Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [47]
The Kurds are the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East—after the Arabs, Turks, and Persians—accounting for perhaps 15 percent of its population. They occupy some of the region’s most strategic and richest lands. Turkey’s Kurdistan contains major coal deposits, as well as the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers—important irrigation sources for Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. Iraqi Kurdistan holds significant oil reserves, and Turkey’s and Syria’s Kurdistan, lesser ones. Much of Iraqi and Syrian Kurdistan also lies in the fertile valley of and adjoining northern Mesopotamia, one of the world’s richest breadbaskets and most ancient lands.
The Iraqi Kurds, numbering about 5 million, constitute between one-fourth and one-fifth of Iraq’s population. Despite much repression, they have always been recognized by the state as a separate ethnic group. Iraqi Kurds have at times held important government and military positions, and between 1992 and 2003, ran their own semiautonomous, fledgling democracy in Iraq’s so-called “northern no-fly zone.” Post-Saddam Hussein, the Kurds are assuming a central role in the forging of a new Iraq.
Numbering 13 or 14 million, or one-half of all Kurds, Turkey’s Kurds comprise at least 20 percent of their nation and boast a birthrate that is nearly double that of their compatriots—promising an even greater presence in the future. Turkey’s Kurds have been brutally repressed both culturally and politically since the founding of the modern Turkish Republic in 1923. Turkey is now striving to join the European Union, however, and its acceptance therein will depend largely on an improvement in its human rights record toward the Kurds.
Numbering about 6.5 million, or 10 percent of Iran’s population, Iranian Kurds ran their own semiautonomous state as early as the 1300s. Today, they have about twenty reform-minded representatives in Iran’s Parliament, who, along with many others, are pushing for more liberalization in the Islamic Republic. Syrian Kurds, although numbering only about 1.4 million, constitute 9 percent of their country’s sparse population, with the Syrian capital of Damascus home to an influential Kurdish community since the Middle Ages.
Exact population figures for the Kurds are unavailable because no reliable census has been conducted for decades. All of the countries in which they reside regard them as a political threat and downplay their existence. And without a nation-state of their own, the Kurds have been slow in letting their presence be known to the outside world.
This is changing. Thanks in part to recent political developments, of which the Iraq war of 2003 is only the latest, and in part to a growing diaspora, satellite communications, and the Internet, today’s Kurds are both rapidly developing a national consciousness as a people, and overcoming the geographic and psychic isolation that has plagued them for centuries. And as they do so, questions of nationalism, multiculturalism, and a possible future redrawing of international boundaries arise.
The Kurds possess an ancient and romantic culture, which many Kurds trace back to the Medes, a people mentioned in the Bible and other early texts. Inhabitants of the Kurdish lands may have pioneered agriculture as early as 12,000 BC, while the first probable written mention of the Kurds appears in Anabasis, penned by Xenophon the Greek some twenty-four hundred years ago. In his account of a 401 BC battle, which pitted ten thousand Greek mercenaries against the Persian forces, he writes of the “Karduchoi”—probably Kurds: “The Greeks spent a happy night with plenty to eat. Talking about the struggle now past. For they passed through the country of the Karduchoi, fighting all the time and they had suffered worse things at the hands of the Karduchoi than all that the King of Persia and his general, Tissaphernes, could do to them.”
The Arab armies arrived in Kurdistan in AD 637, bringing with them the new religion of Islam.