Throughout the last eight years, the Kurds have generally been supportive of U.S. involvement in the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial regime. It was the Kurds, in northern Iraq, after all, that Saddam targeted for genocide with the use of chemical weapons.
In 1988, the Hussein regime began a campaign of extermination against the Kurdish people living in Northern Iraq. The campaign was mostly directed at Kurds who sided with Iranians during the Iraq-Iran War. The attacks resulted in the death of at least 50,000 (some reports estimate as many as 100,000 people), many of them women and children. A team of Human Rights Watch investigators determined, after analyzing eighteen tons of captured Iraqi documents, testing soil samples and carrying out interviews with more than 350 witnesses, that the attacks on the Kurdish people were characterized by gross violations of human rights, including mass executions and disappearances of many tens of thousands of noncombatants, widespread use of chemical weapons including Sarin, mustard gas and nerve agents that killed thousands. Hussein was reponsible for the wholesale destruction of nearly two thousand villages along with their schools, mosques, farms, and power stations.
But the genocide didn’t end there. In April 1991, after Saddam lost control of Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War, he cracked down ruthlessly against several uprisings in the Kurdish north. His forces committed wholesale massacres and other gross human rights violations against the northern Kurds similar to the violations mentioned before. Estimates of deaths during that time range from 20,000 to 100,000.
The term “Kurdistan” today refers to a region, predominately peopled by Kurds. In 1920, Turkey fell under the aegis of the League of Nations, which, in a 13 point treaty, wanted to punish the Turks for their being part of the Central Powers in World War I. The Central Powers consisted of the German Empire, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire (also known as the Turkish Empire), and the Kingdom of Bulgaria. In the treaty, Turkey was to agree to “the establishment of local autonomy for Kurdistan” the boundaries of which were to be established by the English, French, and Italian governments. It also provided that the League could establish a free and independent Kurdistan at some point in the future should the Kurds request it.
The term Kurdistan is used today to refer to a land mass, depending on what sources are used, about the size of France. Kurdistan is split among several countries…Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Estimates place the Kurdish population in these countries at over 30 million. Kurds are the fourth largest ethnicity in the Middle East after Arabs, Persians and Turks. According to the CIA World Factbook, Kurds comprise 20% of the population in Turkey, 15-20% in Iraq, perhaps 8% in Syria, 7% in Iran and 1.3% in Armenia. In all of these countries except Iran, Kurds form the second largest ethnic group. Roughly 55% of the world's Kurds live in Turkey, about 20% each in Iran and Iraq, and a bit over 5% in Syria.
From a political standpoint, Iraqi Kurdistan is the only region which has gained official recognition internationally as an autonomous federal entity. Kurds in Iran are also officially recognized as a minority, although no Iranian territory is designated as ethnically Kurdish.
Kurdistan is a mountainous region with a cold climate and it receives enough annual precipitation to sustain temperate forests and shrubs. The region has an extreme continental climate—hot in the summer, bitterly cold in the winter. Despite this, much of the region is fertile and has traditionally exported grain and livestock to the cities in the plains. The plateaus and mountains of Kurdistan, which are characterized by heavy rainfall and in winter a heavy coat of snow, are a water reservoir for the Near and Middle East. Kurdistan is the source of the famous Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
There are vast oil and mineral resources in Kurdistan. Iraqi Kurdistan is estimated to have around 45 billion barrels of oil reserves making it sixth largest in the world, mostly recently discovered.
Most Kurds are bilingual or polylingual, speaking the languages of the surrounding peoples such as Arabic, Turkish and Persian as a second language. Kurdish Jews and some Kurdish Christians usually speak Aramaic as their first language. Aramaic is a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic rather than Kurdish.
The majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims, with a minority being Shiites. The original religion of the Kurds was Yazidism, a religion greatly influenced by Jewish, Zoroastrian, Christian and Islamic beliefs. Christianity and Judaism is practiced, but in small numbers.
Because of the genocidal efforts of Saddam Hussein and his first cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, (dubbed "Chemical Ali" by Iraqi Kurds for his use of chemical weapons in attacks against them), Iraqi Kurds have been supportive of American intervention into Iraq following 9-11.
Why haven’t the Kurds, with their own cultural identity, been able to unify and demand independence?
The name of the game is the political stronghold Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria have, over the years, placed on any dream of independence. Agrarian by nature, many Kurds have dreamt of autonomy, but their nascent political aggressiveness has been no match for the control the four countries hold on them. There were recent skirmishes with Turkey by Kurdish rebels early in 2008 in northern Iraq, but the Bush administration agreed with the Iraqi government in supporting suppression of the Kurdish movement. Kurds periodically have held uprisings in all four countries, with little success.
The drive for Kurdish independence looks bleak for the future. It is a case of an ethnic group, with a long and tortured history, being denied its century-long promise of independence given by the forerunner of the United Nations…the League of Nations.
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