The long line of guerrilla fighters throwing their rifles in the oven where they were molten caused more uncertainty than admiration for viewers, who listened to an insufficient explanation.
Who were those Kurds, combatants that voluntarily disarmed and expressed it to television cameras around the world?
Frequently they are called a town without a country, a nation without a state. They are not the only ones in the world, but they are the most numerous.
They call themselves children of the mountain. Life in rugged areas over many centuries has not only allowed them to survive in hostile media, but to prevent their identity from disintegrating and founded the ethnic groups that surround them where they live.
Their ethnic origin links them to the ancient medos, a Iranian people which established an empire in the seventh century Anne in what is now the northwest of Iran, parts of Iraq and Türkiye. The Medes, known for their role in the fall of the Assyrian Empire, spoke an Iranian language that was the precursor of the Kurdish dialects that exist today.
The highlands of the Zagros and Taurus mountains, regions that remain the heart of the current Kurdistan. A common language – more a linguistic complex – common traditions and a history of resistance in the mountainous lands of Türkiye, Iran, Iraq and Syria helped form their own identity.
“His language, the Kurdo, has as many variants as mountains are in its territory. In the north they speak Kurmanji, in the south Sorani, and each dialect tells a different story of cultural survival. Most are Sunni Muslims, but among them there are also yazidi with their mysterious rituals, Assyrian Christians and even some Shiites. This religious diversity has historically made them historically uncommon in a region marked by sectarian conflicts, ”says Mastoura Ardalan, an important 19th -century Kurdish poet Historical Chronicle of the Emirate of Ardalan.
Its existence as its own civilization is as old as Persian, and for more than two millennia they have lived in the mountains that has come to be called Kurdistan, the Kurdish country. But that is just named. The Kurdistan mountains were occupied by other countries in the area at the end of World War I and the Ottoman Empire disappears.
As happened to other peoples, the decision makers, English and French, and their partners of the great mesorient space, traced limits and transformed countries. None thought about the mountain people, which was caught in the current eastern territory of Turkey – the greatest number -, the northeast of Syria, northern Iraq and a large piece of Iran.
It was only a matter of time that each group ran its own luck and faced its destiny.
In Türkiye, Mustafa Kemal, Atatürk, reorganized that country; The Shah Reza Pahlavi formed the current Iran, and the British and French redrawed the borders of the Middle East according to their conveniences. The 1923 Lausanian treaty forested forever Kurdish dream, distributing their territory among four countries that since then have looked at them over their shoulders.
Kurdish dispersion
As there are no official censuses, it is not easy to define the size of its population. However, it is assumed that the total Kurda population ranges between 25 and 45 million people; Of these, from 15 to 20 in Turkey (the fifth part of the population of the country), from 8 to 12 million in Iran (10 to 15 % of the total population), between 5 and 7 million in Iraq (15 to 20 % of the totality) and 2 to 3 million in Syria (10 % of the population in the country). In the diaspora, one million Kurds in Europe is significant, mainly in Germany.
In 1984 Abdullah Öcalan (The “Ö” is pronounced approximately OE and the Turkish “C” as a and or one ch. If you say Ochalanwill close enough to the real pronunciation), a young intelligent and fighter Kurdish, filled the pages of the world’s newspapers. Öcalan, after a random youth, found in Marxism and Leninism the response to his concerns as a fighter for his people. In that year, the party he had created in 1978, the Kurdistan or PKK workers party, declared the armed struggle against Türkiye.
Its objective was to constitute a Kurdish country in the east of Türkiye. Where the largest Kurdish population in the world lives, for decades they were forbidden to speak their own language. They were called “Turks of the mountains” and it was intended that they did not exist as a differentiated people. This systematic denial was one more reason for the existence of one of the oldest guerrillas of the twentieth century.
In a very short time, Öcalan became a reference for the entire region and beyond. He was persecuted in his intense movements in different countries, until in an operation in which different intelligence services participated, including, there was no more, the CIA and the Mossad, was arrested in Kenya and sentenced to life imprisonment on the island of Imrali, in the Turkish Marmara Sea.
But it was there that, isolated for years, Öcalan formulated his own theories that, without abandoning his position of liberation and militancy, incorporating ideas about feminism, ecologism and others from his sociological studies, ended up imagining an own social organization, which he called “Democratic Confederalism”, For the Kurdish people. The Kurds who participated in the armed struggle against the Bashar Al-Assad government adopted it in Syria.
The Red Autonomous Project was established, at least nominally, in the area dominated by the so -called Syrian Democratic Forces.
The Kurds in Syria are the most frequent today in the press for the events of that region. There they faced a strange collection of enemies and joined a no less rare alliance. They fought against the Turkish army on the border, which the Turks crossed without asking permission from the Assad government.
On the other hand, they faced the terrorists of the Islamic State (or ISIS, or Daesh), who came to establish in the nearby city of Raqaa The capital of its state dominated by an extreme version of Islam and, incidentally, owned the oil fields of Syria.
Your friends? Well, the United States, which saw them as a wedge to enter the coveted scenario of Syria’s internal war, and in particular in the fight against the Islamic State.
The United States’s interest was not difficult to understand. The Kurdos of Northern Iraq, separated by the work and grace of the borders that the winners of the First World War, had acquired a great autonomy of Baghdad thanks to the US troops, which rescued them from the hostility of Saddam Hussein, and also became the United States war preparation base against Iraq in 2003. Today the dominant family, Barzaniit is one of its strongest allies.
Something more about Öcalan
Abdullah Öcalan remains a central figure for the Kurdish movement. For millions of them, it is a symbol of resistance and freedom. For the Turkish state, it is still a terrorist.
Since February He had made public The evolution of his thinking in a message in which he asked the Kurdistan Workers Party depose weapons and seek “integration into the state and society.”
More recently, Öcalan made from prison Another important appeal last July 9, asking the Kurdish forces to adopt the peaceful road in politics towards Türkiye. He asked the PKK to depose the weapons and consider the dissolution of the armed movement, to seek “full democracy” through non -violent political mechanisms.
Publicly, this appeal was known days before the publicized process of self -devoting me began, on July 11, 2025, with symbolic ceremonies in the Iraqi Kurdistan.
The peace proposals of Abdullah Öcalan were favorably welcomed by the Kurds of Northern Iraq. Leaders of the regional government of Kurdistan, such as Nechirvan Barzani, and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) considered them an opportunity to reduce tensions and suppress Turkish attacks in northern Iraq, where the PKK maintains bases.
In Iran, the Kurds’ response is more diverse. The main local political organizations have reacted positively and some leaders have explored negotiations with Tehran. However, the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), which has been loyal to Öcalan, has rejected the renunciation of weapons.
Öcalan’s influence is significant, but regional dynamics limit the real possibilities of a peace process.
Erdogan’s concerns
Since the beginning of the year, the president of Türkiye, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had expressed disposition to the dialogue about the Kurdish problem, although always from his approach as part of a war against terrorism. “We have a historical opportunity to move towards the objective of destroying the wall of terror,” He indicated then.
He has now supported Öcalan’s proposal publicly, as an opportunity for peace. Key officials, including intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin, met with a Kurdish delegation and traveled to Baghdad to coordinate the logistics aspects of the process.
From the prison, Öcalan declared in a televised message: “The PKK movement and its ‘National Liberation Strategy’, which arose as a reaction to the denial of existence [de los kurdos] And, therefore, he sought to establish an independent state, they have dissolved. ”
“Existence has been recognized [de los kurdos]; Therefore, the fundamental objective has been achieved. In this sense, its time has come. ”
It remains to be seen. Not everyone feels so optimistic. The support is great, but many feel that the worst, discrimination – and everything that accompanies it – at a social level has not disappeared. Certainly, the closest political parties celebrate this process, the governmental as well, but as a victory over terrorism.
Details that are not minor, such as the freedom of Öcalan. The other Turkish enclaves support and doubt. The closest ones, those of Syria, share both joy and skepticism. It would be necessary to look in the books if one day a process of ratification of such a complex identity occurred in the story.
There will not be, at least in this phase and for a long time, a Kurdish state. The division will survive in the different current enclaves, unpredictably in Syria, with little information about Iran, and in Iraq, where they have a great influence on the country’s government and autonomy is recognized; The wind clearly blows in your favor.
Everything decided in Türkiye, and apparently, the game has been sealed for a long time, after 41 years of armed struggle and 40 thousand dead. The region’s policy is in a moment of redefinitions that can alter several assumptions and several realities. Perhaps, when you go to the more or less definitive analyzes, there is space to treat the historical tragedy of the Kurdish people.
