboteurs' - in other words, Kurds fighting for autonomy.
Estimates of casualties vary considerably, but it is widely believed that well over 100,000 Kurds were slaughtered in indiscriminate killing campaigns. One particularly horrific incident in the town of Halabja saw 5,000 men, women and children killed in one afternoon with chemical weapons, drawing international condemnation.
In 1991, after the horrors of the past decade, the US imposed a no-fly zone over Kurdish majority areas in Iraq which allowed many displaced Kurds to return to their homes and saw the election of the first Kurdistan Regional Government in 1992.
This was a major turning point in the Kurds' fight for greater autonomy and freedom, but this new-found autonomy did not lead to greater unity. Instead, Iraqi Kurds became embroiled in a civil war between 1994-1998 with Barzani's KDP and Talabani's PUK quarrelling over legitimacy, resulting in some 2,000-plus deaths before a power-sharing agreement was reached.
The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was problematic for all sorts of reasons, but Washington's involvement in the ousting of Saddam did Iraqi Kurds a big favour, allowing the Kurds to assert themselves politically and participate in the drafting of Iraq's new constitution.
Talabani, the founder of the PUK, was elected president of Iraq in 2005, and the new Iraqi constitution recognised the KRG as an autonomous entity with its own regional government and security forces. The autonomous region, known as Iraqi Kurdistan, still exists to this day.
In 2017, the Iraqi Kurdistan made one final push for total freedom, when the KRG announced a referendum for complete independence from Iraq. But the referendum was dismissed by the Iraqi central government and armed clashes ensued, which saw Iraqi Kurdistan lose territory and control over some oil fields.
Despite this, Iraqi Kurdistan remains the region where Kurds enjoy the most autonomy, with their own regional government and security forces.
In Iran however, Kurds do not enjoy such self-determination. The Iranian Kurds face continued repression in the Islamic Republic, enduring human rights abuses and restrictions on their cultural and linguistic freedom.
In September 2022, the death in custody of 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini after being arrested by Iran's Islamic police force led Iranian Kurds to hold mass protests.
These sparked a wave of demonstrations which spread across the entire country and endured for several months and shook the foundation of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s Islamic regime.
But they also initiated a brutal crackdown by Iran's security forces which has seen thousands arrested and dozens hanged since the protests began.
Will there ever be a Kurdistan?
No one can say for certain there will never be a Kurdistan. Governments rise and fall, nations are made and are dissolved and international geopolitics by its very nature is in a constant state of change. After all, it was only 100 years ago that Ataturk won independence from the Turks and negotiated the Treaty of Lausanne – were it not for Ataturk, the modern Republic of Turkey may never have been created and an independent Kurdish state could well exist today.
But with that being said, it is very hard to see a scenario in which Kurds will win a sovereign homeland any time soon.
For one, the historical geography of Kurdistan is quite broadly defined, and it is not clear where exactly the borders would be drawn. Different Kurdish factions have suggested different maps of what a greater Kurdistan would look like - and although one version of Kurdistan is more widely accepted than the others, the Kurds themselves aren’t even in total agreement on where Kurdistan’s borders would lie.
In any case, ethnicities and cultures cannot be divided into neat nation-states with hard borders (didn’t stop Western colonial powers from trying), and any attempt to introduce and enforce Kurdistan’s national boundaries would undoubtedly leave many other people in the same circumstances as the Kurds are right now - displaced, disconnected and living as a minority.
Secondly, any attempt to create modern-day Kurdistan would mean Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria would have to relinquish control of territory and control - something that the ruling authorities in each of these countries have no interest in doing.
In Turkey, Iran and Syria, the central governments are intent on repressing the Kurds to prevent any secessionist movements from gaining popularity and undermining their authority.
In Iraq, the Kurds enjoy their own autonomous region, but their last attempt at a full independence referendum was quashed and the Iraqi government routinely fights battles with Iraqi Kurd forces over access to and control of oil-rich regions.
A general desire to live in peace, speak their mother tongue, express their culture and have the right to self-determination is shared by all Kurds.
But the diaspora has been spread throughout several different territories for so long and has faced such repression that the goals of Kurdish factions have shifted from winning outright independence to simply securing more autonomy and the right to self-governance.
Democratic Confederalism, a concept conceived by the founder of the PKK Abdullah Ocalan, is now widely seen by Kurdish groups as a way to achieve equal rights by establishing autonomous regions for Kurds and other ethnic groups within the restrictions of existing national boundaries.
For example, the authorities in Rojava want to safeguard their autonomy in the north by establishing a decentralised federal system in Syria, where Kurds have equal rights alongside other ethnic groups to control their own territory. But this would not see Rojava become its own independent state, but rather an autonomous self-governing region, similar to Iraqi Kurdistan.
With the goals of Kurdish organisations shifting towards securing autonomy through Democratic Confederalism, and with no Ataturk-like figure in a position to unite Kurds throughout the Middle East to fight back and force regional powers to recognise their independence, it is safe to say that there is little to no prospect of a truly independent Kurdish nation any time soon.