Levantine Kurds

I · Foundations

Ancient Origins and the Betrayal of Sèvres

An Iranian-language people whose presence in the Zagros and Taurus highlands is attested from at least the seventh century BCE, with ancestors likely including the ancient Medes, the Kurds entered the modern era as tribal confederations balancing autonomy and subordination under the Ottomans; Saladin, who recaptured Jerusalem in 1187, was of Kurdish origin, an irony not lost on a people since persecuted by Muslim states. The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres provided for a referendum on Kurdish autonomy and possible independence; it was never implemented, and the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne replaced it without a single Kurdish provision, drawing the Turkish Republic's borders across the Kurdish heartland. Sèvres set the template for the century that followed: Western powers arming Kurdish forces when convenient and abandoning them when calculations shifted, in 1975, in 1991, and again in 2019.

II · Four States

One Nation, Four Frameworks of Denial

The postwar settlement divided the Kurds across four states, each with its own machinery of suppression. Turkey, home to the largest population, denied Kurdish existence outright, coining the term Mountain Turks, banning the language from public life, and waging military campaigns that evacuated 3,000 to 4,000 villages and displaced up to three million people between 1984 and 1999, in a conflict with the PKK that has killed roughly 40,000 people across four decades, with documented atrocities by both the state and the PKK itself. Iraq answered Kurdish resistance with the Anfal genocide of 1986 to 1989 and the Halabja chemical attack. Iran has executed Kurdish political prisoners at disproportionate rates since declaring jihad on Kurdish organizations in 1979. Syria stripped some 120,000 Kurds of citizenship by decree in 1962, a number that had grown past 300,000 by the civil war.

III · The Present

ISIS, Rojava, and the Price of Alliance

Kurdish forces, the Peshmerga of Iraqi Kurdistan and the YPG and YPJ of northeastern Syria, became the primary ground force that halted and destroyed the Islamic State's caliphate, at a cost the Syrian Democratic Forces put at roughly 11,000 fighters killed, while ISIS inflicted on the Kurdish-speaking Yazidis the most documented genocide of the century. The Rojava administration built from the Syrian collapse, with gender-parity governance across a multi-ethnic territory, has faced Turkish military operations in Afrin in 2018 and northeastern Syria in 2019, the latter launched within days of the American withdrawal announcement and described by Kurdish leaders as betrayal and by Turkey as counterterrorism. The fall of the Assad government in late 2024 and the expansion of HTS have added new uncertainty, while Turkish drone strikes on Kurdish leadership continue across Iraq and Syria.