It has been said that the Kurds are a nation without borders, though that is only partly true. They are, of course, citizens of any number of countries, ones that envelop their homeland in the Middle East and ones much farther afield. But for the Kurds — a nation of some 25 million people who, despite their shared culture, speak different languages, practice different religions, subscribe to different political ideologies and hold different passports — citizenship is not such a simple matter.
It would be more accurate to say that Kurds, having assimilated into countries they do not consider their own, tend to be citizens in name but not in practice. And they are subject, therefore, to discrimination and outright oppression. In Turkey, Kurdish language curriculums are still banned in most schools. In Iraq, an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 Kurds were killed in the late 1980s during Saddam Hussein's al-Anfal campaign. In Iran, as many as 1,200 Kurdish political prisoners were allegedly executed after the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
The Kurds had no choice but to assimilate, for the country most of them would prefer to call home — Kurdistan — does not exist and probably never will. And so the Kurds find themselves not entirely displaced but not entirely with a state of their own, awkwardly situated in a region punctuated by chaos and exploited by foreign powers.
