Kurdish refugees

The problem of Kurdish refugees and displaced people arose in the 20th century in the Middle East, and continues today. The Kurds (Kurdish: کورد, Kurd), are an ethnic group in Western Asia, mostly inhabiting a region known as Kurdistan, which includes adjacent parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.

Displacements of Kurds had already been happening within the Ottoman Empire, on the pretext of suppressing Kurdish rebellions, over the period of its domination of the northern Fertile Crescent and the adjacent areas of the Zagros and Taurus Mountains. In the early 20th century, the Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire suffered genocide (especially during the First World War and the Turkish War of Independence), and many Kurds whose tribes opposed the Turks were displaced at the same time.^[1]

In Iraq, suppression of Kurdish aspirations for autonomy and independence have descended into armed conflict since the 1919 Mahmud Barzanji revolt. Displacement of people became most severe during the Iraqi-Kurdish conflict and the parallel Arabization programs of the Ba'athist regime,^[2] which looked to cleanse Iraqi Kurdistan of its Kurdish majority. Tens of thousands of Kurds became displaced and fled the war zones following the First and Second Kurdish Iraqi Wars in the 1960s and 1970s. The Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s, the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, and subsequent rebellions altogether created several million primarily Kurdish refugees, who mostly found refuge in Iran, while others dispersed into the Kurdish diaspora in Europe and the Americas. Iran alone provided asylum for 1,400,000 Iraqi refugees, mostly Kurds, who had been uprooted as a result of the Persian Gulf War (1990–91) and the subsequent rebellions. Today, a large portion of the Kurdish population is composed of Kurdish refugees and displaced and their descendants.