Kurdistan History and suppression. The Europe of the East, Turkey, Iraqi, Iran, Syria, Asian Kurds.

Kurds are united by language and culture, but divided by politics and religion. The Kurds are notoriously fractious, with political formations based on diverse formal ideologies, as well as more traditional clan-based rivalries.

Most Kurds are Sunni, some are Shia, and a few are Yazidi. This complexity produces interesting results, as in late 2014 when the Islamist government of Turkey allowed "good" Kurds from Iraq to relieve the siege of Kobane, while prohibiting such aid from the "bad" Kurds of the secular Kurdish groups in Turkey and Syria.

The Kurd population, stretching across at least 4 countries, with a diaspora in many more, historically has been hard to quantify. In 1987, estimates suggested that probably numbering close to 16 million kurds, inhabits the wide arc from eastern Turkey and the northwestern part of Syria through Soviet Azerbaijan and Iraq to the northwest of the Zagros Mountains in Iran, respresented the population of what has been referred to as "Kurdistan.

" About half of all Kurds worldwide lived in Turkey. Most of the rest lived in adjacent regions of Iran, Iraq, and Syri.