Introduction In the twenty-third century BCE, the Akkadian Empire — the world's first multinational empire — dominated Mesopotamia from the Persian Gulf to the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates. Within a few generations, that empire had collapsed. Ancient Sumerian scribes blamed its destruction on a single force: the Gutians, a people from the Zagros Mountains who swept down into the lowlands, shattered Akkadian power, and imposed their own rule over Sumer for nearl

Introduction The Kurdish people have never had a unified national army. Instead, they have produced some of the most resilient and adaptable fighting forces in the modern Middle East — organisations that emerged from mountains, prisons, and refugee camps to become critical allies of the world's most powerful military coalition. This article traces the evolution of Kurdish military organisation from the partisan Peshmerga forces of Iraq through the emergence of the YPG, YPJ,

Introduction The war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was one of the defining conflicts of the early twenty-first century. For the Kurdish people, it was both an existential crisis and a moment of extraordinary military achievement. Between 2014 and 2019, Kurdish forces on two major fronts — the Peshmerga in Iraq and the YPG/YPJ-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria — fought and ultimately defeated the most powerful jihadist army the modern Middle Ea

Between February and September 1988, the Iraqi Baathist regime carried out a systematic military campaign against the Kurdish population of northern Iraq. The operation, code-named Anfal after a chapter of the Quran meaning "the spoils of war," was directed by Ali Hassan al-Majid — known as Chemical Ali — and involved mass executions, chemical weapons attacks, forced displacement, village destruction, and enforced disappearances on a scale that constituted genocide. An esti

For four decades, the name Barzani was synonymous with Kurdish armed resistance in Iraq. From Ahmed Barzani's revolt in 1931 to the collapse of Mustafa Barzani's final campaign in 1975, the Barzani family led a series of wars against the Iraqi state that created the Peshmerga as a recognised fighting force, tied down the majority of the Iraqi Army, and established the Kurdish national movement as a permanent feature of Iraqi politics. This is the military history of those r

Between 1925 and 1938, three major Kurdish revolts erupted in the newly founded Republic of Turkey. Each was crushed with escalating brutality. The Sheikh Said Rebellion of 1925 was the first major Kurdish uprising of the republican era. The Ararat Revolt of 1927–1930 attempted to establish a Kurdish republic on Mount Ararat. And the Dersim Rebellion of 1937–1938 ended with the devastation of an entire Kurdish-Alevi region. These three rebellions defined the interwar Kurdis

In the autumn of 1880, tens of thousands of armed Kurdish fighters crossed from Ottoman territory into Qajar Iran under the command of Sheikh Ubeydullah of Nehri. They captured towns, seized territory, and for a brief moment held a swathe of northwestern Iran under Kurdish control. It was the first time in modern history that a Kurdish leader had explicitly articulated the goal of a unified Kurdish state — and backed it with military force. The uprising failed. But it marke

For centuries, autonomous Kurdish emirates governed vast stretches of the Ottoman-Persian borderlands with little interference from Istanbul or Tehran. The emirs maintained their own armies, collected their own taxes, minted their own coins, and administered justice according to local custom. But in the early nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire launched a campaign of centralisation that would systematically destroy every Kurdish emirate, one by one. The result was a seri

No Kurdish commander in history has matched the military achievements of Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub — known to the Western world as Saladin. In a single campaign season in 1187, he destroyed the Crusader field army at Hattin, recaptured Jerusalem, and swept through nearly every Crusader stronghold in the Levant. Within five years, he had fought the Third Crusade to a standstill against Richard I of England and secured Muslim control over Jerusalem for the next eight centuri

Between the mid-tenth and late eleventh centuries, Kurdish dynasties ruled vast stretches of territory from the Zagros Mountains to the Caucasus, from the upper Tigris to the shores of the Caspian. These were not ceremonial kingdoms. They were forged in war, sustained by military force, and ultimately destroyed by it. The Hasanwayhids fought the Buyids for control of the central Zagros. The Annazids waged frontier wars on the Iran-Iraq border for over a century. The Marwani

Long before the name "Kurd" appeared in any chronicle, the mountains of the Zagros were already a battlefield. For more than two thousand years before the Common Era, highland peoples — Lullubi, Gutians, and later the Medes — fought wars against the most powerful empires of the ancient world. They raided Akkadian supply lines, conquered Sumerian cities, resisted Assyrian campaigns, and eventually brought down the Assyrian Empire itself. These were not Kurdish wars in the mo