Kurds

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kurds are a stateless nation of between 30 and 45 million people, the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East after Arabs, Persians, and Turks. Their homeland, Kurdistan, has no border on any official map. It spans southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, and northeastern Syria, a mountainous stretch divided four ways. In 1920, the victorious Allies of World War I drafted a Kurdish state into the Treaty of Sevres. Three years later the Treaty of Lausanne erased that promise, and the Kurds have lived inside other people's countries ever since. How does a people this large remain without a country of their own? Why do their languages and their religions branch so widely apart? And what happened in the towns of Halabja, Mahabad, and Qamishli that shaped a century of struggle? The answers run from a Sumerian clay tablet to a Kurdish town nicknamed Little Kurdistan in the American South.

• 2. Roots Of A Name

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  Qardu is how the Assyrians recorded the toponym that underlies the name Kurd, with an even older Sumerian form, Kar-da, reaching back to the Middle Bronze Age. Assyrian Qardu named an area in the upper Tigris basin. The name carried forward into Corduene, the territory of a tribe that Xenophon described opposing the retreat of the Ten Thousand through the mountains north of Mesopotamia in the 4th century BC. Not every scholar accepts that chain. Martin Hartmann, Theodor Noldeke, and F. H. Weissbach deemed the Qardu link philologically impossible, pointing instead to the Cyrtians, a tribe living in Media and Persia, as the ancestors of the Kurds. The ethnonym may instead descend from a Middle Persian word, kwrt-, a common noun for nomads or tent-dwellers, applicable to any Iranic group living that way. The term hardened into an ethnic name only after the Muslim conquest of Persia, when it entered Arabic and attached to an amalgam of Iranic and Iranicized tribes. In 1923, The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland offered a different gloss, claiming the Persian gurd or kurd signifies brave, valiant, or warlike. The same journal tied that meaning to a Babylonian root, gardu or qardu, and credited the word's spread into European usage to its passage from Persian into Arabic.

• 3. Tongues And Beliefs

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  Kurdish is not one language but a collection of related dialects, classified by the scholar Mackenzie into a Northern group of Kurmanji, a Central group within Sorani, and a Southern group including Laki. Arab geographers such as al-Masudi recognized the Kurds as a people with a distinct language as early as the 10th century. The tongue holds official status in Iraq as a national language alongside Arabic, is recognized in Iran as a regional language, and counts as a minority language in Armenia. The Zaza and Gorani are ethnic Kurds, yet the Zaza-Gorani languages are not classified as Kurdish. Sunni Islam is the most prevalent faith, most Kurds following the Shafii school, with significant minorities in the Hanafi school and in Alevism, and many Shafii Kurds belonging to the Naqshbandi or Qadiriyya Sufi orders. Yazidism is the largest non-Islamic religion among Kurds, a monotheistic ethnic faith whose adherents number from 700,000 to 1 million worldwide. Its believers hold that one God created the world and entrusted it to seven Holy Beings, led by Tawuse Melek, symbolized by a peacock. Yarsanism, also called Ahl-i-Haqq, counts more than 2 million followers in Iran and over 300,000 in Iraqi Kurdistan, though they lack political rights in both countries. In 2016 the first official Zoroastrian fire temple of Iraqi Kurdistan opened in Sulaymaniyah, where attendees lit a ritual fire and beat the frame drum known as the daf.

• 4. Princes And Empires

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  Saladin, the Kurdish ruler who founded the Ayyubid dynasty in 1171, led the Muslims to recapture Jerusalem from the Crusaders at the Battle of Hattin. His dynasty stretched across Egypt, Syria, Upper Mesopotamia, the Hejaz, Yemen, and parts of southeastern Anatolia, lasting until 1341 when it fell to Mongol invasions. Long before Saladin, the Sasanian king Shapur II marched in AD 360 into the Roman province of Zabdicene to take its chief city Bezabde, present-day Cizre, which he found guarded by three legions and a large body of Kurdish archers. The same era produced a vivid insult preserved in the Middle Persian work Kar-Namag i Ardashir i Pabagan, where Ardashir I is taunted in a letter from his foe Ardavan V: O son of a Kurd, raised in the tents of the Kurds, who gave you permission to put a crown on your head? Between the 10th and 12th centuries a cluster of Kurdish principalities took shape, among them the Shaddadids who ruled parts of Armenia and Arran, the Marwanids in eastern Anatolia, and the Hasanwayhids in western Iran. The Safavid Empire, established in 1501, carried Kurdish roots in its paternal line, tracing back to Firuz-Shah Zarrin-Kolah, who moved from Kurdistan to Ardabil in the 11th century. The Battle of Chaldiran in 1514 opened the long Ottoman-Persian Wars, and for the next 300 years Kurds lived on land that changed hands again and again. The year-long Battle of Dimdim ended with Shah Abbas I crushing the rebellion of the Kurdish ruler Amir Khan Lepzerin, after which many Kurds were deported to Khorasan, where some 700,000 still speak the Kurmanji dialect.

• 5. A Promise Withdrawn

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  Sheik Ubeydullah, a landowner and head of the powerful Shemdinan family, launched the first modern Kurdish nationalist movement in 1880, demanding autonomy or independence and a Kurdistan state free of Turkish or Persian interference. The Ottomans suppressed the uprising and exiled Ubeydullah to Istanbul. During World War I, Jakob Kunzler, head of a missionary hospital in Urfa, documented the deportation of Kurds from Erzurum and Bitlis in the winter of 1916, when around 300,000 were forced southward to Urfa and then westward to Aintab and Marasch. By the war's end, up to 700,000 Kurds had been forcibly deported, and almost half of the displaced perished. The 1920 Treaty of Sevres held out the possibility of Kurdish autonomy, but Kemal Ataturk prevented that outcome. Brief states rose and fell in the aftermath. Kurds backed by the United Kingdom declared the Republic of Ararat in 1927, a Kingdom of Kurdistan existed in Iraq from 1922 to 1924, and the Soviet-sponsored Republic of Mahabad lasted only from January to December 1946. When the Soviets withdrew from Iran in December 1946, government forces entered Mahabad unopposed. In 1978 Kurdish students formed the militant separatist organization PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which later abandoned Marxism-Leninism.

• 6. Four States, One People

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  Mountain Turks was the label the Turkish state used to deny the very existence of its Kurds, later replaced by Eastern Turk from 1980 and by Easterner, or Dogulu, today. In 1961 President Cemal Gursel declared it of utmost importance to prove the Turkishness of the Kurds. Between 1984 and 1999 the PKK and the Turkish military fought an open war that depopulated much of the southeast, pushing civilians into cities like Diyarbakir, Van, and Sirnak. Leyla Zana, the first Kurdish female MP from Diyarbakir, caused an uproar in 1994 by adding a sentence in Kurdish to her parliamentary oath: I take this oath for the brotherhood of the Turkish and Kurdish peoples. She was sentenced to 15 years in jail in October 1995, awarded the Sakharov Prize that same year, and released in 2004. In Iraq, the Anfal campaign waged by the government between 1986 and 1989 destroyed over two thousand villages and killed 182,000 Kurdish civilians, including the chemical attack on Halabja in 1988 that killed 5000 people instantly. After the failed uprising of March 1991, 1.5 million Kurds fled toward the Turkish and Iranian borders, and close to 20,000 died from exhaustion, cold, and disease. On the 5th of April 1991, UN Security Council resolution 688 condemned the repression, the first international document since the League of Nations arbitration of Mosul in 1926 to mention Kurds by name. The Kurds held parliamentary elections in May 1992 and established the Kurdistan Regional Government. In Syria, where Kurds form about 9% of the population, the government denied roughly 300,000 of them citizenship, trapping them within the country until a 2011 promise to grant it. On the 12th of March 2004, clashes that began at a stadium in Qamishli killed at least thirty people and spread to Damascus and Aleppo.

• 7. Threads And Tales

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  The fox is the most widely recurring figure in Kurdish folklore, triumphing over less intelligent species through cunning, yet often meeting his own demise. These stories of nature, heroes, villains, and mythological creatures passed down by speech or song, written down only in the 20th and 21st centuries. The Kurdish Jews of Zakho stand out, their gifted storytellers respected throughout the region for a unique oral tradition. After the coup of 1980 criminalized the Kurdish language, the dengbej singers and cirokbej tellers were silenced, and many tales became endangered until decriminalization in 1991. Kurdish weaving is renowned worldwide, and the rugs of the Bijar region are so stout and durable they earned the name Iron Rugs of Persia. The Senneh rug, named for the region of Sanandaj, is regarded as the most sophisticated, prized for its great knot density and high-quality mountain wool. Kurdish bags come mainly from the Jaff tribe living on the Iran-Iraq border, colorful and stout with medallion patterns, especially popular in the West during the 1920s and 1930s. Tattoos, called deq, spread widely despite being impermissible in Sunni Islam, their ink mixed from soot, milk, and the liquid from an animal's gall bladder. In cinema, Yilmaz Guney directed Yol, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival of 1982, while Bahman Qubadi's first feature A Time for Drunken Horses, released in 2000, won multiple awards. The earliest film featuring Kurdish culture, Zare, was shot in Armenia and released in 1927.

• 8. Scattered And Counted

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  Nashville is home to the largest Kurdish community in the United States, nicknamed Little Kurdistan, where Kurdish immigrants began settling in large numbers in 1976 and now number around 11,000. The US Census Bureau estimates 20,591 ethnic Kurds in the country. Across the Atlantic, a Council of Europe report counts approximately 1.3 million Kurds in Western Europe, the earliest arriving from Turkey to settle in Germany, Austria, the Benelux countries, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and France during the 1960s. In Canada, a 2011 household survey found 11,685 people of Kurdish background. A separate story unfolded in the Transcaucasus, where Kurds displaced mostly during the Russian Empire developed an ethnic identity in their own right, their population estimated near 0.4 million in 1990. In 1920 the Kurdish-inhabited areas of Jewanshir and eastern Zangazur were combined into the Kurdistan Okrug, or Red Kurdistan, which did not last beyond 1929. The numbers tell their own story of dispersal. In 1991 the total Kurdish population was placed at 22.5 million, with 48% in Turkey, 24% in Iran, 18% in Iraq, and 4% in Syria. For a people without a state, even the count of who they are remains contested, ranging across a span of fifteen million from one estimate to the next.