The Kurds represent a unique human condition in their existence and their struggle for life. They are among the few peoples who were stranded in history and their suffering was distributed among three countries: Turkey, Iraq, and Iran.

They have sacrificed enough and it is time for them to regain their right because they are considered a great nation that contributed to the making of Islamic civilization and provided martyrs and leaders. They established the Ayyubid state, which had great contributions in confronting the Crusades, and preserving the region from the Crusader oppression launched by the kings of the European sects.

Undoubtedly, the Kurds are not new to the region and are not a burden as the Turks try to describe them. They belong to a unique indigenous race. They were never a part of the Turkish race; so that they could ignore them and despise their demands and rights.

More than 30 million Kurds inhabit this region of the world, who did not descend from Mars, but are an authentic people who grew up in the region between western Iran to the Mediterranean Sea and from northern Syria to the end of Anatolia in central Turkey.

The Kurdish struggle is long and continuous for the sake of life and to get their minimum rights from the Turkish occupiers. The Kurds are among the few nations in the world that are still under occupation and have not obtained their independence and the right to self-determination. They are a part of the suffering of a people whose roots are deep in the East, thousands of years before the Turkish reign. On the other hand, the Turkish-Uyghur race came from East Asia, immigrating to the Kurdish lands in Diyarbakir and Anatolia, and occupied them claiming its right to them, establishing its empire at the expense of the Kurds.

With the end of the Ottoman Empire, the first clearly defined Kurdish uprising against the Ottoman Turkish occupation began in 1880 AD, demanding its rights, followed by smaller uprisings, but it adopted those legitimate demands, until the conflict escalated with the birth of the Turkish Republic by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and until today.

In 1924, the Kurdish militant Sheikh Said Piran (Seîdê Pîranî) assumed the presidency of the Kurdish Azadi Association, which established a liberation movement against Turkish rule to obtain their national rights, which came after the great rise of Turkish racism that glorified the Turkish race and adopted hostility to other peoples and races, especially Arabs, Armenians and Kurds. The Turkish government led a comprehensive campaign to eliminate the Kurdish struggle. That campaign led to the killing, displacement and expulsion of the struggling families, and the dispersal of innocent people in the Turkish south, where most of the Kurds live.

Sheikh Said Al Kurdi led his popular movement, which included 14 states that represented most of the Kurdish lands in southeastern Turkey, in which about 600,000 Kurds participated, according to many sources. As for the Kurdish narratives, they confirmed the participation of many Circassians, Arabs, Armenians and Assyrians who believed in the project of liberation against the Turkish occupation.

The Turkish oppression of the Kurds did not stop, as they made them inferior to the Turks and underestimated them. However, in 1973 a small group of Kurdish militants under the leadership of Abdullah Oglan (Ebdullah Ocelan) issued a national declaration confirming the preservation of Kurdish identity in Turkey.  In 1974, the group decided to start a campaign for the rights of their people.

The dispute with the Turks grew with the launch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (partiya karkerên Kurdistan) in 1978, which took upon itself the issue of the struggle against the Turkish occupation. During the long period of conflict, Turkey’s Kurds lived through a dark and bleak period of oppression, intimidation, denial, and ethnic assimilation into Turkish nationalism. The matter reached the point of forcing the Kurds to disavow their origin, language, culture and national identity.

If we want to summarize the suffering of the Kurdish people, we can say:

Today’s Turks are not better than their Ottoman predecessors. Since their occupation of the Kurdish lands, the “Ottoman” Turkish governments have launched organized military genocide operations against the Kurdish people, especially in the isolated regions of Diyarbakir, where military and repressive provisions are applied that no occupier had used.

Among those unjust measures imposed by the Turkish occupier on the Kurdish people are the prohibition of the use of the Kurdish language, the prohibition of manifestations of Kurdish identity, and the abolition of Kurdish heritage, dances, feasts and Kurdish events. All this is in addition to the imprisonment of prominent leaders and their displacement from their original homes, limiting their movements and transferring them to northern Turkish cities, in addition to depriving the Kurds of the sensitive public jobs.