The Kurdish Crossroads: Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria

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Recent hostilities with Iran have once again highlighted the role of the Kurds as a key player in regional conflicts. While seen as a threat by governments in Ankara, Tehran, Damascus, and Baghdad, the world’s largest stateless group of people continues to be considered by Washington as potential allies when convenient. As the region faces new waves of destabilization, particularly with the war with Iran and the new Syrian government consolidating its territory, what will the role of the Kurds be across the region? How will the disparate views of 30-40 million people spread over four countries impact dynamics in this volatile region as well as for their own quest for independence? .

Join us for a discussion with Bill Park, Visiting Research Fellow in the Defence Studies Department, King’s College, London, where we will examine how today’s rapidly shifting regional dynamics are creating both new opportunities and new vulnerabilities for Kurdish communities and whether potential support from the U.S. will be strong and sustainable or easily abandoned.

Music by Aleksey Chistilin from Pixabay

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The Kurds' only friends are the mountains, as they say. That is true. That's the place they can retreat to. Because history tells them we can't really rely on anybody else that much when it's not in anybody else's interests to support the Kurds.

SPEAKER_02 0:17

Forty million Kurds live scattered across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. None of those countries is theirs. For a century, the governments around them have tried to absorb them or push them aside. Now, every one of those countries is in flux. Iran is at war. Syria is under new leadership. And in Turkey, the PKK, the Kurdish militant group that has fought the Turkish state for 40 years, has offered to lay down its arms. But the Kurds have been here before. When a crisis is the region, outside powers attack them. When it passes, the support vanishes.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

This is the leader of the Syrian Kurds. I said to him, You do know, Jackie, that the Americans one day will tell you out. And he did smile, but he didn't say yes or no, but he kind of knew that the Kurds would be instrumentalized by others because that's what happened.

SPEAKER_02 1:17

What does this moment mean for the world's largest stateless people? And is there any reason to think it ends differently this time? This is Global Insights by Network 2020. Today, the future occurred. Joining us today is Bill Park, a visiting research fellow at King's College London, who has studied Kurdish politics for decades. Our conversation today is moderated by Courtney Doggard.

SPEAKER_03 1:54

So, Bill, welcome. Um, to start, what I would like to do is just a little bit of a scene setter. So the Kurds have the dubious distinction of being, I think, the world's largest stateless ethnic group with 30 to 40 million people spread across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Um yet they have no state. Could you walk us through who the Kurds are, how they came to be divided across all of these nation states, um, and how statelessness figures into that identity. Um, and also just for those of us because we're joining from a lot of different places, primarily in the United States, also in the UK, um why does this matter?

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Yeah, I mean, there's about 40 million Kurds today. Uh, these figures can't be accurate because the four main countries in which Kurds live, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey, don't do ethnically based census. Um, but we reckon there's about 40 million Kurds. Probably about half of them live in Turkey, where they make up 20% of the population. They're 20% of Iraq's population, roughly. Um, that's a smaller population, but percentage-wise 20%, and about 10 of Iran and Syria. Um, they are obviously mainly Muslim, there are Christian, um Zarastrian, um, Jewish Kurds, people that would regard themselves as Kurds, but they're mainly Sunni Muslim. But there are uh Alawite, a branch of Shia Kurds as well, most notably in Turkey, some in Iran. Um, and they tend to be, they're like the Assad regime in Syria, they're sort of secular Shia people, so they tend to be leftist and secular. And um in Turkey they probably disproportionately uh make up the ranks of the PKK and Kurdish activists, um, uh Sunni Kurds, a little bit less so. Um, it's worth noting that they live primarily in a mountain region, the Komishli Mountains. And this is almost impassable unless you are a Kurd. They know the way through all the passes and they know where the caves are and the shelters are. Um, Kurds, even today, do a lot of smuggling across these borders. Um, but it also means that they stayed in an economically relatively backward situation compared to the people around them, but also were divided into um tribal groups. And the tribalism, I think, has limited the unity of Kurds, and this perhaps will matter as we go through this session. So they're quite fragmented even in any one of these countries, as well as between these countries. Why? Because they are used to fragmentations, even from each other, as well as other people. Why did they end up with no state? Well, um, they were mainly in the Ottoman Empire, up until its uh collapse with the First World War. So the Iraqi, the Syrian, and the Turkish Kurds were in the Ottoman Empire, and they weren't particularly marginalized, although there had been Kurdish revolts, they weren't particularly marginalized. Certainly, for much of the period of the Ottoman Empire, they had been used as foot soldiers for the Ottomans, um, but also administrators and tax gatherers and so on and so forth, because they're militarily quite proficient and were living on the front lines of troubled areas. Um, so the remaining in the Ottoman Empire, the state system that emerged, that divided them. I suppose, if I want to be a little bit cheap about it, but not inaccurate, basically the British and the French inherited the Ottoman Empire, carved it up between them. We like to say the Sykes-Pico Agreement. Um, the one interesting issue was the Treaty of Sev, which was with still the Ottomans in 1920, which was never implemented, did foresee the possibility that those Kurds that had been inside the Ottoman Empire, which is most Kurds, um could become part of some new Turkey. Turkey hadn't yet been established, or there could be a referendum and they might be independent. But between 20 and 23, under Azuk, the Turkish Republic established itself, then you had the Treaty of Lausanne, and Kurdish rights of self-determination was not mentioned, and the British decided they would take what is now Iraq and Kurdistan for themselves. So the borders don't reflect any Kurdish desire, they reflect the British in the French, and most especially the British in the relationship between the UK and Turkey. Yeah, I think that's the main thing to say. The one other thing I would say is that there was a Kurdish presence at Sev and at Lausanne, and indeed at Versailles, but Kurdish national identity was a bit slow to develop. So the pressure that they created was not irresistible enough for the British Friend and others to need to take note of it. National identity for the Kurds intensified with the attempts by these states that emerged after the First World War to nation build, to become Iranians, to become Turks, to become Syrians. And then the Kurdish identity felt itself under pressure and started to emerge. The Kurds identified tribally at the time this map was being drawn more than they did nationally. Why does it matter? It matters because the Kurds are not going to go away. Right now it's a big issue in whether Syria can stabilize itself and unify. It's been an issue in Turkey since the foundation of the republic. There's ongoing issues between Iraqi, Kurdistan, and Baghdad, which at the moment are quite intense because of the problems with exporting oil through Bazaar. The Iraqis are looking at exporting oil across northern Iraq into Turkey, and that requires Kurdish cooperation. So, um, and of course, in Iran, um where many of the Kurds are both non-Iranian and not Shia. So in all of these countries, Kurds will continue to be an issue, continue to be a destabilizing, potentially destabilizing factor.

SPEAKER_03 8:54

Thank you. And uh that was a great scene setter. So once you impose this nation-state rubric across the region, um, could you just talk a little bit about the current state of Kurds in each region in Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq? So when you're looking at that um the different circumstances in each country, how would you kind of quickly describe where things are at for the Kurds?

SPEAKER_00 9:21

Yeah. Um Turkey, I would say, is the most persistent and most coherent obstacle to Kurdish self-determination, not only in Turkey, but in the region. Um so I'll start with Turkey. Also, there, as I say, about a half of all Kurds live in Turkey. Um, what you had basically was an attempt by Atatok to modernize Turkey and secularize it. The Kurds, being not very modern and not wishing to be secular, revolted, the so-called Sheikh Said revolt, um, almost as soon as the republic was formed. Um, and when the constitution for the republic was drawn up in 1924, Kurdishness was banned and not mentioned. So, what you had basically pretty much from the foundation of the Turkish Republic was this denial of even the fact of Kurds, let alone any arrangement that might give them some degree of autonomy or cultural identity or whatever. Even the fact of being Kurdish was in dispute. Um, this issue was picked, there were revolts throughout the 20s and the 30s. Probably the majority of Syrian Kurds today descend, well not probably, I think actually the majority of Syrian Kurds today descend from Kurds that went, moved from Turkey into the French-mandated Syria in the 20s and 30s because of what was happening inside Turkey. So you had a series of revolts. The worst of them was in Ghesim, which was the Alawites um Kurdish area. They also speak a different language, different, sorry, another different language, a different dialect, Zaza. That was the worst revolt, and the Turks repressed it very badly. The issue was taken up by leftists in Turkey. Um, but circs and even Turkish leftists struggled with Kurdish identities and demands. So you had um the formation in 1978 of the Kurdistan Workers' Party by Abdullah Ojulan, and then a beginning of a revolt in 1984, I suppose it became really violent. So Turkey has become defined by the PKK revolt against um Turkish rule. Initially, this revolt for independence. By the late 90s, 2000s, the position softened, and it was much more to do with national rights and all the rest of it, cultural rights. Old Julam was put in prison in 1999, by the way. There were a whole continuing struggles and ceasefires and peace processes, which we can go to in more detail. Um, but basically, now what we would regard as the PKK lives in the Iraqi side of the border. It's impossible to live in the Turkish side of the border. And a lot of population movement took place, about 3,000 villages or more were destroyed in Turkey. A lot of Kurds were dispersed uh throughout Turkey into the cities. The biggest concentration of Kurds in the world is actually in Istanbul, um, because a lot of Kurds moved to Istanbul. Um, and then last year in 25, PKK conceded its willingness to disband. So right now we're in a peace process, about which, as with most things, I'm quite skeptical, but that's where Turkey is. The fighting has kind of stopped, um, and we're in another peace process, which is about the fourth, depending on how you count them. It might end well, it might end badly. Syria, I'll mention very quickly, um there were Syrian, Kurdish-Syrian revolts as well. Syria didn't become properly independent until 1946, and of course the Syrians tried to Arabize Syria, whereas the French had been quite well disposed towards the Kurds in their Syrian mandate. The Syrians tried to Arabize Syria, they even in 1962 took the right to citizenship away from many Kurds, saying, well, they really came from Turkey, they're nothing to do with us, and those people still do not have citizenship since the early 60s. Only now is it being looked at. Um, but it really came to fruition in Syria with the revolt 2011, the Arab Spring, and the revolt against Assad, when the Kurds, the Syrian defense force, which is a Kurdish force, mainly Kurdish force, very close to the PKK, revolted and basically sought to control much of northern Syria along the Turkish border, centered on Khamisri in the northeast. Turkey got involved in places like Afrin, Kabani, you will remember. There was a siege of Kobani, Turkey attacked it, wouldn't help the Americans tried to siege by the Islamic State. Um, Americans tried to help, especially the Americans, Turkey wouldn't help later on, um, undermined the Kurdish presence there by sending in military forces. Um what again you have is something parallel for good reasons with what's going on in Turkey. Earlier this year, in January, um, the new Syrian government um basically attacked the Kurds, who pulled back and are now only really in control of commissary and have agreed to integrate into the Syrian forces. So again, the picture looks good. If you're an optimist, if you're me, you'll wait and see. Um Iraq is Iraq I know best. Well, Iraq and Turkey I know best. I've been to Iraqi Kurdistan many times. Um, I've got a lot of contacts there. Um, they established, again, you've had a whole series of revolts. Often the British were putting them down. Churchill, as a minister of war, made his name by bombing the Kurds in the 1920s when Iraq was a um a British mandate. Um it was led by the Bazani clan leaders, and the Bazanis are still with us to this day. So they revolted on and off throughout the 30s, 40s, and in 1932, Iraq became formally independent. Um Kurds revolted under the Bazani leadership throughout those periods, but it really came to fruition uh with the war over Kuwait, um, when the Kurdist regional government established itself in what we call the KLG, Iraqi Kurdistan, and was protected by safe haven. So Saddam Hussein still in power couldn't really touch it. Uh, and then with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, of course it became autonomous, and the Kurdist regional government was must recognized in the 2005 Iraqi um constitution. So it is now recognized as a self-governing entity. And I could say a lot about being there because I've been there a lot. I oversaw um um supervision, not supervision, um, a report on the uh independence referendum. Um so I was there then, I was there when ISIS took Mosul. I go to Kurdistan whenever there's a crisis, basically. The crisis now is partly that the Kurds have run out of control over the kind of oil they used to control because of the loss of Kirkuk. Um, and also because in 2023 an international legal judgment was made against the right of the Kurds to take the money of oil exported from Iraqi-Kurdistan via Turkey. Baghdad had taken Turkey and KRD to court and won the case, quite understandably. So Kurdistan has has trouble now about resources. It also has trouble through its own internal divisions, which it always has. Um, and Baghdad has got his act together a little bit more and is creating all sorts of pressures on Kurdistan. But it's still there, it's constitutionally recognized, it functions. Um, when you go to Ebil Al-Sulamaniya, the authorities are Kurdish, not Iraqi Arab. And then Iran. Um Iran in some ways are most complicated. Most Iranian Kurds are Sunnis, but there are Shia as well. So Iran's Iranians have been hit by a double whammy. They're Sunni and Kurds. It's a subplant of Iranian, not Arabic or Turkish. And yet the Kurds are quite marginalized in Iran. Um there might have been a bit of an opening for them, but then the 1980 Iran-Iraq war broke out. Um, and Saddam backed the Iranian Kurds to fight against Iran, and at that point the new revolutionaries, the Islamists in Iran decided to crack down on the Kurds, who up until then had showed some signs of sympathy with the Iranian regime. So both under the Shahs and then especially from 1980 under the Mullahs, Iran has been hell-bent on Iranianization of Iran, which has made life difficult for the Kurds. And the Kurdish inclination to revolt and rebel and be oppositionist has done them no favors, frankly, in Iran. So slightly different picture, but everywhere, a more or less continuous picture of revolt and continuous repressions.

SPEAKER_03 19:06

Thank you. That's a very helpful overview. So um we started talking about Iran, and then you also mentioned um earlier Kurdish alignments and how that can sometimes bite them in the end. Um just looking at Washington's relationship with the Kurds over time, um, and one of the reasons why we conceived of this talk a few months ago was back when the U It was rumored that the US was looking uh to Iranian Kurds to foment some sort of domestic uprising. And so I'd love just to hear a little bit from your perspective about um how Kurdish groups have decided to align with different governments over time and how that's worked out for them. And so who's getting to call the shots um in these cases? Uh is it powerful ruling families? How does that happen?

SPEAKER_00 20:00

Yeah. Um that's a very interesting question. Um the world is a difficult place, and the Kurds are in the most difficult position in it. I was very, this sounds a little bit over the top, but I was quite friendly with Saleh Muslim, who was leader of the Syrian Kurds. And I remember having a long conversation that lasted all day between the two of us in a Kurdish restaurant in London. And it was when the Americans were backing the Kurds against the Islamic State. And I said to him, You do know, don't you, that the Americans one day will sell you out. And he just smiled, he didn't say yes or no, which was partly in his manner. He was a non-confrontational, very gentle person. This is the leader of the Syrian Kurds. But he kind of knew that the Kurds would be instrumentalized by others because that's what's happened. Um I also remember being at celebrations in Kirkuk, actually, which was technically not a part of Iraqi-Kurdistan, on the day of the referendum, independence referendum in Iraqi-Kurdistan. And a Kurd came up to me in all his national regalia and his baggy trousers and his belt and everything. Ah, hello, who are you? Where are you from? So I said, I'm British. And he said, It's all your fault, which of course it is in a certain sort of way. Um so what the Kurds have been had to do with the Americans in Syria, um, to some extent with they tried with the British in Iraq, it didn't work. Certainly with the French, it worked better under the mandate, but not once Syria became independent. And with the Ottomans. The Kurds threw their lot in with those authorities, those powers, that they could find some kind of alignment of interest that would offer them some protection or some support for whatever reason, either because the Kurds are useful as a force or because they're against. Other people in the region that the sponsoring power was against, like Americans against ISIS, so the Kurds become good news. You see this with the Israelis, I think, and the Kurds in Syria against both Assad and the present regime. So the Kurds do get sponsored, but then they get dropped because when things move on. And that's really where they are now. And I think for the Kurds, this is a difficult history to have to live with. They feel the sense of betrayal. The Kurds' only friends are the mountains, as they say. That is true. That's the place they can retreat to. Because they history tells them we can't really rely on anybody else that much when it's not in anybody's interests, anybody else's interests to support the Kurds. And I think that's where they are, really. Um, so the only friend of the Kurds is the mountains, I think, is a something Kurds will say a lot. It's kind of been proved true. Um, and they're pretty much there now because in Syria can reasonably say they have been deserted by the Americans. But things have moved on.

SPEAKER_03 23:15

Um so then uh looking forward, um, it sounds as though, just going back to what you were saying earlier, is that you have a largely, let's say, tribal basis for society that's been then further divided into nationalizing nation states. Um there have been some gains, let's say, like the Iraqi Kurdistan and Iraq, but that also seems, judging by what you said earlier, has been rolled back a bit. Um what would you expect as reasonably good outcomes for the Kurds in each of the different countries in which they're in? What does a win look like or does that change depending on um the time and place?

SPEAKER_00 24:01

Well, I think Kurdistan regional government, KLG, is a recognized part of a federal Iraq, is here to stay. However, the two leading parties, um, KDP and the PUK, find it hard to talk to each other. They have two separate military forces. The Americans have been trying really hard to get them to unify the Peshmerga, and there are unified Peshmerga units. But I know someone who knows those people well and says they go through the the notion, the motion of being unified, but their real authority is with their respective KDP and uh PUK leaderships. So if you travel through Iraqi Kurdistan, you get to um armed border guards when you cross from the PUK to the KDP area. It's more difficult to do that than it was to cross from Kurdistan into Iraq. Not more difficult, but it was it was there. It was like a border. Um the attempt to the Americans, did they attempt or not? I don't know, recent months tried to unify the Iranian Kurds based in Iraqi-Kurdistan to fight against Iran. Um, but there are about five groups and they struggle to unify. Um, even in Turkey, where the PKK has been quite strong, bear in mind that about half of Kurds vote for the ruling AKP, and that the Kurdish parts of Turkey, one village will be pro-PKK, but the next one will be village guards who are paid by the Turkish state to watch over them, over the PKK, and to police them and reward it as well. So a lot of Kurds who identify as Kurds, but nevertheless throw themselves, they're not in with the ruling party in Turkey. Why? Because they see themselves as Sni or because their pockets are lined. So they will do that. Um and they're also and they're not leftists, you know, they're religious, they're Sni, and they don't like PKK leftism and these women soldiers and stuff like that. So there's ideological differences. Um, Syria is a bit difficult to say I'm not comfortable about making any observation about Syria, really, what how divided they are, although there are divisions, there's no doubt. But if you ask me for the future, I use analogies from elsewhere and then criticize myself for doing it, but I will do it. Poland in Europe disappeared from the map because Germany and Russia wanted it to disappear from the map for over a hundred years. After the First World War, when Germany's defeated and Russia was caught up in its revolution, we could put a large Poland back on the map because the powers that sought to deny the right of Poland to exist had been weakened, and others could put them there. Um, so that's a sort of, I tried this on Kurds, and I don't like me to say it. But the truth is, so long as the powers around them are big enough to suppress Kurdish rights, unless they go through some major democratizing reform, Kurdish rights are going to be difficult to achieve. Certainly Kurdish independence. And Turkey's the biggest problem. Even if Turkey really democratized, nationalism in Turkey, Turkish nationalism, is hardwired. They won't easily accept a separate Kurdish entity that might not be under their control or loyal to them or have different interests. And that's Turks across the political spectrum. So I think unless the situation around the Kurdish areas changes massively and weakens, the Kurds are not going to have a state. The KRG only came about because of Saddam Hussein was basically weakened by the war over Kuwait and then by his overthrow. Um and the KRG could establish itself as a really properly functioning entity in the early 2000s. The other problem that Kurds faced is both within each of these countries and outside of these countries, they are just hopelessly dividing. So even if you could have a Kurdish state, would it fight itself? The Iraqi Kurds fought each other in '94, '97. Um, as I say, you have neighboring villages in Turkey, village guards in one, PKK in the other. Um, so these divisions exist. And then there's one other model that I sometimes use, and it's I look at the UK and I look at, say, the Scottish or the Welsh. Um, I was in Wales just a couple of weeks back in the area that just in local elections was depleted. Cumri. Everyone speaking Welsh is totally Welsh. I don't know whether they really want independence, but they have a strong sense of identity, of being distinctive. And in Scotland, you have the Scottish Nationalist Party also that talks about independence. But other Welsh people and other Scottish people regard themselves very much as British. So another possibility for the Kurds in at least some of these countries is that you create a situation in which you can be both part of the bigger entity, but also identify with your more parochial notion of self. If Turkey had called itself Anatolia rather than Turkey, that would have been easier. We can all be Anatolians, but some of us are Kurds and some of us are Turks. Um, and that might apply as well to other countries as well. But that requires a lot of change in those countries for that to come about. I don't think the Kurds are strong enough or united enough or sufficiently externally sponsored enough to create it by themselves.

SPEAKER_02 30:07

Thank you for joining us on this episode of Global Insights. You can subscribe to Global Insights on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your audio. For more analysis, events, and ways to connect with our community, click on the link in the description. See you next time.