BRIDGEMANThe Kurds are said to be the largest
people never to have achieved statehood.
However, the idea that the speakers of
the many different Kurdish dialects
- scattered across mountainous areas
of eastern Anatolia, northern Iraq and
western Iran, with smaller pockets in
northern Syria, Armenia and north-
eastern Iran – form a coherent ‘people’
is a relatively new one.
Kurdish is a language of the north-
western Iranian group, and descent from
people identified in the Bible as Medes,
from what’s now Iran, has been claimed.
Early Mesopotamian records mention
tribes with names that could be linked
to ‘Kurd’, but modern Kurds may not
have a single ancient ethnic heritage;
certainly, the tribe has long been the pri-
mary level of identity and organisation.
The name ‘Kurd’ can definitively be
traced to the period following the tribes’
conversion to Islam in the seventh cen-
tury AD. Even after that, they continued
to exist largely in nomadic groups rather
than occupying a defined homeland. Yet
Kurds wielded significant military influ-
ence, peaking with Salah ad-Din Yusuf
ibn Ayyub (c1137–1193), known in the
west as Saladin, the Kurdish warlord
whose empire encompassed much of the
Middle East and north-east Africa.
The vast area known historically as
Kurdistan was never defined. Before the
20th century, Kurds lived mostly at the
periphery of empires, in semi-autono-
mous tribal confederations in remote
mountain valleys. And though the
majority of Kurds are Sunni, significant
minorities follow a variety of other reli-
gions. Tribal identities were paramount,
and a northern Kurd from Diyarbakır
would have struggled to understand a
southern Kurd from Erbil, their tongues
being distinctly different languages.
But in the upheaval during and after
the First World War, this all began to
change. Defeated by the Allies, the Ot-
toman empire was carved up into new
states. The fate of the Kurds was an item
on the agenda in the postwar discussions
that continued for much of 1919 and
which culminated in the foundation of
the League of Nations in early 1920. A
Committee of Kurdish Independence
addressed the peace conference in Paris
and, for a while, the notion of a Kurdish
state was entertained. The peace treaty
signed with Turkey at Sèvres in August
1920 contained an article stating that:
“If within one year... the Kurdish
peoples... shall address themselves to
the Council of the League of Nations in
such a manner as to show that a majorit yKurds in Iraq
An ancient people’s hunt for a home
in a war-torn region
by ĄĹ İ ĠĶ ÂL·ĠĶÔŬĶ
of the population... desires independ-
ence from Turkey, and if the Council
then considers that these peoples are
capable of such independence and
recommends that it should be granted to
them, Turkey hereby agrees to execute
such a recommendation, and to renounce
all rights and title over these areas.”
Before such a scheme could be
implemented, however, a resurgent
Turkish nationalist movement led by
the war hero Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk)
took charge of the defeated imperial
army and, in a war of liberation, drove
the occupation forces out of Anatolia.
When the dust settled, the Allied powers
agreed to revise the punitive Treat y of
Sèvres. In the new peace treaty, signed
at Lausanne in 1923, the article that
promised Kurdish independence had
vanished. Instead, the Kurds were incor-
porated into the new states of Turkey,
Iraq and Syria, with a significant portion
also dwelling in Iran.Following the Second World War, the
first embryo of a coherent Kurdish
nationalist movement began to form
Kurds in Iraq