Historical Background

For nearly 3,000 years the Kurds have lived along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the cradle of civilization. This places their beginnings at the very source of the nations and in the immediate vicinity of history's most important events. (A few selections would include the creation of man, the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark on Mt. Ararat in northern Kurdistan, The Tower of Babel, the calling of Abraham, the Babylonian Exile, and much more.) The Kurdish belief that they are the descendants of the biblical Medes reflects this rich background.

Iraqi Kurdistan, also known as Kurdistan Region or South Kurdistan, is an autonomous region of northern Iraq. It borders Iran to the east, Turkey to the north, Syria to the west and the rest of Iraq to the south. The regional capital is Erbil, known in Kurdish as Hewlêr. The region is officially governed by the Kurdistan Regional Government. The 25 million Kurds are the largest ethnicity in the world without a state of its own. Promised - but never granted- their own country after WWI, Kurds now live in parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Armenia and Azerbaijan. They are almost universally despised for asserting their identity. The government of Turkey spends US$6 billion a year fighting its Kurdish separatists. Saddam Hussein's Iraq has tried to wipe out its four million Kurds altogether: Some 300,000 Kurdish civilians "disappeared" between 1983 and 1987. Then Iraq launched a religious war against them (complete with chemical weapons), razing 4,000 villages and killing another 100,000 Kurds. Many of those who survived are now starving, thanks to the UN's embargo against Iraq.

The establishment of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq dates back to the March 1970 autonomy agreement between the Kurdish opposition and the Iraqi government after years of heavy fighting. The agreement however failed to be implemented and by 1974 Northern Iraq plunged into another round of bloody conflict between the Kurds and the Arab-dominated government of Iraq. Further, the Iran–Iraq War during the 1980s and the Anfal genocide campaign of the Iraqi army devastated the population and nature of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Following the 1991 uprising of Kurds in the north and Shia's in the south against Saddam Hussein, the Peshmerga succeeded in pushing out the main Iraqi forces from the north.