The Kurds are one of the oldest peoples of the Middle East, with roots tracing back thousands of years to the mountainous highlands where Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Armenia now meet. They speak Kurdish, an Indo-European language related to Persian, though divided into several major dialects, Kurmanji, Sorani, and others, that reflect the fragmentation of Kurdish society across different states. The overwhelming majority are Sunni Muslim, though significant minorities practice Shia Islam, Yarsanism, Alevism, and other faiths, and Kurdish culture retains pre-Islamic traditions such as the springtime festival of Newroz, which doubles as a symbol of national identity and resistance. Numbering somewhere between 25 and 40 million people, no state has ever counted them precisely, the Kurds are spread across a region informally called Kurdistan, encompassing parts of southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and northern Syria.
When the victorious Allied powers redrew the map of the post-Ottoman Middle East after the First World War, they created new states for Arabs, Turks, and others. The Kurds were promised autonomy under the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, but that promise was abandoned three years later under the Treaty of Lausanne, which divided Kurdish lands among Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. A century later, the Kurds remain the largest ethnic group in the Middle East and North Africa without a sovereign state of their own, a distinction that shapes nearly every aspect of their modern political life, from the Kurdistan Regional Government’s fragile autonomy in Iraq to the precarious self-administration once built by Syrian Kurds in the northeast of that country.
The Kurdish predicament invites comparison with other peoples who have faced statelessness, displacement, or systematic persecution, though each case has its own distinct shape. The Palestinians, unlike the Kurds, have seen statehood placed on the table repeatedly, from the 1947 UN partition plan through Oslo and successive rounds of negotiations. The Uyghurs of China’s Xinjiang region present an almost inverse case: theirs is not primarily a struggle for independence, since few Uyghur organizations have pursued sovereign statehood as a realistic goal, but a fight for cultural and religious survival against a state policy of assimilation, enforced through mass internment, surveillance, and the systematic suppression of Uyghur identity. The Kurds occupy a harder position than either. They have consistently sought genuine autonomy or statehood, not merely rights within someone else’s state, yet unlike the Palestinians they have rarely been offered a real diplomatic path toward it and, unlike the Uyghurs, their exclusion has come less from one state’s assimilationist policy than from a recurring pattern of wartime partnerships: great powers have repeatedly enlisted the Kurds against a common enemy, only to withdraw once victory, ceasefire, or retreat was achieved, leaving the promise of self-determination unmet each time. The Yazidis, a small Kurdish-speaking religious minority, experienced a version of this same vulnerability in its most brutal form: targeted for genocide by the Islamic State in 2014, and defended in large part by Kurdish fighters, including Yazidis themselves. What unites all four peoples is a recurring exposure to great-power indifference, but the Kurds are distinguished by how often that indifference has followed a direct promise of something better.
Few peoples in the modern Middle East have paid a higher price fighting the region’s worst actors than the Kurds. Kurdish Peshmerga forces in Iraq were essential to halting the advance of the Islamic State in 2014, when Iraqi army units collapsed. In Syria, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces became the United States’ indispensable partner against ISIS, losing an estimated 11,000 fighters in that campaign. Their reputation among soldiers, aid workers, and journalists who worked alongside them is almost uniformly one of skill, discipline, and sacrifice.
Yet that courage has repeatedly been met with abandonment. In 1991, Kurds who rose up against Saddam Hussein at the urging of the United States were left exposed when the war ended prematurely, and thousands were killed or displaced. In 2019, President Trump withdrew American forces protecting Kurdish-held northeastern Syria, opening the door to a Turkish military offensive against the very fighters who had just helped defeat ISIS. And in early 2025, following the fall of the Assad regime, Washington backed the new Syrian government’s push to dismantle Kurdish self-administration in the northeast, a move widely seen among Kurds as yet another betrayal by an ally they had bled for.
That history weighed heavily over the most recent chapter. When the United States and Israel launched their war against Iran on 28 February 2026, a campaign that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and much of Iran’s senior leadership, American and Israeli officials reportedly saw an opportunity to use Iran’s own Kurdish minority, concentrated in the country’s northwest, as a lever to help topple the Islamic Republic. According to multiple reports, the CIA and Israel’s Mossad had for years cultivated ties with Iranian Kurdish opposition factions such as the Kurdistan Freedom Party, the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, and Komala, and a plan took shape for these groups, backed by a U.S.-Israeli no-fly zone and air cover, to cross from Iraqi Kurdistan into Iran and open a second front against the regime.
Azad Lashkari/Reuters
Trump initially voiced enthusiasm for the idea, but he reversed himself within days, and by early March had publicly stated he did not want the Kurds entering the fight. Multiple reports, including from the Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, and Israeli outlets, point to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as a central force behind that reversal. Turkey, home to its own large Kurdish population and deeply anxious about any precedent of Kurdish autonomy near its borders, had just watched Kurdish self-rule in Syria dismantled to its satisfaction and had no interest in seeing a new Kurdish-controlled zone emerge in Iran. Turkish officials later said publicly that Ankara had worked to delay and limit the wider war, and analysts noted Erdoğan’s close relationship with Trump, reinforced by memories of the damaging 2018 sanctions dispute between the two countries, gave him real leverage in Washington. Some reporting also points to skepticism within the U.S. defense establishments itself, so the reversal likely reflected more than Turkish pressure alone. Iranian Kurdish groups, for their part, had their own reasons for hesitation, demanding political guarantees rather than another transactional arrangement they feared would end the way Syria did.
As of mid-2026, Iran’s regime has managed to survive, propped up by a new Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leadership that for now, shows no sign of mass defection despite enormous economical and infrastructure losses . A ceasefire brokered with Pakistani mediation has held only unevenly, and talks over Iran’s nuclear program, its missile arsenal, and control of the Strait of Hormuz remain unresolved.
Should the IRGC’s grip eventually weaken or collapse, whether from this conflict’s aftershocks, financial strain, or the protest movements that have repeatedly convulsed Iran’s Kurdish provinces since the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, the Kurds would once again find themselves at a historic crossroads. A genuinely federal, post-clerical Iran could offer Iranian Kurds a degree of self-rule unimaginable under the Islamic Republic, and might in turn embolden Kurdish aspirations in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. But the same obstacles that have defined the last century would not disappear: Turkey’s implacable opposition to Kurdish autonomy anywhere near its frontiers, the reluctance of Iraq’s Baghdad government and Iran’s future leadership, clerical or otherwise, to cede real power, and Washington’s demonstrated pattern of embracing Kurdish partners in moments of crisis only to set them aside once the crisis passes.
For a people who have shown extraordinary endurance across a century of shifting borders and broken promises, the measure of any post-IRGC future will be whether, for once, that endurance is met with something more durable than another round of encouragement followed by retreat.