The Kurdish Dream Is Not Yet Over — A Century of Struggle by a People Without a State

A People Erased from the Map

Imagine your people have lived on a land for thousands of years — and then one day, diplomats from distant countries draw lines on a table and split that land into four pieces. That is exactly what happened to the Kurds.

Today, the Kurdish people number an estimated 40 million, making them the largest ethnic group in the world without a state of their own. They are scattered across the mountainous region known as Kurdistan, where the borders of four countries converge: Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria.

1916 and 1923: Where It All Began

In 1916, in the midst of World War I, Britain's Mark Sykes and France's François Georges-Picot struck a secret deal. The Sykes-Picot Agreement determined how the Middle East would be carved up after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. It is no exaggeration to say that a single line drawn on a map planted the seeds of every tragedy that followed in the region.

At the time, the Kurds were promised an independent state of their own — a promise even written into the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres. But just three years later, that promise was quietly struck from the record in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. It was the result of fierce resistance from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, combined with the competing interests of the great powers.

A Hundred Years of Resistance — and Today

Since then, Kurdish history has been a relentless cycle of oppression and resistance.

• In Turkey, the Kurdish language was banned for decades, and armed conflict with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) continues to this day.
• In Iraq, 1988 saw the Halabja massacre, in which Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians. Around 5,000 people were killed — a tragedy the international community largely chose to ignore.
• In Syria, Kurdish militias YPG/SDF fought alongside U.S. forces to defeat ISIS, only to be abandoned overnight when Trump announced the withdrawal of American troops in 2019.
• In Iran, Kurdish activists continue to be detained and executed to this day.

As of 2026, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) in the north enjoys a level of autonomy that rivals de facto independence. Erbil has grown into a city with a modern skyline, and the region maintains its own military force, the Peshmerga. Yet disputes with Baghdad over oil revenues, internal factional tensions, and ongoing cross-border airstrikes by Turkish forces continue to cast a shadow over the region's future.

🎬 The Middle East on Screen

The Kurdish story has been told with great intensity on screen as well.

Turtles Can Fly (2004), directed by Iranian-Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi, is set along the Iraq-Turkey border just before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The story of Kurdish children scraping together a living in a minefield moved audiences around the world, capturing the brutality of war through a child's eyes. That said, the film focuses on individual tragedy and deliberately leaves aside the complex inner workings of Kurdish political movements.

My Sweet Pepper Land (2013), also set in Iraqi Kurdistan, offers a refreshing take on Kurdish society — depicting the everyday tensions between tradition and change through the lens of a Western-style film. It is a rare and valuable work that shows the Kurdish world is about far more than war and suffering.

The documentary Songs of Kurdistan (2019) traces how traditional Kurdish music has preserved the people's identity, vividly capturing how language and art become instruments of political resistance.

What Does Home Mean?

The Kurdish story is not simply a distant conflict in a faraway land. Must a nation-state always align with an ethnic group? How far should the right to self-determination for minorities be recognized? These are universal questions that apply to every border in the world — from Jeju Island to Catalonia.

A dream that 40 million people have been dreaming for a hundred years. Before we pass judgment on whether that dream is justified, perhaps we owe it to ourselves to first feel the full weight of it.