Who are the Kurds?

As part of its plan to unify the country following 14 years of brutal civil war, Syria’s government announced it had reached a ceasefire agreement with the secular-led, Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) on Sunday. Under the agreement, the government will take over land held by the Kurdish armed group. Despite this, Syria’s army and the SDF both reported ongoing gun battles in the country on Monday, in particular around a prison holding ISIL (ISIS) members in the town of al-Shadadi. President Ahmed al-Sharaa said the Syrian Army would take control of three eastern and northeastern provinces – Raqqa, Deir Az Zor and Hasakah – from the SDF as part of the deal. On Monday, an official from Syria’s Defence Ministry said government-affiliated forces had arrived on the outskirts of the Kurdish-led city of Hasakah in the country’s northeast per this agreement. The SDF is now to be integrated into Syria’s defence and interior ministries as part of a broader 14-point agreement. Al-Sharaa’s government pledged to reunify Syria following the ousting of former President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. On Friday, al-Sharaa issued a decree declaring Kurdish a “national language” and granting the minority group official recognition. “What [we] are witnessing now in the region is the end of the SDF,” Omar Abu Layla, a Syrian affairs analyst, told Al Jazeera.

The SDF in Syria represents the struggle of the Kurdish people, an ethnic group present across the Middle East. The Kurds are a group of people who are indigenous to the Mesopotamian plains and nearby highlands which, today, stretch across southeastern Turkiye, northeastern Syria, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran and southwestern Armenia. The Kurdish population is concentrated in these areas, which are collectively referred to as Kurdistan. Kurds are, therefore, spread across several different countries in the Middle East and do not have a state of their own. They also have a large diaspora population, primarily in Germany but also in other European countries including France, the Netherlands and Switzerland. There are between 30 and 40 million Kurdish people around the globe. Kurds are widely understood to be the largest stateless ethnic group in the world, connected by a shared culture and the Kurdish language. Kurdish, a Northwestern Iranian language, has several distinct dialects that vary by region. Most historians agree that Kurds constitute the Iranian branch of the Indo‑European peoples. While most Kurds are Sunni Muslims, there are also Kurdish communities that follow Shia Islam, Alevism, Yazidism, Christianity and other faiths.

The Kurds lost their lands in the 1500s when the Ottoman Empire took over most Kurdish-held territory. The Ottoman Empire was dissolved by the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, a post-World War I peace treaty. Under this, the Allied powers proposed creating an autonomous Kurdistan. This was seen as a major breakthrough for the emerging Kurdish nationalist movement, but the treaty never came into force. Turkiye later renegotiated the post-war settlement with the Allies, and the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne dropped the idea of a self-governing Kurdistan altogether. Since then, Kurds have repeatedly tried to establish their own state, but those efforts have so far failed. In each of the four nations, Kurds have endured years of tricky relations with respective governments. Kurds make up about 10 percent of the population in Syria, according to the CIA World Factbook. Syria’s Kurds have experienced repression and unfair treatment. In 1962, a special census in al-Hasakah province stripped about 120,000 Kurds of Syrian citizenship. Their children and grandchildren remained stateless, and later estimates from early 2011 put the number of Kurds without citizenship at around 300,000. Kurdish land has also been distributed to Arab communities under Arabisation policies. The Kurds were initially neutral when the uprising against al-Assad began in 2011 and escalated into a civil war. However, in 2012, Syrian government troops pulled out of many Kurdish areas, and Kurdish groups took control. In 2013, fighters from ISIL (ISIS) began attacking three Kurdish areas in northern Syria that bordered the armed group’s territory. The People’s Protection Units (YPG) – a Syrian Kurdish armed group that is the military wing of the Syrian Kurdish political party, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) – fought them off. The YPG was backed by the Turkiye-based Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). In 2014, ISIL seized the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobane on the Turkish border. After months of heavy fighting, Kurdish forces, led by the YPG and backed by United States-led air strikes, regained control of the town in early 2015. Later that year, in October 2015, the YPG and allied Arab and other factions formally established the SDF as a broader coalition to fight ISIL across northern and eastern Syria. In October 2017, the SDF captured Raqqa, the de facto capital of ISIL in Syria, and then pushed into Deir Az Zor, ISIL’s last big stronghold. By March 2019, the SDF had taken Baghouz, the last piece of ISIL-held territory in Syria. Al-Assad remained in power until he was ousted in December 2024 by Syrian opposition fighters led by al-Sharaa, who is now the interim president. As part of his efforts to unite Syria, al-Sharaa on Friday issued a decree formally recognising Kurdish as a “national language” alongside Arabic, allowing it to be taught in schools, and restoring citizenship to all Kurdish Syrians. The decree also abolishes measures dating back to a 1962 census in Hasakah province that actively stripped many Kurds of Syrian nationality. The decree officially recognises Kurdish identity as part of Syria’s national fabric for the first time and declares Newroz, the Kurdish New Year festival, a paid national holiday. It also grants Kurdish Syrians rights, bans ethnic or linguistic discrimination, requires state institutions to adopt inclusive national messaging, and sets out penalties for “inciters”.