Kurds

Lore & Background

The Kurdish languages and the Zaza–Gorani languages belong to the Western Iranic branch of the Iranic language family and are the native languages of the Kurdish people. Other widely spoken languages include Turkish, Persian, or Arabic. The most prevalent religion is Sunni Islam, with Shia Islam and Alevism as significant Islamic minorities. Yazidism is the largest non-Islamic minority religion among the broader Kurdish community, followed by Yarsanism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity. Although they exercise autonomy in Iraq, the Kurds are a stateless nation. The prospect of Kurdish independence has been a source of ethnic and political tension in West Asia since the 19th century. After World War I, the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres made territorial provisions for a Kurdish state, but it was never ratified. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne set the boundaries of the Turkish state, and the Allies ceased their push for Kurdish statehood. Since the 20th century, Kurdish history has been marked by struggles for independence, predominantly in the Kurdish–Turkish conflict and the Iraqi–Kurdish conflict, and to a lesser extent in the Iranian–Kurdish conflict and the Syrian–Kurdish conflict.

Reader's Guide

The exact origins of the name Kurd are unclear. The underlying toponym is recorded in Assyrian and in Middle Bronze Age Sumerian, referring to an area in the upper Tigris basin, and is reflected in corrupted form in Classical Arabic, re-adopted in Kurdish. The name would be continued as the first element in the toponym Corduene, mentioned by Xenophon in the 4th century BC. There are dissenting views that do not derive the name from that toponym but opt for another derivation. Regardless, the ethnonym Kurd might be derived from a term used in Middle Persian as a common noun for 'nomads' or 'tent-dwellers', applied as an attribute to any Iranic group with such a lifestyle. The term became an ethnonym after the Muslim conquest of Persia, adopted into Arabic and associated with an amalgamation of Iranic and Iranicized tribes. Kurdish is a collection of related dialects spoken by the Kurds, mainly in parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey that comprise Kurdistan. Kurdish holds official status in Iraq as a national language alongside Arabic, is recognized in Iran as a regional language, and in Armenia as a minority language. The Kurdish dialects according to Mackenzie are classified as: Northern group (Kurmanji), Central group (part of Sorani), and Southern group (part of Xwarin) including Laki. Zaza and Gorani are ethnic Kurds, but the Zaza–Gorani languages are not classified as Kurdish.

Did You Know?

• The number of Kurds living in West Asia is estimated at between 30 and 45 million, with another one or two million in the diaspora.
• Kurds comprise anywhere from 18 to 25% of the population in Turkey, 15 to 20% in Iraq, 10% in Iran, and 9% in Syria.
• The total number of Kurds in 1991 was placed at 22.5 million, with 48% living in Turkey, 24% in Iran, 18% in Iraq, and 4% in Syria.
• Recent emigration accounts for a population of close to 1.5 million in Western countries, about half of them in Germany.
• Kurdish populations in the Transcaucasus and Central Asia, displaced mostly in the time of the Russian Empire, were estimated at close to 0.4 million in 1990.

Roots in the Transcaucasus

The earliest documented Kurdish presence in the Caucasus stretches back to the mid-10th century, when members of the Hadhabani tribe, associated with the Shaddadid dynasty, established themselves at Dvin in medieval Armenia. Their first emir, Muhammad ibn Shaddad, anchored a political entity that would govern the territory between the Kura and Aras rivers for roughly two centuries, until the dynasty's collapse at the close of the 12th century. During their rule, the Shaddadids found themselves locked in recurring military confrontations with the medieval Georgian Kingdom and, on occasion, with Byzantine forces. Centuries later, additional waves of Kurdish settlement followed shifting geopolitical tides: a possible influx during the Ottoman-Safavid War of 1578-1590, when soldiers stationed in conquered western Azerbaijan chose to remain; 18th-century migrations into the Ararat Plain; and Kurdish arrivals in Tbilisi in the late 1700s seeking the protection of King Erekle II against Ottoman pressure. These successive layers of settlement wove Kurdish communities into the fabric of Transcaucasian life long before modern statehood.

Cultural Flourishing and Stalin's Erasure

Under the Soviet policy of Korenizatsiia in the early 1920s, Kurdish cultural life in Armenia experienced an extraordinary flowering. A Kurdish-language radio station went on air, the newspaper Riya Teze began publication, and educational programs were established in Kurmanji. The most tangible symbol of this era was the creation of a written Kurdish alphabet: first adapted to the Armenian script in 1922, then recast in a Latin form in 1927, and finally rendered in Cyrillic under Stalin in 1945. Yet this institutional support proved fragile. Beginning in 1937, and continuing through 1938 and 1944, Joseph Stalin ordered the forced deportation of Kurdish communities from Nakhchivan and other parts of the Caucasus to the Kazakh, Uzbek, and Kirghiz Soviet republics. Most of the deportees perished during the ordeal. Kurdish radio, Riya Teze, and associated institutions were shuttered almost immediately. It was not until the 1950s that some of these cultural outlets were cautiously revived, and the descendants of those deported remain concentrated in Kazakhstan to this day.

The Yazidi Question and Demographic Identity

One of the most striking features of Caucasian Kurdish demographics is the divergent way neighboring states classify the relationship between Kurds and Yazidis. In Armenia, the 2022 census records 31,079 Yazidis and 1,663 non-Yazidi Kurds as two distinct ethnic categories, even though the vast majority of the country's 32,742 Kurds are themselves Yazidis. Georgia takes the opposite administrative approach: the Georgian government folds Yazidis into the broader Kurdish ethnic category. This classification difference carries real demographic consequences. Georgia's Yazidi population, counted within the Kurdish figure, has declined sharply from 30,000 in 1989 to 18,000 by 2002 and further to just 6,000 by 2015. In Armenia, Kurds cluster primarily in the western regions and speak Kurmanji, while in Georgia the 20,843 Kurds recorded in the 2002 census concentrate in Tbilisi and Rustavi. The precise total of Caucasian Kurds, both within and beyond the Caucasus, remains unknown, a reflection of these inconsistent counting methods and the dispersal caused by Soviet-era deportations.

Political Voices and the Karabakh Displacement

Caucasian Kurds have repeatedly sought political representation within the states that encompass them. During the brief First Republic of Armenia (1918-1920), a Kurdish representative won a seat in the national parliament. In the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic of the same period, Kurds such as Khosrov bey Sultanov and Nurmammad bey Shahsuvarov held government offices. In 1923, the Azerbaijan SSR even created a Kurdistan Uezd, an administrative unit whose population was 74 percent Kurdish. Yet aspirations for self-governance met repeated obstacles: the 1989 founding of the Yekbûn movement, which sought to restore Kurdish autonomy within the Soviet framework, was thwarted by the USSR's collapse and Turkish opposition. The First Nagorno-Karabakh War devastated Kurdish communities on multiple fronts. Roughly 18,000 Kurds fled Armenia for Azerbaijan, while the Kurdish minorities of Lachin and Kelbajar districts were driven out between 1992 and 1994. A short-lived Kurdish Republic of Lachin was proclaimed in 1992 with Armenian backing, only to dissolve once that support evaporated. A large diaspora community subsequently took root in Krasnodar.