Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Kurds are an Iranian ethnic group from West Asia, indigenous to Kurdistan, a geographic region spanning southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, and northeastern Syria. They number between 30 and 45 million people and are the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East after Arabs, Persians, and Turks.
The Kurds are a stateless nation because the Kurdish state outlined in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres was never ratified after being signed. Three years later the Treaty of Lausanne set the boundaries of the Turkish state, and the Western Allies ceased their push for Kurdish statehood in exchange for Turkish recognition of Allied terms.
The native languages of the Kurds are the Kurdish languages and the Zaza-Gorani languages, both belonging to the Western Iranic branch of the Iranic language family. The most prevalent religion is Sunni Islam, with Shia Islam and Alevism as significant Islamic minorities, and Yazidism as the largest non-Islamic minority faith.
The Anfal campaign was a genocidal campaign carried out by the Iraqi government against the Kurdish population between 1986 and 1989, culminating in 1988. It led to the destruction of over two thousand villages and the killing of 182,000 Kurdish civilians, including the chemical attack on the town of Halabja in 1988 that killed 5000 people instantly.
Saladin was a Kurdish ruler who founded the Ayyubid dynasty in 1171. He led the Muslims to recapture Jerusalem from the Crusaders at the Battle of Hattin, and his dynasty lasted until 1341 when it fell to Mongol invasions.
The largest Kurdish community in the United States is in Nashville, which is nicknamed Little Kurdistan. Kurdish immigrants began settling there in large numbers in 1976, and the community is estimated at around 11,000 people.