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Chapter One:the Iraqi Kurds- A Introduction Kurds, Kurdistan And The ...

Chapter One:The Iraqi Kurds- A Brief Introduction

Kurds, Kurdistan and the Kurdish Identity
The Kurds are native inhabitants of their land therefore, there are no strict beginnings for Kurdish history and origins. The modern Kurds as an ethnic group are the end product of thousands of years of evolution beginning with tribes such as the Guti, Kurti, Mede, Mard, Carduchi, Gordyene, Adianbene, Zila and Khaldi and the migration of Indo-European ribes to the Zagros mountain region about 4000 years ago. The term ‘Kurdistan' means ‘the land of the Kurds' and was first used in the Twelfth century when the then Turkish Seljuk prince Saandjar created a province with the name. However, the phrase ‘Kurdistan' did not come into common usage until the sixteenth century and It was not until the early twentieth century that the Kurdish people acquired a sense of community as Kurds.
Kurdistan is neither a politically defined entity nor a state. There are no recognized international boundaries to the territory and even internal administrative boundaries within the states are sometimes controversial and commonly ephemeral. Rather, it is an area of about 191,600 square kilometres straddling the boundaries of several countries, notably Turkey, Iran and Iraq. Globally, the Kurds are the largest nation in the world to have been denied an independent state. It is believed that there are over fifteen million Kurds in Turkey (20% of the population), four million in Iraq (25% of the population), seven million in Iran (15% of the population), over one million in Syria (9% of the population), seventy five thousand in Armenia (1.8% of the population) and two hundred thousand in Azerbaijan (2.8% of the population). There are no more definite figures largely because censuses in Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran do not recognise ethnic identity as a legitimate category of registration. These countries have better served their interests by downplaying the size of their Kurdish communities to prevent them from becoming politically powerful.
Two inter-related questions must be considered in an examination of the modern history of the Kurds. One is the struggle between the Kurdish people and the governments to which they are subject for the control of the lands which they live in. The other is the struggle of the Kurds to move form being merely a people who happen to share some common attributes which had come to be described as ‘Kurdish' to becoming a coherent community with the essential characteristics of nationhood. For most of the twentieth century, the Kurds have fought to obtain greater autonomy within their different states with a vision of creating an independent Kurdistan.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement.
During World War One, the French and British Governments concluded a secret treaty- The Sykes- Picot Agreement 1916 which effectively divided the Ottoman territories between French and British zones.

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