For a people without a country, the dream of statehood is not merely political—it is existential. The Kurds, a mountainous people of shepherds and warriors, are the largest ethnic group in the world without a state. Numbering between 40 and 45 million, they are scattered across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. This dispersion has been their curse. The tyranny of geography explains why their history is a cycle of broken promises, strategic betrayals, and an unfulfilled dream.

The modern Kurdish tragedy began after World War I, when the victors carved the Ottoman Empire into new states. The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres dangled the possibility of Kurdish independence, but it was abandoned in the Treaty of Lausanne three years later. The Arabs gained Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq; the Armenians were promised a state, yet the Kurds were left stateless on their ancestral lands. That initial betrayal shaped everything that followed: the Kurds became too numerous to be ignored, too divided to unify, and too inconvenient for great powers to support.

Kurdish history is littered with instances of being used and discarded. The short-lived Mahabad Republic in northwestern Iran, founded in 1946 with Soviet backing, collapsed within a year when Stalin withdrew his support. In Iraq, Mullah Mustafa Barzani launched a potent insurgency in the 1960s.

Israel, following David Ben-Gurion’s “Periphery Doctrine,” provided arms and training to weaken Baghdad. But in 1975, when the Shah of Iran reached a deal with Saddam........

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