West Asia is in a geo-engineering flux not seen since the birth of Israel 77 years ago. The perennial Palestinian issue is at a pivotal moment with an extreme right Israeli government’s hard-line position at odds with the Arab States’ insistence on a two-state solution for the Abraham Accords’ expansion. After the loss of regional proxies and the resumption of American “maximum pressure” tactics and military threat, a weakened and isolated Iran has agreed to negotiate its nuclear programme. The toppling of the five decades-old al-Assad regime has created new paradigms. Although Turkey has ambitions to reshape Syria, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is battling an Intefadah at home. The decline of oil prices by a fifth in 2025 may upend the regional economic stability. Amidst this tumult, U.S. President Donald Trump, the global disruptor of “Gaza Riviera” fame, is set to pay his first visit abroad to the Gulf next month.
How does this regional commotion impact a century-old quest by Kurds for statehood? In the past century, two diaspora-based states, viz. Israel and Armenia, have been created in West Asia. Could Kurdistan be the next or, once again, likely to be brushed under the carpet as weightier developments and superpower politics take precedence? Let us examine the prospects in some detail.
An unrealised dream
Kurds are not only the biggest minority group in West Asia, but they are also the world’s largest ethnic minority without a state of their own. Estimates vary, but their total population is put at 35 million-45 million. The overwhelming majority of them live in Turkey (around 17 million, 20% of the total population), Iraq (9 million, 20%), Iran (8 million, 10%), and Syria (2.5 million, 10%). Kurd diaspora exists in Germany (around 1.5 million) and other West European countries.
While Kurds have their sub-divisions, their common identity is shaped by a shared history and the craggy geography of Asia Minor. Anthropological studies put them to be of Old Mediterranean and Caucasian stock, distinct from either Turkic, Semitic, or Iranian ethnicities dominating their existence. While most Kurds are Sunni Muslims, they are linked to other regional ethnic minorities, such as Yezidis, Alevi, and Zoroastrianism.
The Kurds have a reputation for gritty bravery. Historically, they have often been either exploited as a geopolitical pawn or subject to suppression and exclusion. One of the rare occasions when they led the endgame was in the 12th century when Salahuddin, a Kurd General, commanded the Islamic legion to liberate Jerusalem from crusading Christian armies. The Kurdish quest for a state has remained unrequited. The nearest the Kurds came to realising this ambition was at the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, negotiated to dismantle the Ottoman empire. It promised the Kurds an autonomous state in eastern Turkey. However, the Young Turks under Kemal Ataturk thwarted the Kurdistan Homeland project and instead foisted assertive Turkish nationalism. Since then, Ankara has single-mindedly suppressed the identity of Kurds, who were officially called “mountain Turks”. This repression has continued: as late as 1994, a Kurdish female MP was sentenced to 15 years in prison for temerity to speak a sentence in Kurdish after her swearing-in about the Kurd-Turk brotherhood.
Counterproductive repression
Turkish repression has been counterproductive: it led to the formation in 1978 of PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) by Abdullah Öcalan which has waged a campaign for Kurdish independence. Mr. Öcalan was caught in 1999 and is still in solitary confinement in a Turkish jail. Four decades of no-holds-barred conflict has killed an estimated 37,000 people. Following the recent softening of Ankara’s policies, Mr. Öcalan has called for the cessation of hostilities and PKK declared a ceasefire on March 15. Turkey has announced a $20 billion socio-economic reconstruction plan for the south-east of the country where most Kurds live but a political package to bring the Kurds to the Turkish mainstream is still awaited.
The 13-year civil war provided Syria’s Kurds a rare opportunity to fill in the politico-strategic vacuum. With substantive American support, a formidable Kurdish Self Defence Force (SDF) was created to fight the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. SDF currently controls nearly 40% of Syria. This has caused considerable threat perceptions in Ankara which accuses SDF of helping PKK. Turkey has sought to checkmate the SDF by creating exclusion zones and forming a militia against it. However, the US pressure has prevented it from an anti-SDF military campaign. In a potentially far-reaching move on March 11, the SDF Commander and the interim Syrian President signed a basic agreement to integrate the SDF into the new Damascus politico-strategic architecture. Even otherwise, SDF’s good fortunes may diminish with the planned attenuation of American military presence in Syria.
During Saddam Hussein’s rule, Kurds in neighbouring Iraq suffered brutal pogroms, forced deportation and even chemical weapons attacks. However, the situation changed in 1991 after the U.S. Operation Desert Storm substantially weakened Iraqi hold over Kurds and a Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) was formed in 1992. The Constitution of Iraq following the U.S. occupation of the country granted the KRG considerable autonomy although a 2017 referendum on Kurdistan Regional Independence, which received 92% support, was disallowed by the Iraqi Supreme Court stating that no Iraqi province was allowed to secede. Meanwhile, oil-rich KRG has sought to assert its autonomy, often creating a piquant situation with Baghdad authorities. Following an international arbitration ruling, oil exports through the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline have been suspended for the past two years. Turkish armed forces have also been active in hitting alleged PKK targets in KRG. Iran, too, has occasionally attacked the alleged hostile U.S.-Israeli presence in KRG. Thus, although KRG has now been around for over three decades, its existence is still quite tenuous.
The situation of Iranian Kurds
Compared to repression elsewhere in the region, the Iranian regimes have been marginally benign to its Kurds who mostly live in the northwest of the country along mountainous borders with Turkey and Iraq; some Kurds are also living in the Khorasan province in the northeast. These areas lie along the geo-strategic faultlines, forcing Kurds to choose between loyalty to Tehran, Ankara, or Baghdad. Unlike in other Kurdish-populated countries, there are strong ethnic and cultural ties between Kurds and Persians and some modern Iranian dynasties were partly of Kurdish origin. While Tehran has never employed the same level of brutality against its own Kurds as Turkey or Iraq, it has always been implacably opposed to Kurdish separatism. During the long Persian-Ottoman wars and the recent Iran-Iraq war, largely Sunni Kurds were often suspected of being the fifth column of the foreign powers. Under the Islamic Republic, attempts to Persianise, and general economic deprivation, spurred centrifugal tendencies among Iranian Kurds. With the considerable weakening of the Iranian state and looming prospects of the U.S.-Israel military campaign against Tehran, Iranian Kurds, the country’s largest minority, may feel encouraged to secede.
Recent weakening of the central authority in each of the aforementioned four countries has brightened the prospects of Kurdish statehood and such proto-states have already emerged in Iraq and Syria. At the same time, they neither have a unifying ideology such as Zionism nor a transnational political entity to dovetail their statehood to the emerging grand Western strategy for West Asia. Their hopes rest on the regional entropy creating a situation conducive to the creation of a Kurdistan. However, even if such a pro-Western surrogate Kurdish state is grafted, it remains to be seen whether it would face autoimmune rejection (as Israel) from regional powers or take deep roots.
In short, Kurds’ fate currently swings between two of their apt proverbs: “It is easy to catch a serpent with someone else’s hand” and “Kurds (as a nation) have no friends, except the mountains.”
Mahesh Sachdev, Retired Indian Ambassador with an interest in West Asian geopolitics. He is currently the president of Eco-Diplomacy and Strategies, based in New Delhi
Published – April 25, 2025 01:59 am IST