The Kurds are a people divided between four countries: Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. This reflects the fact that state boundaries were drawn in many parts of the world depending on factors other than ethnic homogeneity, reflecting the relative reach and control of territory by states that included peoples of the same ethnic origin, in the process dividing them.

Closer to home, we can refer to the similar case of divided ethnic groups and nationalities: the Baloch (Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan) and the Pashtuns (Pakistan and Afghanistan). In the case of the Kurds, despite the division, sentiments of solidarity and expressed desire for self-determination in the shape of a unified Kurd state have been part of their history.

However, the divisions into different states have proved stronger than this aspiration, leading to struggles by the Kurds within the confines of the respective states they find themselves in.

The Iraqi Kurds fought a long guerrilla war against their state for independence, led by Mulla Mustafa Barzani and his Peshmerga fighters from 1961 to 1975, but were eventually defeated, leading to the exile of Barzani in the Soviet Union and Iran, where he eventually died in 1979.

After the overthrow of Saddam by the US in 2003, the Iraqi Kurds, now led by Mustafa’s son Masoud Barzani, gained autonomous control of their oil-rich territory in northern Iraq in a tenuous alliance with........

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