Introduction The Rojava revolution is the most significant experiment in Kurdish self-governance since the Republic of Mahabad. When the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011 and the Assad regime withdrew its forces from northeastern Syria in 2012, Kurdish fighters of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) filled the vacuum, establishing an autonomous administration across three cantons: Kobani, Afrin, and Jazira. What followed was a decade of

Introduction Iranian Kurdistan — known to Kurds as Rojhilat (the East) — has been the site of armed conflict between Kurdish organisations and the Iranian state for over a century. From the Simko Shikak revolt of 1918 to the Republic of Mahabad in 1946, from the post-revolutionary rebellion of 1979 to the Iranian missile strikes on Kurdish opposition camps in Iraq in 2022, the struggle for Kurdish rights in Iran has been marked by insurgency, assassination, exile, and cross

Introduction The conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is the longest-running armed conflict in modern Kurdish history. From the PKK’s first attacks in 1984 to the ceasefire and disarmament announcement of 2025, the insurgency has lasted over four decades, killed tens of thousands of people on all sides, displaced millions, and shaped the political landscape of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and the broader Middle East. This article traces the ma

Introduction Between the Anfal genocide of 1988 and the independence referendum of 2017, Iraqi Kurdistan experienced three decades of upheaval that transformed it from a devastated, stateless territory into a functioning autonomous region with its own parliament, military, and foreign relations. This article covers the defining events of that transformation: the 1991 uprising (Raperin) that created the safe haven, the Kurdish civil war that nearly destroyed it, the 2003 Ira

Introduction The collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 was supposed to create an opportunity for Kurdish independence. The Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 promised a Kurdish state. Instead, the postwar settlement produced the opposite: Kurdistan was divided between four new nation-states — Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria — and the Kurdish revolts of the 1918–1947 period were crushed one by one. This era produced the Simko Shikak revolt in Iran, Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji’s Kingdom of K

Introduction The nineteenth century was the century in which the Kurdish emirates died. For three hundred years, Kurdish principalities had governed their own territories under loose Ottoman suzerainty, maintaining autonomous armies, hereditary rulers, and internal self-governance. But in the 1830s and 1840s, the Ottoman Empire’s modernising reforms — the Tanzimat — demanded the elimination of all autonomous power centres within the empire, including the Kurdish emirates th

Introduction From the sixteenth century onward, Kurdistan became the most contested frontier in the Islamic world. The Ottoman and Safavid empires fought for control of the region for over 150 years, and the Kurdish emirates that lay between them were forced to choose sides, resist both, or be destroyed. The Battle of Chaldiran in 1514 — the decisive engagement that established Ottoman dominance over eastern Anatolia — was fought with Kurdish support and transformed Kurdist

Introduction Saladin died in Damascus in 1193, but the Kurdish dynasty he founded would fight on for another sixty years. The later Ayyubid period was defined by three existential threats: the Crusader invasions of Egypt, the Khwarazmian mercenary hordes displaced by the Mongol expansion, and finally the Mongols themselves. The Ayyubid sultans who succeeded Saladin defended Egypt against the Fifth and Seventh Crusades, won one of the most devastating battles in Crusader his

Introduction Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub — Saladin — was born into a Kurdish family in Tikrit in 1138 and became the most famous Muslim military commander in history. His career transformed the medieval Near East: he overthrew the Fatimid Caliphate, united Egypt and Syria under a single Kurdish dynasty, destroyed the Crusader field army at the Battle of Hattin, recaptured Jerusalem, and fought Richard the Lionheart to a standstill during the Third Crusade. No Kurdish figur

Introduction While the Hasanwayhids and Annazids fought for control of the central Zagros, and the Marwanids dominated Diyar Bakr, two other Kurdish dynasties were building empires far to the north and east. The Shaddadids ruled in Armenia and Arran (modern western Azerbaijan) from 951 to 1199 — one of the longest-ruling Kurdish dynasties in history. The Rawadids controlled Tabriz and Iranian Azerbaijan from approximately 955 to 1071. Together, they extended Kurdish politic

Introduction In the late tenth century, a shepherd named Badh ibn Dustak left his cattle, took up arms, and carved out a kingdom. Within years, this Kurdish tribal warrior from the Humaydi tribe controlled a realm stretching from Diyarbakır to the shores of Lake Van — one of the most strategically important territories in the medieval Near East. The Marwanid dynasty he founded would rule Diyar Bakr for a century, governing the cities of Amid (Diyarbakır), Mayyafariqin (Silv

Introduction As the Abbasid Caliphate weakened in the tenth century, the Kurdish highlands that had resisted imperial control for centuries finally produced something new: Kurdish states. For the first time in the Islamic era, Kurdish dynastic families — the Aishanids, the Hasanwayhids, and the Annazids — established autonomous principalities in the Zagros mountains and the Iran-Iraq frontier zone. These were not tribal chieftaincies; they were organised states with fortifi

Introduction In 637 CE, the Arab-Muslim armies that had already shattered the Sasanian Empire at the Battle of Qadisiyyah swept northward into the Kurdish highlands. Within a few years, the territories that had been the frontier zone between Rome and Persia for centuries were absorbed into the rapidly expanding Islamic Caliphate. For the Kurdish tribes, this was a seismic transformation: the empires they had navigated between for generations were gone, replaced by a new pow

Introduction For nearly five centuries, the territories that now make up Kurdistan were the principal battlefield of the ancient world's two greatest empires. From Trajan's invasion of Mesopotamia in 115 CE to the death of the Emperor Julian on the banks of the Tigris in 363 CE, Rome and Persia fought a succession of devastating wars across the mountains, river valleys, and fortress cities of the Kurdish highlands. The names that echo through these campaigns — Nisibis, Sing

Introduction In the armies that fought across the Hellenistic Near East — from the great Seleucid campaigns to the battlefields where Rome first clashed with eastern powers — one group of mountain fighters kept appearing in the record: the Cyrtians. Known in Greek as Kyrtioi and in Latin as Cyrtii, these Zagros highland warriors were prized as specialist slingers, recruited by every major power of the era. They fought for rebel satraps and for the kings who crushed them. Th

Introduction Before the Medes united to bring down the Assyrian Empire, the Zagros highlands were already a battleground. For centuries, Assyrian kings launched punitive campaigns into the mountain region they called Zamua — a territory of independent highland chiefs, fortified passes, and fiercely resistant populations that sat on Assyria's eastern frontier. Zamua corresponds to the modern Sulaymaniyah Governorate of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and the Assyrian campaigns

Introduction Between the mountains south of Lake Van and the turbulent waters of the upper Tigris, a small kingdom once stood at the crossroads of the ancient world's greatest empires. Gordyene — also known as Corduene, Beth Qardu, or Korduk’ — was a highland state that survived for centuries by navigating the rivalries of Rome, Parthia, and Armenia. It was never a great power in its own right, but its strategic position, its fierce people, and its stubborn independence mad

Introduction In the autumn of 401 BCE, ten thousand Greek mercenaries found themselves stranded deep inside the Persian Empire. Their employer, the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger, was dead — killed at the Battle of Cunaxa. Their generals had been murdered through treachery. Thousands of miles from home, surrounded by hostile forces, they had to fight their way north through unknown territory toward the Black Sea coast. The most dangerous passage of that retreat was not ag

Introduction In 612 BCE, the largest city in the world burned. Nineveh — the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, seat of the greatest military power the ancient world had ever seen — was stormed and sacked by an alliance of Medes and Babylonians. The Assyrian king Sin-shar-ishkun died in the siege. Within three years, the last remnants of Assyrian resistance were crushed at Harran. An empire that had terrorised the Near East for centuries was finished. The force that led

Introduction High on a limestone cliff at Sar-i Pul-e Zahab, in what is now Iran's Kermanshah Province, a rock carving has looked down over the Zagros foothills for more than four thousand years. It depicts King Anubanini of the Lullubi — armed, triumphant, his foot planted on the chest of a defeated enemy — receiving divine authority from a goddess. It is one of the oldest rock reliefs in Iran, and it was carved by a people who left almost no written records of their own.