History of Kurdish land.It has been said that the Kurds are the largest stateless minority in the world, living in a historic Middle Eastern area for about 1000 years. With an estimated population of thirty-forty million, half of that population in eastern Turkey, six to seven million in Iran, close to five millions in Iraq and more than 1.6 million in Syria. Their lineage dates back to early 2400 BC, when they occupied the same lands as they do today . The map below (Fig 1) indicates how Kurdistan is located amongst other surrounding countries and the chart below (fig 2), presents an approximate population of Kurdish people in each of the nations comprising and surrounding the Kurdistan region. Figure 1: Map of Kurdish-inhabited areas Figure 2 the population of Kurds . 1.7 Establishment of the Kurdistan Regional Government: Historically self-government of the Kurdish region has been under dispute between the Kurds and the central Ottoman Empire . In 1920, Treaty of Sevres created the modern states of Iraq and Syria, which made efforts to provide for an autonomous Republic of Kurdistan. However, this plan was never executed and in 1923, it was superceded by the Treaty of Lausanne, which no longer supported Kurdish autonomy, but rather it divided up the previous Ottoman Kurdistan area into re- boundaried nations of Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq . Much late, in the 1970s the Kurds had an opportunity to sign a legal autonomy agreement with Iraqi state to create a semi-autonomous region around Arbil, Dohuk and Sulaimaniya in the north of Iraq, But ultimately, this did not succeed due to clashes over oil-rich areas such as Kirkuk, which remains to this day a ‘somewhat disputed territory’ with a tense mix of ethnicities and power-sharing. After the Kuwait invasion by Iraq in 1991, the Kurds held their first free elections in 1992 and Iraqi Kurdistan was recognised by the Iraq central government as a federal region consisting of the three provinces named above. Since that time, the Kurds have had their own parliament, a President (Massoud Barzani) and commanded their own security forces .
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 19:28:05 +0000
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