Who are the Kurds?
The Kurds are the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East. Their settlements are distributed mainly to the border regions of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Armenia, some of which in each case fray into the interior and form there enclaves within the majority population. Today, there are - but also in other Asian and European countries - between 25 and 30 million Kurds, most of them in Turkey (at least 12 million).
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Kurdish areas in Syria, Iraq and Iran
Most Kurds are Sunni Muslims, few are Alevis or Shiites. Moreover, a small minority is dependent on the non-Muslim Yesid faith. Kurdish consists of various dialects that belong to the group of Iranian languages. Since they are sometimes very different from each other, there is often talk of the "Kurdish languages".
Did the Kurds ever have their own state?
The Kurds and their ancestors probably settled in the highlands of Western Asia for several millennia. In the Middle Ages, various Kurdish principalities developed, which in the 17th century fell largely under Ottoman rule, but were administered autonomously.
With the downfall of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, the Kurds began to hope for their own state, which was promised by the Allies in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920). However, the agreement did not come into force, in the renegotiated Treaty of Lausanne (1923) was no longer a Kurdish autonomy.
Instead, the Kurdish areas in the partly newly created states Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. There, the Kurdish minorities were sometimes suppressed by the respective governments more or less. There were repeated Kurdish uprisings.
On the other hand, they often served as enemies for opponents of the states in which they resided. However, their efforts to achieve unrestricted self-determination or even their own Kurdish state have benefited only to a limited extent so far: the different Kurdish groups often pursued an opposing policy. After the conflict ended, the Kurds were often dropped by their external allies - as in the case of the US in Syria.
Why does Turkey see the Kurds as a threat?
The Turkish government does not fully recognize the Kurds as an ethnic minority until today, the Kurdish languages were banned for decades. In 1925 and 1937 there were two major Kurdish revolts, which were crushed by the army.
In 1978, Abdullah Öcalan founded the left-wing extremist Kurdish Workers' Party PKK (Partîya Karkerên Kurdistan), whose goal at the time was the creation of an independent Kurdistan and which led from the beginning of the eighties a guerilla fight against the Turkish army.
The PKK is classified by Turkey, the US and the European Union as a terrorist organization. The conflict between the PKK and the army reached its peak in the 1990s, when the PKK also made bloody attacks in tourist resorts that responded to the Turkish military with retaliatory attacks to Iraqi refugee areas of the organization. In many provinces of Southeastern Anatolia, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency which worsened the situation for the Kurdish population.
With the arrest of Öcalan in 1999, the situation calmed down temporarily. An estimated 37,000 people - most of them Kurds - died in the conflicts. In the course of Turkey's accession negotiations with the European Union, the Turkish government allowed the use of the Kurdish languages.
In 2013, peace talks began between Öcalan and the Turkish government, agreeing to a ceasefire and a withdrawal of PKK fighters. But the peace process quickly came to a standstill: the PKK accused the Turkish government of being too lenient against the advance of the Islamic State (IS) militia on Kurdish areas in northern Syria.
In 2015, when an IS terrorist committed a devastating suicide attack on a youth center in the Turkish Kurdish city of Suruç near the Syrian border, PKK supporters murdered two Turkish police officers. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan then declared the peace to be over and again took military action against the PKK. Almost 5,000 people have fallen victim to this new wave of violence.
What role do the Kurds play in Syria?
Today, less than three million Kurds live in Syria, especially in the north of the country. In Syria, too, the Kurds stood against an oppressive state power for a long time.
The Baath Party, which has been ruling since the 1960s, has always understood itself as a representative of Arab nationalism, and the Kurdish minority did not fit into this concept. The Kurdish language was banned in schools and universities. In the 1960s, the Syrian government rendered tens of thousands of Kurds stateless. Many Kurds were relocated to smash ties with Kurdish areas outside Syria.
Between 1979 and 1998, however, the Assad regime supported the PKK, which was fought by Turkey, for strategic reasons. Their leader Öcalan found refuge in Syria in the meantime. Repressions against Syrian Kurds continued to be the order of the day after the turn of the millennium; the Assad regime wanted to stifle autonomy efforts in view of the successes of the Kurds in Iraq.
After the onset of the Syrian civil war, Kurdish forces used the weakness of the Assad regime, mainly in the form of the PKK-affiliated Democratic Union Party (PYD, Partiya Yekitîya Demokrat) and its People's Deputies (YPG), established in 2003, to fight in the three northern non-contiguous cantons Afrin, Kobane and Cizire - Kurdish called Rojava (west) - to build their own state-like structures. Syrian troops withdrew from there.
By the beginning of the week, just under a third of Syria was under Kurdish control. The PYD does not seek state independence, but the greatest possible autonomy. Their dominance is not uncontroversial within the Kurdish groupings. She is accused of centralism, exclusion of other Kurdish parties and human rights violations.
Since at least the Kurds have become an important partner of the USA against the IS in Syria since 2015 at the latest. By the end of 2014, the US had intervened in the battles for the besieged by the IS, predominantly Kurdish Kobane on the Turkish-Syrian border. US special forces and soldiers began to train Kurdish fighters in northern Syria and later to equip them with weapons. The IS could be so largely pushed back, Syrian Kurdish militia captured many Islamists.
Around 1,000 soldiers were last stationed in northeastern Syria. The cooperation between Kurds and the NATO partner saw Ankara critically, even after YPG and Americans sought a broader alliance with Arab and Christian units and founded the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance, which is Kurdish-dominated.
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The Kurdish attempt to control a larger contiguous area near the Turkish border prevented the Turkish military with several offensives, most recently in 2018 around Afrin. A coherent, de facto PKK-controlled autonomous zone on its southern border wants to prevent Ankara at all costs. This explains the current Turkish invasion following the recent retreat of the YPG ally USA from northern Syria. Turkey has announced that it will set up a 30-kilometer "security zone" south of its border. Hundreds of thousands of Syrian civil war refugees will then be resettled there.
What status do the Kurds have in Iraq?
About 3.7 million Kurds live in Iraq, mainly in the north. At 15 to 20 percent, they are the second largest ethnic group behind the Arab population. Despite countless resistance, they came here in their quest for independence as far as nowhere else.
But especially under the rule of Saddam Hussein, they had suffered repressions, resettlements, and brutal oppression since the 1970s. In 1988, Saddam ordered the "Anfal" operation against the Kurds, who had sided with Teheran. The death toll today is estimated at up to 150,000 people, the army used poison gas. The massacre was later recognized as genocide.
After the Iraqi defeat in the war over Kuwait in 1991, there were uprisings in the north against the regime in Baghdad. Countless Kurds once again fled the repressions of Saddam. The Allies then set up a security zone in northern Iraq. This became the forerunner of an autonomous area, which, however, could only be institutionalized in 2005 after violent inter-Kurdish power struggles and the fall of Saddam.
The autonomy with its own regional government, its own parliament and its own armed forces is constitutionally guaranteed. The federal region of Kurdistan-Iraq has good economic conditions thanks to its oil and gas wealth.
However, today she still suffers from the rivalries between the two politically dominant families Barzani and Talabani and rampant corruption. In the meantime, Turkey has developed relaxed political and economic relations, partly because parts of the Iraqi Kurds are in competition with the Turkish PKK.
After the emergence of the IS, the armed Kurdish fighters (Peshmerga) became an important partner of the international anti-IS coalition in 2014, also due to the weakness of the Iraqi army. They advanced against the resistance of Baghdad to areas outside the autonomous region, including the oil-rich Kirkuk. For the most part, these are formerly Kurdish-dominated areas that had been "Arabized" under Saddam.
According to Kurdish wishes, these should remain under their control in the future. The Kurdish cause was then but 2017 self-inflicted a harsh damper: The Autonomegygerei initiated despite many warnings a non-binding, internationally criticized independence referendum in the disputed areas, which found a large majority. Central government troops then recaptured parts of these areas.
How do the Kurds live in Iran?
In neighboring Iran there are about 5.5 million Kurds, or about ten percent of the population, who make up the largest population group in four provinces in the northwest. In 1946, with the help of the Soviet Union, which occupied parts of northern Iran, they were able to establish a Kurdish mini-republic Mahabad for a short time, often transfigured as the only Kurdish state of modernism, which sparked Kurdish national ideas.
However, the Republic of Stalin's Grace quickly collapsed as the Soviets withdrew. The Shahs of Persia did not grant the Kurds any autonomy rights and suppressed such demands.
Even in the Islamic Republic, this did not change, although revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had promised the Kurds political and cultural autonomy during the revolution when they participated in the fight against the Shah.
Thus, in the years after the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, fighting between Kurdish resisters and the new regime took place. Thousands of Kurds fled to neighboring northern Iraq. In the war between Iraq and Iran from 1980 to 1988, many Iranian Kurds put their hands on Iraq, while Iraqi Kurds pacted with Tehran.