Dealing a heavy blow to the Kurdish government, Iraqi forces took control of the two largest oil fields in the disputed northern province of Kirkuk on Tuesday. The move comes after Kurds voted for independence in a referendum last month
In mountainous Mesopotamia
About 35 million Kurds, one of the indigenous people of the Mesopotamian highlands, inhabit the mountainous region straddling the borders of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran and Armenia. “They form a distinctive community, united through race, culture and language, even though they have no standard dialect,” according to BBC
Majority Sunnis
In a Pew survey conducted in 2014, 98 per cent of Kurds in Iraq identified themselves as Sunnis and only 2 per cent identified as Shias. A small minority of Iraqi Kurds, including Yazidis, are not Muslims. In Iran, the Kurds were split about evenly between Sunnis and Shias.
No country for Kurds
They make up the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East, but they have never obtained a permanent nation state. In the early 20th century, many Kurds started considering the creation of a homeland. In the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, after the World War I, Western allies made provision for a Kurdish state.
But three years later, the Treaty of Lausanne, which set the boundaries of modern Turkey, made no provision for a Kurdish state and left the Kurds with a minority status in their respective countries. Over the next 80 years, any move by the Kurds to set up an independent state was brutally quashed, BBC adds