The Other Middle East Story: As the Post-Ottoman Order Frays, Kurdistan Reemerges
The airstrikes on Iran have dominated the headlines. The images are dramatic, the rhetoric sharper still: American and Israeli aircraft striking the Islamic Republic, the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Tehran’s retaliation. It feels like a hinge in the long confrontation between Israel and Iran.
But the deeper shift may not be over Tehran at all. It may be unfolding along a belt of mountains and plains stretching from southeastern Turkey through northern Iraq into northeastern Syria. The visible war is with Iran. The structural shift runs through Kurdistan.
For a century, Kurdish statehood has been constrained less by internal division than by external coordination. The Kurds—roughly 30 to 35 million people spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria—are the largest stateless ethnic group in the Middle East. Their fortunes have risen and fallen with each regional upheaval: after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, during the Cold War, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and in the fight against ISIS. Each time, autonomy expanded in crisis and contracted when neighboring states realigned.
That pattern was set in the aftermath of imperial collapse. When the Ottoman Empire disintegrated after World War I, its provinces were divided through wartime agreements and postwar treaties that reshaped the Middle East. The 1916 Sykes–Picot agreement mapped British and French spheres of influence across former Ottoman lands. The 1917 Balfour Declaration pledged support for a Jewish national home in Palestine. The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres included provisions for a possible Kurdish state. But three years later, the Treaty of Lausanne superseded it, fixing the borders of modern Turkey and abandoning Kurdish statehood. Kurdish-majority regions were partitioned among Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. The settlement did not eliminate Kurdish aspirations; it embedded them within four states whose leaders shared an interest in preventing secession.
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