KURDISTAN

Arabic Kurdestan, Persian Kordestan, traditional region, an extensive plateau and mountain area inhabited mainly by Kurds, including large parts of what are now eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and northwestern Iran and smaller parts of northern Syria and Armenia. Of these, only Iran recognizes an area with the name Kordestan. The name Kurdistan (Land of the Kurds) refers to an area that roughly includes the mountain systems of the Zagros and the eastern extension of the Taurus. Since very early times the area has been the home of the Kurds, a people whose ethnic origins are uncertain. For 600 years after the Arab conquest and their conversion to Islam, the Kurds played a recognizable and considerable part in the troubled history of western Asia, but as tribes, individuals, or turbulent groups rather than as a nation. Among the petty Kurdish dynasties that arose during this period the most important were the Shaddadids, ruling a predominantly Armenian population in the Ani and Ganja districts of Transcaucasia (9511174); the Marwanids of Diyarbakir (9901096); and the Hasanwaihids of Dinavar in the Kermanshah region (9591015). Less is written of the Kurds under the Mongols and Turkmens, but they again became prominent in the wars between the Ottomans and the Safavids. Several Kurdish principalities developed and survived into the first half of the 19th century, notably those of Bohtan, Hakari, Bahdinan, Soran, and Baban in Turkey and of Mukri and Ardelan in Persia. But Kurdistan, though it played a considerable part in the history of western Asia, never enjoyed political unity. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, and particularly with the encouragement of U.S. President Woodrow Wilsonone of whose Fourteen Points stipulated that the non-Turkish nationalities of the Ottoman Empire should be assured of an absolute unmolested opportunity of autonomous developmentKurdish nationalists looked to the eventual establishment of a Kurdistani state. The Treaty of Svres, signed in 1920 by representatives of the Allies and of the sultan, provided for the recognition of the three Arab states of Hejaz, Syria, and Iraq and of Armenia and, to the south of it, Kurdistan, which the Kurds of the Mosul vilayet (province), then under British occupation, would have the right to join. Owing to the military revival of Turkey under Kemal Atatrk, this treaty was never ratified. It was superseded in 1923 by the Treaty of Lausanne, which confirmed the provision for the Arab states but omitted mention of Armenia and Kurdistan. Mosul was excluded from the settlement, and the question of its future was referred to the League of Nations, which in 1925 awarded it to Iraq. This decision was made effective by the Treaty of Ankara, signed in 1926 by Turkey, Iraq, and Great Britain. See also Kurd.