Masoud Barzani has exceeded his allowed term as president of the Iraqi Kurdistan region. Kay Nietfeld/ Press Association. All rights reserved.The situation of the Kurds in a drastically changing Middle East has received little attention in academe and less in the media despite their growing impact on regional and international politics. The biggest stateless people living in the Middle East are on the verge of a new status, not only in Iraqi Kurdistan, where a referendum for independence takes place on September 25, 2017, but also in Syria and Turkey. In Syria, Kurds have fought an organised and effective struggle against the IS. In Turkey, they have suffered a massive destruction of Kurdish cities, displacement of half a million Kurds and eradication of all forms of legal entity by the Turkish state. Then there is Iran. This week’s short series looks at current political struggles of the Kurds in four neighbouring countries. Mehmet Kurt, series editor.
Since the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions sent a seismic shock wave through the Middle East the suffering of Kurds such as Alan Kurdi and the fight of the peshmerga (Kurdish militia) against the Islamic State has catapulted the Kurds’ plight as a ‘stateless nation’ to the world’s attention.
On the liberation of Sinjar from the Islamic State, Masoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, called for the international community to move beyond the ‘Sykes-Picot borders’. This phrase is a shorthand for the artificial and arbitrary frontiers imposed at the end of the First World War by Britain and France which locked the Kurds into the Turkish, Syrian and Iraqi states where they have experienced sustained attempts at assimilation, denial of identity and human rights, and genocidal attack.
