About Kurds & Kurdistan

Who are the Kurds?

The Kurds are an ethnic group indigenous to a mountainous region of the Middle East spanning parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, with smaller historic communities in Armenia and elsewhere. They speak Kurdish, a Northwestern Iranian language in the Indo-European family — making it a distant relative of Persian, but a distinct language in its own right, not a dialect of it.

No reliable census of Kurds exists, since none of the four countries where most Kurds live has ever conducted one that asks about Kurdish ethnicity in a way most Kurdish organizations consider trustworthy. As a result, estimates vary considerably depending on the source: most serious estimates place the total Kurdish population somewhere between 25 and 45 million, which would make Kurds the largest ethnic group in the world without their own internationally recognized state.

Where Kurdistan is

"Kurdistan" refers to the broad cultural and geographic region Kurds consider their homeland — not a recognized country, but a transnational area that overlaps the borders of four states. It is often described in four parts, each named from a Kurdish geographic perspective:

These names describe a shared cultural geography as Kurds themselves often frame it, not a claim of current political sovereignty over all four areas.

A history without a state

Kurds have inhabited the Zagros and Taurus mountain ranges for thousands of years, but a unified independent Kurdish state has never existed in the modern era. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres briefly proposed the possibility of Kurdish autonomy or independence. That provision was never implemented, and the subsequent Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 — which established the borders of modern Turkey — made no such provision, leaving Kurdish-populated areas divided among Turkey, the British and French mandates that became Iraq and Syria, and Iran.

The closest any Kurdish region has come to formal self-government is the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, an autonomous region with its own parliament, government, and security forces, recognized in the Iraqi constitution following the 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein. In 2017, a referendum in the Kurdistan Region produced an overwhelming vote in favor of independence, but the Iraqi federal government rejected the vote's legitimacy and it was not pursued further.

Language and dialects

Kurdish is not a single uniform language but a continuum of related dialects, the two largest of which — Kurmanji and Sorani — together account for the large majority of Kurdish speakers, yet are not mutually intelligible without prior exposure to the other.

• Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish) — the most widely spoken Kurdish dialect overall, used mainly in Turkey, Syria, and parts of northern Iraq. Written in a Latin-based alphabet.
• Sorani (Central Kurdish) — the second-largest dialect, spoken mainly in Iraq and Iran, and holds official status in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Written in a modified Arabic-based script.
• Pehlewani (Southern Kurdish) — spoken mainly in Iran's Ilam and Kermanshah provinces and parts of southern Iraqi Kurdistan.
• Zazaki and Gorani — closely related languages spoken by ethnic Kurds in eastern Turkey and parts of Iraq and Iran respectively; linguists debate whether to classify them as Kurdish dialects or as separate but closely related languages.

Religion and culture

Most Kurds are Sunni Muslims, often with a strong Sufi influence, but the Kurdish religious landscape is notably diverse for the region: it includes significant Shia Muslim, Alevi, Yazidi, and Yarsani (Ahl-e Haqq) communities, along with smaller historic populations of Zoroastrians, Christians, and Jews. This diversity is part of why Kurdish identity is generally understood as primarily ethnic and linguistic rather than religious.

Traditional Kurdish culture places strong emphasis on hospitality, oral poetry and storytelling, and communal dance — particularly the line and circle dances, govend and halparke, performed at celebrations including Newroz.

This site

Nowruz.com exists to give that shared culture a small, living presence online: a place to light a virtual bonfire alongside others around the world, marking the same New Year that has connected Kurdish communities across borders for thousands of years. See the Top 50 Kurdish Cities page for where many of those communities are today.