An Atlas of World Affairs

Kurds

Nearly all of the more than 25 million Kurds are Sunni Muslims. Their language is of the Iranian group, distantly related to Persian (Farsi). Most of them live in an area that is divided between four countries: Turkey, in which there are at least 14 million Kurds; Iran, with 6 million; Iraq, with at least 4 million; and Syria, with 1 million (there are also some thousands of Kurds in Armenia and Israel). About a third of the Kurds in Turkey have migrated to its western regions, and many have, in varying degrees, become assimilated; a quarter of the members of the Turkish parliament, and a quarter of the 2 million immigrants from Turkey now in Germany, are of Kurdish origin. But the Kurds’ heartland is the region stretching from south-east Turkey to northern Iraq and western Iran, whose Population is predominantly Kurdish. Rebellious Kurds have repeatedly challenged each of the three governments that share control of this region.

After the 1914–18 war and the collapse of the Ottoman Turkish empire (which had included Iraq and Syria), it was proposed in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres that, under a League of Nations mandate, Britain should administer an autonomous Kurdistan. Turkey successfully resisted this plan, and the territory that had been proposed for Kurdistan was instead divided between Turkey and Iraq. In later years, several ostensible offers of autonomy were made to Iraq’s Kurds by successive governments, but nothing of  substance developed.....