Kurdish Spring: In 2026, Does Their Dream of Independence Still Live?

A Nation Without a Map, Yet a Heart That Beats

April in the mountain highlands of the Middle East. Snow still blankets the Zagros Mountains along the Iran-Iraq border. Somewhere in that vast white expanse, a folk song sung in Kurdish echoes through the peaks: "Kurdistan is the mountains, and the mountains are our mother." Thirty-five to forty million people. This is the story of the Kurds — the world's largest ethnic group without a state of their own.

A Promise Made a Century Ago, Then Broken

The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, drawn up in the wake of the Ottoman Empire's collapse, promised the Kurds an autonomous region. Yet just three years later, that promise was quietly erased from the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne — the result of Turkey's forceful diplomatic maneuvering converging with the strategic interests of Western powers. From that point on, the Kurdish people were scattered across four countries — Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria — left to live as minorities in each.

In Turkey, even Kurdish-language broadcasting was banned for decades. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein massacred thousands in the 1988 Halabja chemical weapons attack. In Syria, Kurds were denied citizenship for generations. History has been exceptionally cruel to them.

2026: The Landscape Has Shifted, but the Core Reality Hasn't

Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Syria's YPG earned widespread acclaim from the Western world for their role in battling ISIS. But once the fighting wound down, American attention gradually drifted away, and Turkey repeatedly launched military operations against Kurdish-held territories in northern Syria. The phrase "we fought together, then were abandoned alone" echoes throughout Kurdish communities to this day.

As of 2026, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq continues to maintain semi-autonomous administration centered on Erbil. Yet internal divisions, ongoing disputes with Baghdad over oil revenue distribution, and Turkey's continued military operations in northern Iraq remain unresolved. The Rojava autonomous experiment in northeastern Syria also persists, but international recognition remains a distant prospect.

🎬 The Middle East on Screen

The Kurdish story has left a powerful mark on film and television as well.

《Girls of the Sun》(2018) is a French film depicting a unit of Kurdish women who were captured by ISIS, escaped, and became fighters. Inspired by true events, the protagonist's inner journey incorporates dramatic fictional elements as well. Even so, it is celebrated as a work that etches the courage and dignity of Kurdish women onto the screen.

The documentary 《Baghdad in No Particular Order》(2005) is set in Baghdad in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq War, capturing the raw daily lives and upheaval of Iraqi civilians — including Kurds. Its power to move audiences remains undiminished today, precisely because it chooses to show human faces rather than make political declarations.

The Mountains Remain

There is a Kurdish proverb that goes: "The Kurds have no friends but the mountains." It is a bitter thing to realize that in 2026, this blunt assessment of a harsh reality still holds true. But those mountains are not going anywhere. And upon them, voices singing in Kurdish continue to rise, day after day. In the silence of history, those voices ring out — can we truly afford to look away?