The Kurds

The 25 million Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without a clean state. Promised – but never granted-their own country after the First World War, the Kurds now live in parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Armenia and Azerbaijan. They are almost universally despised in order to affirm their identity. The Turkish government passes U.S. $ 6 billion a year the fight against Kurdish separatists. The Iraq of Saddam Hussein tried to wipe his four million Kurds in total: about 300,000 Kurdish civilians “disappeared” between 1983 and 1987. Thus, Iraq has launched a religious war against them (with chemical weapons), 4000 regular villages and kills another 100,000 Kurds. Many who survived are now starving, thanks to the UN embargo against Iraq.

Pop Culture

Kurdish music is central to daily life. Almost all human activity has its song, played on flutes, drums and CC (a type of guitar). Sivan Perwer, Kurdish pop star, selling millions of cassettes through the former Kurdistan and abroad. Exiled from Turkey, currently residing in Sweden Sivan. In 1980, Iraq, the possession of the tapes could have you arrested. They are still banned in Turkey.

Earth and Ecology

The vast Kurdish homeland of about 230,000 square miles is on areas in Germany and Britain combined, or roughly equal to France or Texas. Kurdistan consists basically of the mountainous regions of central and northern Zagros, the eastern third of the Taurus and Pontus, and the northern half Amanus intervals. The symbiosis between the Kurds and their mountains has been so strong they have become synonymous: Kurds Home ends where the end of the mountains. The Kurds as a distinct people have survived only when living in the mountains. The highest points in the country now are respectively Mt. Alvand southern Kurdistan in Iran at 11,745 feet, Mt. Halgurd in central Kurdistan in Iraq at 12,249 feet, Mt. Munzur to 12,600 feet in western Kurdistan and Mt. Ararat at 16,946 feet in northern Kurdistan, both in Turkey.

There are also two large Kurdish enclaves in central and north central Anatolia in Turkey and in the province of Khorasan, in north Iran.The average annual precipitation is 60-80 cm per year in the center and 20-40 inches in descending to lower altitudes. Most precipitation falls as snow, may fall for six months of the year, becoming the resource for many large rivers like the Tigris and Euphrates, otherwise arid Middle East. The total average annual temperature is 55 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit, it cools as it ascends the central massifs.

March, when almost entirely of forests, has created an enormous, especially in this century, which is bound to soil erosion and dry landscape. Unlike the severe damage to forests, pastures are in fair condition and still fruitful nomadic herding economy alongside the basic agriculture.

Despite its mountainous nature, Kurdistan has more arable land proportionately more of the East. Expansive river valleys create a fertile network in Kurdistan. This may also explain the fact that the very invention of agriculture took place primarily in Kurdistan around 12,000 years. The revolution is accompanied by rapid domestication of almost all basic cereals and livestock in the region (with the notable exception of cows and rice).

Race

The Kurds are now mainly in the Mediterranean racial stock similar to southern European and Levantine skin, general coloring and physiology. There is still a constant recurrence of two racial substrata: a darker aboriginal Palaeo-Caucasian element, and the local presence of the Alps blondism Write the central region of Kurdistan. “Aryanization” is aboriginal Palaeo-Caucasian Kurds, linguistically, culturally and racially, seems to have started the beginning of the second millennium BC, with continued immigration and settlement of Indio-European-speaking tribes, such as the Hittites, Mitannis, Haigs , Medes, Persians, Scythians and Alans. The process was more or less complete by the beginning of the Christian era, when the Iranian Kurds had absorbed enough blood and culture, particularly Median and Alan, will form the basis physical typology and culturalidentity.

Language

Kurds speak Kurdish, a member of the Northwest branch of the Iranian language branch of the Indo-europium, similar to Persian, and by extension to other European languages. Altaic is fundamentally different from Semitic Arabic and Turkish. Modern Kurdish divides into two main groups: 1) the Kurmanji group and, 2) Guran Dimili group. Complemented by dozens of sub-dialects as well. The most popular vernacular is that of Kurmanji (or Kirmancha), spoken by about three-quarters of the Kurds today. Kurmanji divided into North Kurmanji (also called Bahdinani, with about 15 million speakers, mainly in Turkey, Syria and the former Soviet Union) and South Kurmanji (also called Sorani, with about 6 million speakers, primarily Iraq and Iran ).

In the far north of Kurdistan along Kizil Irmak and Murat rivers in Turkey, Dimili (less precise but more commonly known as Zaza) dialect is spoken by about 4 million Kurds. There are small pockets of this language is spoken in different parts of Anatolia, northern Iraq, northern Iran and the Caucasus as well.

In the far south of Kurdistan, both in Iraq and Iran, Guran dialect is spoken by about 3 million Kurds. Guran along with two of its significant part: The law and Awramani, should pay particular attention to its wealth of sacred and secular literature that extends beyond the millennium.

Iraq and Iran, a modified version of Persian-Arabic alphabet has been adapted to South Kurman (Sorani). The Kurds of Turkey have recently embarked on a campaign of publication in the Kurmanji dialect of northern Kurmaji (Bahdinani) from their publishing houses in Europe. these employees in a modified form of the Latin alphabet. Kurds in the former Soviet Union began writing Kurdish in the Armenian alphabet in the 1920s, followed by the United States in 1927, then Cyrillic in 1945 and now in both Cyrillic and Latin. Guran dialects continue using the Persian alphabet without any change. Dimili now uses the same Latin alphabet as North Kurmanji modified for printing.

The Kurds in Iran is not allowed to use their Kurdish names. In Turkey, the Kurdish-speaking, even in private was a crime until 1991. Turkey continues to deny that the Kurds are a distinct ethnic identity – the official level is that the Kurds are Turks, who lost in the mountains and forgotten that they were Turks.

Religion

Almost three-fifths of the Kurds, almost all Kurmanji-speakers, are today at least nominally Sunni Muslims in Shafiite rite. There are also some followers of traditional Islam Shiitem among the Kurds, particularly in and around cities Kermanshah, Hamadan and to Bijar in southern and eastern Kurdistan and Khorasan. Damn those Kurds number around half a million. The overwhelming majority of Muslim Kurds are followers of a series of mystical Sufi orders, especially the Bektashi order of the northwest Kurdistan, the Naqshbandi order, to the west and north, Qadiri orders of Eastern and central Kurdistan, and Nurbakhsh in the south.

The rest of the Kurds are supporters of many indigenous religions of the Ancient Kurdish and originality, which are variations on and permutation of an ancient religion that can reasonably but loosely labeled as Yardanism or “worship of angels.” The three surviving major divisions of this religion is Yezidism (in the west and west-central Kurdistan, about 2% of all Kurds), or Yarsanism Ahl-i Haqq (in southern Kurdistan, about 13% of all Kurds ), and Alevism or Kizil Nash (in western Kurdistan and Khorasan, around 20%). The small communities of Kurdish Jews, Christians and Baha’is are available in various Croner Kurdistan. the ancient Jewish community gradually migrated to Israel, while the Christian community is merging their identity with the Assyrians.

History

For the indigenous inhabitants of their country, there is no “beginning” of the Kurdish history and people. The Kurds and their history are the end products of thousands of years of continuous internal evolution and assimilation of new peoples and ideas introduced sporadically into their land. Genetically, Kurds are the descendants of those who have moved to Kurdistan, and not one of them. A people that Guti, Kurti. Coarse, Mard, Carduchi, Gordy, Adianbene, Zila and Khaldi not the ancestor of the Kurds, but only one ancestor.

Archaeological finds continue to document some of humanity’s first steps toward developing agriculture. the domestication of farm animals for many common (sheep, goats, pigs and dogs). record keeping (the symbolic system), development of domestic technologies (weaving, pottery and glazed earthenware), metallurgy and urbanization took place in Kurdistan, dating from 12,000 to 8,000 years.

The earliest evidence so far a coherent and distinct culture (and, possibly, ethnicity) of people living in the Kurdish mountains to the Halaf culture of 8.000 to 7.400 years ago. This was followed by the spread of culture Ubaidian, who was a foreign introduction from Mesopotamia. Around the millennium, its dominance was replaced by the Hurrian culture, which is or is not the people Halafian reasserting their dominance over their mountainous homeland. Hurrian lasted from 6300 about 2,600 years ago. We know very Horites. They spoke a language of north-east Caucasian family of languages ​​(or Alarodian), similar to modern Chechen and Lezgian. Hurrian spread far and wide, dominating much territory outside the Zagros-Taurus mountain base. Their solution was completed, on the Aegean coast. Like their Kurdish children, which does not extend too far from the mountains.

The Hurrian-whose name survives now most prominently in the dialect and district Hawraman / Awraman in Kurdistan is divided into many clans and sub-groups, established city-kingdoms and empires known today after their names respective clan. These include Gutis, Kurti, Khadi, Marden, Mushku, Manna, Hattie, Mittanis, Urartu, and Kassites, to name a few. All these were Hurrians, together representing the Hurrian phase of Kurdish history.

About 4,000 years ago, was the first vanguard of the Indo-European language trickling into Kurdistan in limited numbers and settling there. These formed the aristocracy of Mitanni, and Hittite kingdoms Kassite, while the ordinary people who have remained solidly Hurrian. Around 3,000 years ago, had turned into a trickle of a flood, and Hurrian Kurdistan was fast becoming Indo-European Kurdistan. Far from being wiped out, the Hurrian legacy, despite its linguistic eclipse, remains the most important element in the Kurdish culture until today. It forms the bedrock of all aspects of the existence of Kurds, their native religion to their art, their social organization, the status of women, and even in the form of their militia warfare.

Medes, Scythians and Sagarthians are only the most notorious clans of the Indo-European Aryans who settled in Kurdistan. Approximately 2600 years ago, the Medes had already set up a kingdom with all of Kurdistan and the vast remote areas. Medeans was followed by the results of other kingdoms and city-statesQall dominated by Aryan aristocracies and the people who came to Indo-European, Kurdish speakers if not already so.

By the advent of the classical era in 300 BC. The Kurds were already experiencing massive population movements that resulted in settlement and domination of many neighboring regions. Kurdish political importance of this time were all byproducts of these movements. Kurdish clan Commagene Zealand (Adiyaman area), for example, spread to establish, in addition to the Commagene Zealand dynasty, the kingdom of Cappadocia and PontusQall Zealand Zealand empire in Anatolia. These became Roman vassals by the end of the first century BC. In the Eastern Kingdoms Gordyene Kurds, Cortez, media, and Adiabene Kirm had in the first century BC, become confederate members of the Federation of deliveries.

While all larger Kurdish Kingdoms of the West gradually lost their existence to the Romans in the east they survived into the third century AD, and the emergence of the Persian Sassanid empire. The last major Kurdish dynasty, fell in the 380th AD Kayosids Smaller Kurdish principalities (called Kotyar, “the directors of mountain”), however, retained their independent existence in the 7th century and the advent of Islam.

Several socio-economic revolutions in the guise of religious movements emerged in Kurdistan at this time, many due to the use of the central government, some because of natural disasters. They went on the underground movement in the Islamic era, bursting out from time to time to ask for social reforms. Khurramite Mazdakite and movements are the best known of these.

Bring the Sasanian and Byzantine power in the Muslim caliphate, and its consequent weakening of their permits Kurdish principalities and “mountain administrators” to set a new Independent States. Shaddadids the Caucasus, Armenia, Azerbaijan Rawadids, Marwandis Eastern Anatolia, Hasanwayhids, Fadhilwayhids Ayyarids and central Zagros and Fars and Kirman and Shabankara are some of the medieval Kurdish dynasties.

Ayyubids differs from these because of the vastness of their domain names. Their capital at Cairo they ruled the region in eastern Libya, Egypt, Yemen, western Arabia, Syria, Holy Land, Armenia, and much of Kurdistan. Custodians of the holy cities of Islam, Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, were the key to the Ayyubid defeat and expulsion of the Crusaders from the Holy Land.

With 12 and 13 centuries, the nomadic Turks entered the area in time politically dominated vast segments of the Middle East. More independent Kurdish states succumbed to various kingdoms and empires of Turkey. Kurdish principalities, however, survived and continued with their autonomous existence until the 17th century. Intermittently, these rules would be independent of local empires weakened or collapsed.

The advent of the Safavid and Ottoman empires and their division of Kurdistan into two uneven imperial dependencies was on a par with the previous practice, a few centuries. Their introduction of artillery and scorched-earth policy into Kurdistan was a new and devastating development.

In the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries, large parts of Kurdistan and the systematic destruction of a lot of Kurds were deported to remote corners of the Safavid and Ottoman empires. The magnitude of death and destruction wrought on Kurdistan unified is its people in their call away from the country of these foreign vandals. Sustainable between the suffering of the Kurds awoke feeling of nationalism, which is required for a coherent state of the Kurds and the promotion of Kurdish culture and language. Thus the historian Sharaf al-Din Bitlis wrote the first pan-European history of the Kurds Sharafnama in 1597, when Ahmad Khani composed the national epic of Mem-o-Zin in 1695, demanding a Kurdish state to prevent its people. Kurdish nationalism was born.

For the last time a large Kurdish kingdom Zand, wa s born in 1750. As Ayyubids medieval however, Zandt established their capital and kingdom outside Kurdistan, and pursued no policies aimed at unification of the Kurdish nation. In 1867, they became very last autonomous Kurdish principalities were systematically exterminated by the Ottoman and Persian governments that ruled Kurdistan. Now governed directly by the governors, all Kurdish provinces. The situation has worsened after the end of World War I and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

The Treaty of Sevres (signed August 10, 1921) provides an independent Kurdish state to cover large portions of the former Ottoman Kurdistan. Not impressed by uprisings of the Kurds many bloody independence, France and Britain divided the Ottoman Turkey in Kurdistan, Syria and Iraq. The Treaty of Lausanne (signed June 24, 1923) formalized this division. Kurds of Persia / Iran, meanwhile, have been preserved, were by Tehran.

Based on the well-guarded state boundaries dividing Kurdistan, since 1921, Kurdish society afflicted with a degree of fragmentation, its impact is shattering the unity of the Kurds as a nation. In the 1920′s saw the establishment of Kurdish Autonomous Province (“Red Kurdistan”) in Soviet Azerbaijan. It was dismantled in 1929. In 1945, Kurds set up a Kurdish Mahabad Republic in the Soviet occupied zone in Iran. It lasted a year, until it was reoccupied by the Iranian army.

Since 1970, Iraqi Kurds have enjoyed an official status in part of the autonomous state of Kurdistan. In late 1991, had become almost independent of Iraq. In 1995, however, the Kurdish government in Arbil was on the verge of political suicide due to the outbreak of fighting between factions of the Kurdish leaders.

Since 1987, Kurds in Turkey through the establishment of a majority of Kurds in Turkey have waged a war of national liberation against Ankara’s 70 years of heavy-handed suppression of any vestige of the Kurdish identity and its rich and ancient culture. The mass uprising in 1995, had pushed Turkey into a state of civil war. The growth of the youth population and Kurds in Turkey now requires absolute equality with the Turkish component in that state, and failing that, full independence.

In the Caucasus, the young Armenian Republic in the course of 1992-1994 wiped out the entire Kurdish community in the former “Red Kurdistan.” Garden ethnically “cleansed” it, Armenia has effectively annexed the territory of Kurdistan is the red land bridge between the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia proper.

Geopolitics

Since the end of World War I, Kurdistan has been administered by five sovereign states, and most of the land respectively in Turkey (43%), Iran (31%), Iraq (18% ), Syria (6%) and the former Soviet Union (2%). Iranian Kurds have lived under the jurisdiction of that state since 1514 and the Battle of Chaldiran. The remaining three quarters of the Kurds lived in the Ottoman Empire from that date until its collapse after the First World War. The French Mandate Syria received a piece, and the British incorporated central Kurdistan or Mosul vilayet “and its oil fields in Kirkuk, in their newly established office in Iraq. North and west of Kurdistan had the choice of independence by the Treaty of Sevres (August 10, 1920), which manages the defunct Ottoman Empire, but received the newly created Republic of Turkey as the Treaty of Lausanne (June 24, 1923).

The Kurds were only ethnic group to the world of indigenous representatives in three world geopolitical blocs: the Arab world (Iraq and Syria), NATO (Turkey), South Asian and Central Asian bloc (in Iran and Turkmenistan), and until recently the Soviet bloc (in the Caucasus, now Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia). As a matter of fact, until the Cold War, the Kurds and the Germans were the only people in the world with their region of origin has been in the line of fire as well as NATO and the Warsaw Pact troops.

Company

The most important characteristics of Kurdistan society since the late Middle Ages was its strong tribal organization, with independence or autonomy is the political status of the land. The process of the company to develop the next stage of societal convergence and the creation of a political culture of interest in a pan-Kurdish polity-was well underway in Kurdistan where he stopped was crucial to the construction of the country at the end of the First World War. Tribal confederations remains the highest form of social organization, while the political process and the degree of elite even larger tribe. Today, in the absence of a national Kurdish state and government, tribes serve as the largest source of maternal authority, where people place their allegiance

Population

Kurds in countries rich in natural resources, has always promoted the population in the long term and large. Even if the recording modest gains at the end of 19 century, but especially in the first decade of 20 Kurds country vlost population compared to neighboring countries, ethnic groups. This was due both to their less developed economy and health care system, because it was directly to the massacres, deportations, famines, etc., the total number of Kurds actually decreased during this period, while all other major ethnic groups in the area harvested. From the middle of 1960 this negative demographic trend has been reversed, and Kurds are constantly in a position of importance that they traditionally population, 15% of the over-all population of the Middle East, Asia-a phenomenon common since at least 4 millennium BC.

Today the Kurds are the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East, where Arabs, Persians and Turks. Their largest concentrations are now respectively in Turkey (about 52% of all Kurds), Iran (25.5%), Iraq (16%), Syria (5%) and CIS (1.5%). Unless disaster, the Kurds would be the third most populous ethnic group in the Middle East in 2000, ousted the Turks. Moreover, if current demographic trends hold, because they are probably about 50 years Kurds will also replace the Turks as the largest ethnic group in Turkey itself.

Their intrusions into the neighboring plains of Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau, therefore, were primarily military annexations with little population settlement. Its economy has made remarkable and focused, and their political ties, especially in parallel with the Zagros-Taurus mountains, rather than radiation in the plains, as was the case during the last (foreign) Ubaid cultural period. The mountain-plain exchange economy remained secondary in importance, judging by the archaeological remains of goods and their origin.

Kurds Russian / Soviet had entered their territory during the 19th century, when the area was ceded to Persia / Iran.

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