Peoples of Iran EP.1 Kurds — 40 Million People With No Country

[00:00:10]40 million people, no country, no passport that says their name, no [music] seat at the United Nations, no flag flying over any capital city in the world. The Kurds are the largest ethnic group on Earth without [music] a state of their own. They are more numerous than the entire populations of Canada, Australia, or Saudi Arabia. They have their own language, >> [music] >> actually several related languages, their own culture, their own music, their own literature, their own distinct identity that stretches back thousands of years.

[00:00:42]And yet the map of the Middle East drawn by European powers a century ago divided them between four countries and told them they did not exist as a nation.

[00:00:51][music] Turkey calls them mountain Turks and has at various points in its history banned their language, their names, and their music.

[00:01:00]Iran has suppressed their political movements for decades. [music] Iraq under Saddam Hussein gassed them with chemical weapons, an act the UN formally recognized as genocide. [music] Syria has for most of its history denied them citizenship. And yet the Kurds are still here.

[00:01:18]40 million of them distributed across one of the most strategically contested pieces of land on Earth, maintaining an identity that has survived empire after empire.

[00:01:29]But where did the Kurds actually come from?

[00:01:32]The standard answer that they are descendants of the ancient Medes who overthrew the Assyrian Empire >> [music] >> is part of the story.

[00:01:39]DNA science now tells us that the full answer is considerably older, considerably more complex, and considerably more remarkable than any single origin myth can capture.

[00:01:52]This is the story of the Kurds, and it begins not in the 7th century before the common era, but in the Stone Age. To understand the Kurds, you first have to understand Kurdistan, [music] not as a political entity, but as a geographical reality that has [music] shaped everything about the people who live there.

[00:02:11]Kurdistan is a mountainous region centered on the Zagros and Taurus ranges, [music] spreading across southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and northern Syria.

[00:02:21]It is a landscape of dramatic contrasts, >> [music] >> high peaks over 4,000 m, deep river valleys carved by the Tigris and Euphrates, >> [music] >> and fertile plains where agriculture began.

[00:02:33]These mountains have always been both a refuge and a barrier. They sheltered the Kurds from the conquering armies that swept through the surrounding lowlands, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, [music] Arabs, Mongols, Ottomans. Empires could control the plains.

[00:02:52]The mountains were harder.

[00:02:54]>> [music] >> And so the people of the mountains persisted. Culture intact, language alive, identity [music] continuous, while the civilizations that tried to absorb them were replaced by new [music] ones. This geographic reality is the first key to understanding Kurdish survival. The second is genetic. The oldest evidence of settled human life in Kurdistan dates to 10,000 years ago, part of the Fertile Crescent where agriculture was independently invented.

[00:03:22]The people who built those first settlements predated any identifiable Kurdish tradition by thousands of years.

[00:03:28]But DNA analysis tells us their descendants never left. They are still there. The Kurds carry their genes.

[00:03:35]This enduring identity is not just a matter of culture, [music] but a deep biological connection to the cradle of civilization itself. The popular historical account of Kurdish origins begins with the Medes, an ancient Iranian-speaking people who established a powerful empire.

[00:03:52]Centered in northwestern Iran around 700 BCE, they destroyed the Assyrian empire in alliance with the Babylonians.

[00:04:00][music] They ruled a vast territory before being conquered in turn by the Persians under Cyrus the Great in 550 BCE.

[00:04:09]The linguistic connection between Median and modern Kurdish is [music] real. The geographic overlap between ancient Media and Kurdistan [music] is real. And DNA analysis of ancient remains has shown a high degree of genetic continuity [music] with modern Kurdish populations. The Kurds of today are, in a very meaningful biological sense, the descendants of the Medes. But they were not the beginning.

[00:04:33][music] Genetic research has revealed ancestry from multiple ancient layers [music] that predate the Medes by thousands of years. The deepest layer is early Neolithic farmer ancestry, [music] the genetic signature of the first agricultural communities in the Fertile Crescent. These were the people [music] who first domesticated wheat and barley, who first kept sheep and goats, building [music] the earliest permanent villages.

[00:04:58]Their descendants are disproportionately represented in modern Kurdish populations compared to most other groups in the broader Middle East. This suggests the Kurdish people are primarily the descendants of people who were already living in those mountains when [music] history began.

[00:05:13]When the Medes arrived with their Indo-European language, they did not replace the population. [music] They layered on top of it.

[00:05:21]The language changed, the political structure changed, but the people, the biological continuity of human generations, remained substantially in place.

[00:05:31]The most common Y chromosome haplogroup among Kurds is J2-M172, a lineage that originated in the ancient Middle [music] East.

[00:05:41]This haplogroup is also common among Jews, Armenians, and Assyrians, [music] groups with whom the Kurds share both genetic ancestry and geographic [music] proximity.

[00:05:53]The genetic data points to a shared ancient heritage that predates [music] the formation of any of these modern ethnic or religious identities.

[00:06:02]A secondary genetic component reflects the Indo-European migrations, [music] the step ancestry from Central Asia into the Middle East. The Hurrians complicate the picture [music] further. They were a non-Indo-European people who dominated the ancient Near East between 2300 and 1200 BCE.

[00:06:22]Genetic studies suggest that Hurrian ancestry may form part of the Kurdish substratum, a layer absorbed during the long process of [music] change.

[00:06:32]The result is a population that carries deep genetic roots in ancient communities, overlaid with migrations and traced [music] with ancient cultures. Kurdish is not one language.

[00:06:43]It is a family of closely related languages and dialects, all belonging to the northwestern Iranian branch.

[00:06:50]This makes Kurdish a distant cousin of Persian and a much more distant [music] cousin of English, German, Hindi, and Greek.

[00:06:57]A speaker from Diyarbakir and one from Sulaymaniyah may struggle to understand each other, yet the sense of shared identity is strong.

[00:07:07]What is remarkable about Kurdish is its survival. For most of its modern history, Kurdish has been suppressed by states. In Turkey, the language was officially banned from public life for decades. Publishing and broadcasting in Kurdish was illegal. Parents were prohibited from giving children Kurdish [music] names. The suppression was systematic, legally enforced, and maintained over generations.

[00:07:32]In Iran, cultural expression has been restricted. [music] And in Syria, Kurds were for decades legally stateless within their own birth country. In Iraq, the Bathist government's policy went beyond cultural suppression into outright elimination, and yet Kurdish survived. The language of the people of Mount Carda 3,000 years ago is still spoken by [music] 40 million people. It survived the Arab conquest, the Mongol invasions, the Ottoman absorption, and the nation-state [music] suppressions of the 20th century.

[00:08:05]Language is perhaps the most intimate carrier of identity, and the persistence [music] of Kurdish is itself a form of historical testimony.

[00:08:14]To understand why the Kurds have no state, you have to understand what happened in the years between 1918 and 1923, a period when the map of the Middle East was redrawn by European powers [music] who had never visited most of the territory they were dividing. The Ottoman Empire, which had controlled most of the Kurdish inhabited territories for four centuries, collapsed [music] after its defeat in the First World War. In its place, the victorious Allied powers set about creating new states [music] that would serve their strategic and economic interests in the region.

[00:08:49]The process was nakedly imperial.

[00:08:51]Borders were drawn in London and Paris >> [music] >> by diplomats consulting maps, not by the people who actually lived there.

[00:08:59]The Treaty of [music] Sèvres, signed in 1920, included provisions for a Kurdish autonomous [music] region and the possibility of Kurdish independence.

[00:09:09]It was the closest the Kurds had ever come to international recognition of their distinct national [music] identity.

[00:09:15]The possibility of a Kurdish state seemed real.

[00:09:19]It lasted 3 years. The Turkish nationalist movement under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk successfully [music] repudiated the Treaty of Sèvres.

[00:09:28]They negotiated a replacement, the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, that drew the borders without any provision for Kurdish autonomy. The territory was divided between Turkey, the British mandate of Iraq, the French mandate of Syria, and the new state of Iran.

[00:09:45]The Kurdish [music] question was set aside.

[00:09:48]The Kurds were told in effect that their national aspirations were inconvenient [music] and would not be accommodated.

[00:09:56]The consequences of this decision have shaped the Middle East for 100 years and continue [music] to shape it today.

[00:10:02]Every conflict in which Kurdish fighters have been involved traces back in some meaningful way to the broken promise of 1920.

[00:10:10]Of all the episodes of violence directed against the Kurdish people in the 20th century, one stands apart in scale and method. On March 16th, 1988, Iraqi aircraft flew over the town of Halabja [music] and dropped chemical weapons on its civilian population. The weapons included [music] mustard gas and nerve agents, substances developed for WWI, >> [music] >> now deployed against a town with no shelter.

[00:10:37]Between 3,500 and 5,000 people died in Halabja [music] on that single day.

[00:10:44]Thousands more died in subsequent weeks.

[00:10:47]The attack was part of a campaign called the Anfal, an Arabic term meaning the spoils of war, >> [music] >> directed by Saddam Hussein.

[00:10:56]The Anfal campaign involved chemical attacks, mass executions, and the [music] destruction of thousands of Kurdish settlements between 1986 and 1989.

[00:11:07]The United Nations formally recognized the Anfal campaign as a genocide in 2007.

[00:11:13]The Halabja [music] attack is the largest use against civilians in history. It happened within a political context [music] where the Iraqi government had both the motive and the means, including chemical weapons supplied by others. The full history is uncomfortable reading for anyone who believes the Western response [music] was primarily motivated by concern for human rights.

[00:11:36]The Kurds of Iraq have not forgotten Halabja.

[00:11:38]>> [music] >> It is commemorated every year.

[00:11:41]The memory of what a government was willing to do to them shapes every political calculation the Kurdish leadership has made since.

[00:11:48]The closest thing to a Kurdish state that exists [music] today is the Kurdistan region of Iraq, an autonomous region in the north of the country. It has its own parliament, military forces known as the Peshmerga, foreign relations, its [music] own flag, and a government functioning independently of Baghdad.

[00:12:08]The Kurdistan region emerged from the chaos following the 1991 Gulf War when a Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein was brutally suppressed. Millions of Kurds fled toward the Turkish and Iranian borders in one of the largest refugee [music] crises in Middle Eastern history. The US and allies established a no-fly zone over northern Iraq, effectively protecting the Kurdish population from further Iraqi air power.

[00:12:37]>> [music] >> Kurdish political parties, primarily the KDP and PUK, gradually built the institutions of a functioning administration in their territory. The 2003 invasion of Iraq and the collapse of the Ba'athist state accelerated [music] this process. The Kurdish Peshmerga were key military allies of the United States. Kurds secured constitutional recognition of their autonomous region and control over the city of Kirkuk and its surrounding oil fields. In 2017, the Kurdistan Regional Government held an independence referendum. Over 90% of voters supported independence.

[00:13:15]>> [music] >> The international community, including the United States, opposed the referendum. Baghdad responded by seizing disputed territories, including Kirkuk.

[00:13:25]The bid for independence collapsed, [music] but the region remains governing 6 million people in a territory roughly the size of Switzerland. [music] In Rojava, a Kurdish political movement established a self-governing administration built around a philosophy unlike anything else in the Middle East.

[00:13:43]>> [music] >> The ideology is called democratic confederalism, developed by Abdullah Öcalan, combining libertarian municipalism, feminism, ecology, and multi-ethnic democracy. The administration has established gender parity at every level. Every executive position is filled jointly by a man and a woman.

[00:14:04]It incorporates Arab, Assyrian, and other non-Kurdish minorities alongside the Kurdish majority, building a civil society with schools and courts.

[00:14:13]The Kurdish forces of Rojava, the Syrian Democratic Forces, played the central military role in the defeat of the Islamic State. They suffered thousands of casualties. The US provided air support, but when ISIS was defeated, the US largely withdrew its support.

[00:14:32]Turkey considers the Syrian Kurdish forces a terrorist organization.

[00:14:37]Military operations have repeatedly targeted Kurdish forces and civilian populations in Rojava.

[00:14:44]The Kurds find themselves in a precarious position, [music] praised as an effective fighting force, yet abandoned when their political survival is at stake. The 40 million Kurds of the contemporary world live in circumstances that vary enormously, depending on which side of which border they find themselves on.

[00:15:03]In Turkey, the approximately 20 million Kurds have experienced cycles of political opening and repression over the past three decades. [music] The peace process that briefly raised hopes for a political settlement collapsed in 2015, leading to renewed military conflict and political bans.

[00:15:21]Kurdish mayors have been removed and replaced by government-appointed trustees, [music] while parts of Diyarbakir's historical center were destroyed in military operations.

[00:15:31][music] In Iran, the 10 million Kurds live under an Islamic Republic where their ethnic nationalism finds little room for recognition or political movement. The 2022 uprising following the death of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, began in these regions and [music] carried a specifically Kurdish dimension. The slogan "Zan, Zendegi, Azadi" woman, life, >> [music] >> freedom, that became the motto of the uprising is itself a Kurdish phrase.

[00:16:01]And yet, across all these borders, something persists.

[00:16:06]The New Year celebration of Nowruz remains one of their most important cultural markers.

[00:16:12]The music, the dances, and the clothing maintain a remarkable consistency across [music] four countries despite decades of intense suppression.

[00:16:21]This cultural persistence is [music] a form of political statement. A woman in traditional dress asserts a continuity of identity that outlasted empires.

[00:16:30][music] She is saying, "We are still here.

[00:16:34]We have always been here."

[00:16:36]The Kurdish question is not peripheral.

[00:16:38][music] It is central to the Middle East.

[00:16:41]The post-war settlement and drawing of borders by European powers created this crisis by deciding that 40 million people did [music] not need a state.

[00:16:51]The consequences are still playing out in every military operation and refugee [music] flow that involves the territory of Kurdistan.

[00:17:00]The genetic evidence adds another layer.

[00:17:03]The Kurds are not newcomers. They carry the DNA of people who have been here for 10,000 years.

[00:17:09]The Neolithic farmers who first cultivated wheat in these valleys were their ancestors, >> [music] >> as were the Hurrians and the Medes. 40 million people.

[00:17:18]A genetic heritage reaching back to the dawn of agriculture. A language and culture that survived 30 empires.

[00:17:26]>> [music] >> The map said they did not exist as a nation. The people said otherwise, and they have been saying so for a very long time.

[00:17:34]This is the first episode in our series on the peoples of Iran.

[00:17:38]The extraordinary mosaic who have lived around the Iranian Plateau.

[00:17:43]In the next episode, we go deeper to find the Luers. A people who may be the closest living descendants of Iran's original prehistoric inhabitants.

[00:17:53]Subscribe to Hidden Origins so you don't miss it. Drop a comment below.

[00:17:58]What do you think the world owes the largest people without a state?