Who are the Kurds?
Thirty to forty-five million people, one divided homeland, a century of broken promises — and a question no Middle East settlement can dodge.
Last updated: October 2026
The Kurds are an Iranian ethnic group of roughly 30 to 45 million people, the Middle East’s largest nation without a state. Their homeland, Kurdistan, is divided between Türkiye, Iraq, Iran and Syria — a partition drawn by the colonial powers after World War I that has defined a century of uprising, repression and survival.
The Kurds are an ethnic group of roughly 30 to 45 million people whose homeland, known as Kurdistan, lies across the mountainous borderlands where Türkiye, Iraq, Iran and Syria meet. Estimates of the Kurdish population vary widely, because censuses in the region do not always count ethnicity and because large Kurdish communities also live in the diaspora, above all in Germany and other European countries. By most estimates, the Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the Middle East without a state of their own. The largest Kurdish populations live in Türkiye, where Kurds make up a substantial minority of the population, and in Iran, Iraq and Syria, where they are also significant minorities.
The Kurds speak Kurdish languages, which belong to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family and are related to Persian. The two main varieties are Kurmanji, spoken widely in Türkiye, Syria and parts of Iraq and Iran, and Sorani, spoken widely in Iraq and Iran. Kurdish is written in different scripts in different countries: in the Latin alphabet in Türkiye and Syria, and in a modified Arabic script in Iraq and Iran. Most Kurds are Sunni Muslims, but the Kurdish population also includes Shia Muslims, Alevis, Yazidis, Christians and followers of other faiths. Kurdish society has historically been organised around tribes and extended families, though urbanisation and modern politics have reshaped those loyalties, and Kurdish identity today is expressed through language, culture, political movements and a shared history of struggle for recognition.
Kurdistan is not a country but a geographical and cultural region, a highland zone of mountains and valleys that has long been a crossroads between the Anatolian plateau, the Mesopotamian plain and the Iranian plateau. Its mountains have given Kurdish communities a degree of shelter from central authority throughout history, and Kurdish leaders have repeatedly used that terrain to resist the empires that claimed it. The region is also rich in resources, above all water and, in the Iraqi part, oil, which have made the question of who controls Kurdistan a matter of regional and international significance.
For centuries, the Kurdish lands were divided between the Ottoman Empire in the west and the Persian Empire in the east, and Kurdish princes and chieftains governed their own emirates with varying degrees of autonomy, shifting allegiance between the two empires as circumstances required. The nineteenth century brought centralisation: both the Ottoman and Persian states sought to bring the Kurdish emirates under direct control, and Kurdish revolts against that centralisation became a recurring feature of the period. Kurdish nationalism, in the modern sense of a movement claiming a distinct nation deserving political self-determination, emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, alongside the nationalisms of the region’s other peoples.
The First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire created a moment when Kurdish self-determination seemed possible. The Treaty of Sèvres of 1920, which imposed a peace settlement on the defeated Ottoman Empire, provided for local autonomy for Kurdish areas and for the possibility of a referendum on independence. But the treaty was never implemented. The Turkish national movement under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk rejected the partition of Anatolia, fought a war of independence, and secured a new settlement in the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, which made no provision for Kurdish autonomy or statehood. The Kurdish lands were divided among the new Turkish Republic, the British-mandated territories of Iraq and Syria, and Persia, later Iran. The division made at the end of the First World War has defined the Kurdish question ever since.
In the decades that followed, each state pursued its own policy toward its Kurdish population. In Türkiye, the republic defined itself as a Turkish nation-state, and for decades Kurdish language, place names and political expression were restricted, a policy that softened only in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when Kurdish-language broadcasting and education were gradually permitted. In Iraq, Kurdish revolts under the Barzani family in the mid-twentieth century led to a series of wars and negotiations with Baghdad. In Iran, Kurdish movements sought autonomy within the Iranian state, and a short-lived Kurdish republic was proclaimed at Mahabad in 1946 with Soviet backing, only to collapse when Soviet support was withdrawn. In Syria, Kurds long faced restrictions on citizenship and on the use of their language.
The Kurdish experience in Iraq has been the most consequential for the region. The Kurdistan Region of Iraq, governed from Erbil, is today the most developed Kurdish self-government in the world. Its roots lie in decades of armed resistance and in the catastrophe of the late 1980s, when the government of Saddam Hussein carried out the Anfal campaign against the Kurdish population, a campaign of mass killing and village destruction that culminated in the chemical attack on the town of Halabja in March 1988, which killed thousands of civilians. The Anfal campaign is widely described by scholars and human rights organisations as a genocide, and it remains the defining trauma of modern Kurdish history.
After the Gulf War of 1991, an international no-fly zone protected the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq from Baghdad, and the Kurdish parties established a de facto autonomous administration. The American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the new Iraqi constitution of 2005 recognised the Kurdistan Region as a federal region with its own government, parliament, security forces and control over many areas of policy. The region developed its own oil industry, its own foreign relationships and its own institutions, and Erbil became a relatively stable and prosperous city in a turbulent region. But the region’s status has remained contested: disputes with Baghdad over oil revenues, territory and the budget have never been fully resolved, and the Kurdish parties have themselves been divided between the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, whose rivalry has shaped the region’s politics.
In September 2017, the Kurdistan Regional Government held an independence referendum in which voters overwhelmingly backed independence. The referendum was opposed by Baghdad, by neighbouring states and by most of the international community, and its aftermath saw Iraqi forces retake the disputed city of Kirkuk and other territories. The referendum did not lead to independence, and the episode demonstrated both the strength of Kurdish national feeling and the limits that regional and international opposition place on Kurdish statehood. The Kurdistan Region remains autonomous within Iraq, neither a state nor an ordinary province, and its future remains one of the unresolved questions of Middle Eastern politics.
In Türkiye, the Kurdish question has been shaped above all by the armed conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, founded in 1978 under the leadership of Abdullah Öcalan. The PKK began an armed campaign in 1984, and the conflict that followed claimed tens of thousands of lives over four decades and displaced large numbers of civilians, above all in the Kurdish-majority south-east of the country. Türkiye, the United States and the European Union designate the PKK as a terrorist organisation, while supporters of the Kurdish movement describe it as a liberation movement and point to the political restrictions that preceded its campaign. The conflict has gone through phases of war, ceasefire and attempted negotiation, including a peace process in the 2010s that collapsed in 2015. In 2025, Öcalan called from prison for the PKK to lay down its arms and dissolve, a development whose consequences remain to be seen. The Kurdish political movement in Türkiye also operates through legal political parties, which have won significant support in elections and have repeatedly faced legal challenges and the imprisonment of their leaders.
In Syria, the Kurdish population, concentrated in the north-east of the country, lived for decades under a government that denied many Kurds citizenship and restricted their language and political organisation. The Syrian civil war that began in 2011 transformed the situation: as the government of Bashar al-Assad withdrew from Kurdish areas to fight rebels elsewhere, Kurdish forces established control over much of the north-east, and Kurdish-led forces, backed by the United States, played a central role in the defeat of the Islamic State group, whose self-declared caliphate was destroyed in 2019. The Kurdish-led administration in north-east Syria, often called by its Kurdish name Rojava, has presented itself as a project of decentralised, multi-ethnic self-government, while its critics, including Türkiye, have accused it of being linked to the PKK and of pursuing separatist aims. The fall of the Assad government in December 2024 opened a new and uncertain chapter, with the status of the Kurdish areas a central question in Syria’s future.
In Iran, Kurds form a significant minority, concentrated in the north-west of the country, and Kurdish political movements have long sought greater autonomy and cultural rights within the Iranian state. The death in custody in September 2022 of Jina Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman detained for allegedly violating Iran’s dress code, set off nationwide protests that became one of the most serious challenges to the Iranian government in decades, and the protests began in the Kurdish areas of the country. The Iranian government has responded to Kurdish political activity with repression, including the imprisonment and execution of Kurdish activists, a record condemned by international human rights organisations. Across all four states, the Kurdish question remains what it has been for a century: the unfinished business of the post-Ottoman settlement, and a question that no durable peace in the Middle East can ignore.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Kurd.”
- World History Encyclopedia, “Kurds.”
- McDowall, David, A Modern History of the Kurds (I.B. Tauris, 2004).
- Human Rights Watch, reports on the Anfal campaign and Halabja.