Steve Wininger: Bahoz Kurdi

The Kurds are a unique ethnic group who reside in a continuous area that spans Southern Turkey (Bakur), Northwestern Iran (Rojhalet), Northern Iraq (Bashur), and Northern Syria (Rojava). The Kurds are the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East behind Arabs, Turks, and Persians and the largest ethnic group in the world without their own state. It is important to define Kurdistan as a nation, and a territory. The term Kurdistan first appeared in the fourteenth century, and literally translated, means land of the Kurds. While it has never existed as a state, kingdom, or empire, Kurdistan is the imagined nation of the Kurds, however. In Iran, Kurdistan is a province and in Iraq the 1974 Autonomy Law defined Kurdistan as areas found by a 1957 census to have a majority Kurdish population. Although greater Kurdistan (all four regions of Kurdistan) is not recognized internationally as a nation-state, it does have official designation both in Iran and Iraq  As for the imagined map the Kurds claim as their homeland (Greater Kurdistan), it has never been officially recognized as an independent nation-state by any world government or world governing body such as the United Nations or NATO.

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For the Kurds, their culture and identity is most important. The more the occupying governments of Kurdistan try to prevent the Kurds from publicly showing their culture and identity, the more determined the Kurds are to resist the occupiers forced assimilation policies. Kurdistan might be located in the Middle East, but Kurds do not think of themselves as Middle Easterners, which often times implies Arab, Turkish, or Persian ethnicity. . Using the same logic, one can reason that just because most Kurds are Muslim, does not mean they are Arab. Living in the part of Kurdistan that is occupied by Iraq does not make Kurds Iraqi, and so it is with all Kurdish regions that are occupied by different governments. In whatever occupied region they live, the Kurds are Kurds regardless of the occupier’s national identity. Too often the term Middle Easterner or Muslim is automatically associated with the term Arab, and thus anyone from those areas are automatically deemed something they are not. For the previously mentioned reasons, this is why the Kurds dislike the question ‘where are you from?’ Those who know very little or nothing about the Kurds assume they are Arab or Middle Eastern simply based on geographical location or religion.