Background on the Kurdish Conflict

Turkey is a secular country that is 99% Muslim. About 20% of the population of Turkey is made of Kurdish people, who reside in the southeastern region. Kurds are also settled in the regions of northern Iraq, northern Syria, and eastern Iran. They look similar to Turks, but have a different language and culture.

Turkey refuses to acknowledge its Kurdish population. They do not have a ‘Kurdish’ option on their census, and they refer to them as ‘Mountain Turks.’ For a while the Kurdish language and Kurdish holidays were illegal, although this is no longer the case. Many Kurds speak Kurdish as their first language, and cannot even speak Turkish.

A Kurdish separatist group exists known as the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). During the 1990’s there was intense fighting between Turkey and the PKK that was on the order of a civil war. This reached a peak in ’91 when tons of Kurds fled into Turkey from northern Iraq after the Gulf War. This fighting raged until the former leader of the PKK was captured in 1999. Since then, the majority of the PKK has been pushed back into Iraq, where they are much less active than they were in the 90’s. They did however announce an end to their ceasefire in 2004.

Iraq is divided between three groups of people: Sunni Arab Muslims, Shiite Arab Muslims, and Kurds. The boundary of Iraq was drawn arbitrarily to include three groups of people who should not be together. Saddam’s reign of terror was the only thing that kept the country under control and prevented civil war. This is why America is having such a hard time creating a stable democratic state. If we were to leave the situation right now, Iraq would erupt into a civil war. The option of dividing Iraq into three independent states is strongly opposed by Turkey. They are worried that the creation of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq would encourage their own Kurdish population to revolt and break off. Understandably Turkey does not want to lose land, but do they really have the right to hold onto this group of people that they oppress?

After leaving Turkey our ship was heading to Europe, so this was my last chance to get in deep. The Kurdish conflict was one of the issues that I had been following before I left for this trip, and I was really excited to go to the region and see it for myself. It looked like I was going to go it alone, but the night before we docked in Istanbul I got my journalist buddy Jeff to come. As it would work out we wouldn’t see a single other westerner for four days and this would turn out to be one of the richest experiences of my trip.