PAYNE INSTITUTE COMMENTARY SERIES: COMMENTARY

By Peri-Khan Aqrawi-Whitcomb

March 16, 2026

Whenever a “Who Are the Kurds?” explainer appears in your feed, and they’re landing right now, you already know two things: there is war somewhere in the Middle East, and someone is hoping the Kurds will help win or contain it.

For more than a century, roughly 30 to 45 million Kurds have lived across the mountains and plains of the Middle East without a state of their own. Spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, they are widely regarded as the largest stateless nation in the world.

Yet the Kurdish question is often misunderstood. When unrest erupts in the region, international commentary frequently returns to a familiar question: Will the Kurds rise up?

The framing suggests that Kurdish political ambition is the central problem. In reality, the Kurdish experience reveals something deeper. It exposes the unfinished political architecture of the modern Middle East.

The Kurds are not only the largest stateless nation in the world. They are also one of the clearest indicators of how fragile the region’s political order has remained since the end of the Ottoman Empire.

The origins of that order lie in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. In 1916, the Sykes–Picot Agreement between Britain and France sketched the outline of a new regional map. A few years later, the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres briefly raised the possibility of Kurdish self-determination, only for that prospect to disappear with the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which consolidated the borders of the modern Middle East.

The result was a political order in which Kurdish communities, often the majority in the regions where they had lived for centuries, were incorporated into newly created states where they became political minorities within centralized national systems.

For Kurdish communities, the past century has rarely been a period of political normalcy. Instead, it has often been a continuous effort to survive within political systems that frequently viewed Kurdish identity itself as a challenge to state authority.

Yet Kurdish political demands have historically focused less on territorial expansion than on recognition and self-governance within lands where Kurdish communities have lived for centuries. Unlike many nationalist movements of the twentieth century, Kurdish political aspirations have rarely involved claims beyond lands where Kurdish communities have historically lived. The Kurdish question has therefore rarely been about redrawing borders outward. It has been about how existing states govern the diverse societies already living within them.

For much of the twentieth century, stability in the Middle East was pursued through centralized political authority. Governments relied on powerful security institutions to maintain control over complex societies. Minority identities were frequently suppressed in the name of national unity. For decades, many external powers quietly prioritized the stability of centralized states, often important energy suppliers, over the more difficult work of supporting inclusive political institutions.

In Iraq, this model reached its most extreme form under Saddam Hussein, whose Ba’athist regime ruled from 1979 until 2003. Political opposition was ruthlessly crushed, and minority communities faced systematic repression. The regime’s brutality reached its peak during the Anfal Campaign, when tens of thousands of Kurdish civilians were killed, and thousands of cities and villages were destroyed.

For decades, authoritarian governance across the region appeared to provide stability. Yet the past two decades have demonstrated the limits of this approach. When centralized systems weaken, underlying political tensions frequently reemerge with greater intensity.

The collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime following the 2003 Iraq War exposed how quickly centralized systems could unravel once the institutions sustaining them disappeared. Militant organizations such as Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which later evolved into ISIS, exploited the resulting vacuum. Meanwhile, geopolitical rivalries between regional powers, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, often transformed fragile states into arenas for proxy competition.

These dynamics have shaped conflicts across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and beyond. But they have also revealed the deeper structural weakness of political systems that rely primarily on centralization and coercion.

Against this backdrop, the evolution of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq offers an instructive counterpoint.

Modern Kurdish autonomy in Iraq began in the aftermath of the Gulf War. In 1991, after millions of Kurdish civilians fled repression toward the mountains along Iraq’s northern borders, the United States and its partners launched Operation Provide Comfort, establishing a protected zone and enforcing a no-fly zone over Kurdish areas.

The intervention was remarkable not only for its scale but for its purpose. It was one of the first major post–Cold War military operations carried out primarily to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. In international relations literature, the northern Iraq no-fly zone is often cited as an early example of how international action can prevent mass atrocities while creating space for political stabilization.

What began as an emergency humanitarian intervention in 1991 ultimately produced one of the Middle East’s most durable examples of post-conflict political development.

More than three decades later, the Kurdistan Region has developed into one of the more stable parts of Iraq. Universities have expanded, infrastructure has improved, and economic ties have grown with neighboring countries.

Erbil today hosts 41 foreign consulates and representative offices, reflecting its growing role as a regional hub. Trade routes link the region closely with Turkey, while partnerships with Gulf countries such as the United Arab Emirates have expanded cooperation in sectors ranging from agriculture to energy.

The region has also played a significant humanitarian role. During the rise of ISIS in 2014, the Kurdistan Region hosted nearly 2 million refugees and internally displaced people, including Arabs, Yazidis, Turkmen, and Christians fleeing violence across Iraq and Syria.

In March 2021, Pope Francis visited Iraq, including the Kurdistan Region, highlighting the region’s importance as a place of religious coexistence in a part of the world where many ancient communities have faced displacement.

Another often overlooked aspect of the Kurdish experience is the role Kurdish forces have repeatedly played as stabilizing actors during regional crises. Over the past decades, Kurdish groups have frequently served as reliable “boots on the ground” for international coalitions confronting security threats, from resisting Saddam Hussein’s forces in northern Iraq to helping defeat ISIS after 2014.

This pattern is not accidental. For Kurdish communities, political organization and local security structures have long been matters of survival. A century of repeated existential threats, from repression and displacement to genocidal campaigns such as the Anfal campaign, has fostered strong local institutions capable of defending communities under extremely difficult conditions.

The lesson of the Kurdish experience is not that the Kurdish case for self-determination lacks legitimacy, far from it. The right to self-determination is firmly grounded in international law. Rather, the repeated Kurdish struggle also exposes a broader truth: political systems built around rigid centralization cannot govern diverse societies justly or sustainably. Federal arrangements, regional autonomy, and economic integration, approaches that helped stabilize postwar Europe and eventually led to the European Union, may offer more durable models for parts of the Middle East as well.

More than a century after the borders of the modern Middle East were drawn, the region continues to grapple with the same unresolved question: how to govern diverse societies without suppressing them.

The Kurdish experience does not offer a simple solution. But it does offer a lesson. Stability in complex societies rarely emerges from rigid centralization or the suppression of identity. It grows from political systems capable of accommodating diversity, sharing power, and building economic interdependence.

Europe learned this lesson the hard way after the devastation of the twentieth century. Its path toward peace began not with idealism alone, but with institutions that bound former rivals together through shared interests, beginning with postwar arrangements such as the European Coal and Steel Community and later the European Union.

The Middle East’s political future will ultimately depend on whether similar forms of governance can emerge. If they do, the Kurdish story may come to be seen not as a source of instability, but as an early signal of the reforms the region has long required. Perhaps then the question that has followed the Kurds for more than a century, “Will they rise up?”, will give way to a better one: how can diverse societies be governed in ways that make coexistence durable? That will be the moment when the explainers finally become unnecessary.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peri-Khan Aqrawi-Whitcomb is a specialist in international affairs, crisis response, and sustainable development, with extensive research on Iraq, the Kurdistan Region, and the wider Middle East. She is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Payne Institute for Public Policy and studied at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna. Her academic work focused on empire and state formation, particularly the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the modern Kurdish national movement. She writes on crisis, governance, resilience, and the socio-political future of conflict-affected societies.

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DISCLAIMER: The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the opinions, beliefs, viewpoints, or official policies of the Payne Institute or the Colorado School of Mines.