U.S.-backed mainly-Kurdish militia (YPG) firing on IS militant positions in Al Sinaa neighborhood, eastern Raqqa, Syria, 06 July 2017. Morukc Umnaber/Press Association. All rights reserved.The situation of the Kurds in a drastically changing Middle East has received little attention in academia 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.
With the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War, the Kurdish question – the denial of the Kurds’ right to form their own nation-state and the division of their land among four countries of Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran – became one of the major geopolitical questions in the Middle East.
Throughout the last century, the Kurdish peoples’ right to self-determination has been expressed in various forms of struggle in movements such as the Republic of Kurdistan in 1946, the rebellion of Iraqi Kurds in 1960s and 1970s, the armed struggle of the Kurdistan’s Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey since the 1980s and the Rojava revolution in Syria. Notwithstanding ideological and political differences among these movements, they have relied, to varying degrees, upon foreign support in their fights for self-determination.
