Kurds

Kurds (Kurdish: کورد, romanized: Kurd), or the Kurdish people, are an Iranic ethnic group from West Asia. They are indigenous to Kurdistan, which is a geographic region spanning southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, and northeastern Syria. Consisting of 30–45 million people, the global Kurdish population is largely concentrated in Kurdistan, but significant communities of the Kurdish diaspora exist in parts of West Asia beyond Kurdistan and in parts of Europe, most notably including: Turkey's Central Anatolian Kurds, as well as Istanbul Kurds; Iran's Khorasani Kurds; the Caucasian Kurds, primarily in Azerbaijan and Armenia; and the Kurdish populations in various European countries, namely Germany, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

The Kurdish languages and the Zaza–Gorani languages, both of which belong to the Western Iranic branch of the Iranic language family, are the native languages of the Kurdish people. Other widely spoken languages among the community are those of their host countries or neighbouring regions, such as Turkish, Persian, or Arabic. The most prevalent religion among Kurds is Sunni Islam, with Shia Islam and Alevism being significant Islamic minorities. Yazidism, which is the ethnic religion of the Kurdish-speaking Yazidi people, is the largest non-Islamic minority religion among the broader Kurdish community, followed by Yarsanism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity.

Although they exercise autonomy in Iraq and in Syria, the Kurds are a stateless nation. The prospect of Kurdish independence, which is rooted in early Kurdish nationalism, has been the source of much ethnic and political tension in West Asia since the 19th century. In the aftermath of World War I and the partition of the Ottoman Empire, the victorious Western Allies made territorial provisions for the establishment of a Kurdish state, as outlined in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, but it was never ratified after being signed. Three years later, when the Treaty of Lausanne set the boundaries of the Turkish state, the Western Allies ceased their push for Kurdish statehood in the face of certain agreements and guarantees—chiefly Turkey's relinquishing of territorial claims over formerly Ottoman-ruled Arab lands in exchange for the Allies' recognition of Turkish sovereignty over all of Anatolia. As such, since the 20th century, the history of the Kurds has largely been marked by struggles for independence, predominantly in the Kurdish–Turkish conflict and the Iraqi–Kurdish conflict, and to a lesser extent in the Iranian–Kurdish conflict and the comparatively recent Syrian–Kurdish conflict.

The exact origins of the name Kurd are unclear. The underlying toponym is recorded in Assyrian as Qardu and in Middle Bronze Age Sumerian as Kar-da. Assyrian Qardu refers to an area in the upper Tigris basin, and it is presumably reflected in corrupted form in Classical Arabic Ǧūdī (جودي), re-adopted in Kurdish as Cûdî. The name would be continued as the first element in the toponym Corduene, mentioned by Xenophon as the tribe who opposed the retreat of the Ten Thousand through the mountains north of Mesopotamia in the 4th century BC.

There are, however, dissenting views, which do not derive the name of the Kurds from Qardu and Corduene but opt for derivation from Cyrtii (Cyrtaei) instead.

Regardless of its possible roots in ancient toponymy, the ethnonym Kurd might be derived from a term kwrt- used in Middle Persian as a common noun to refer to 'nomads' or 'tent-dwellers', which could be applied as an attribute to any Iranic group with such a lifestyle.

The term gained the characteristic of an ethnonym following the Muslim conquest of Persia, as it was adopted into Arabic and gradually became associated with an amalgamation of Iranic and Iranicized tribes and groups in the region.

The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland in 1923 claimed that the same way Kerman in Persian was Qarman in Syriac, Kurd in Persian was Qardu in Syriac, stating that "the Persian gurd or kurd, which seems to have been derived from a common origin with the Babylonian gardu or qardu, signifies 'brave', 'valiant', or 'warlike', and bravery and the love of fighting are the outstanding traits of the Kurdish character. From the Persians it passed into Arabic, whence it became the common European name of the Kurds."