By Dr. Adnan Bouzan

Introduction

The current Kurdish situation—in Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran—cannot be approached as a mere reflection of immediate political events, the outcome of tactical mistakes committed at specific historical moments, or even as a form of self-inflicted failure in managing conflict. Such a superficial interpretation fails to explain the persistence of the tragedy, and does not answer a fundamental question: why does Kurdish disappointment recur every time the horizon of recognition seems within reach?

The answer lies in a deeper and more complex structure, one connected to the nature of both the regional and international systems, and to the way the Kurdish question has been treated since the early twentieth century—as an issue that can be postponed, bargained over, or annulled whenever the interests of dominant powers so require.

Contrary to what some official narratives seek to promote, the Kurds were never a people without history, without land, or without a role. They were, and remain, one of the oldest peoples of the region, deeply rooted in its geography and contributors to the formation of its political, military, and cultural history. Yet the harsh paradox lies in the fact that, despite this profound presence, they were deliberately absent from international decision-making tables. This absence was neither accidental nor the result of a momentary weakness in representation; rather, it was the product of a conscious political decision to marginalize them, so that their cause would not become an obstacle to the redrawing of spheres of influence following the collapse of old empires.

From the moment colonial powers began shaping the borders of the modern Middle East, the Kurds were treated as a detail that could be overlooked, or as a human mass that could be distributed among several states without recognition of their national rights. Thus, Kurdish geography was transformed into an open arena for political experimentation—divided at times, forcibly integrated at others, and subjected to the logic of national security of emerging states rather than the logic of peoples’ right to self-determination. With every new historical phase, the same equation was reproduced: a promise of recognition, followed by retreat, and then repression.

Whenever the moment of recognition drew near—whether through an international text, a political understanding, or a military alliance—a new agreement emerged to empty that recognition of its substance, to cancel it outright, or to replace it with security arrangements presented as temporary solutions, while in essence serving as tools for managing the conflict rather than resolving it. In these contexts, agreements were not mechanisms to end Kurdish injustice; they became instruments for reproducing it in different forms—changing the language while preserving the same core: denial, containment, or repression.

What the Kurds are experiencing today is not a transient crisis linked to post-2011 transformations, nor the result of the rise or fall of a particular regime. It is the cumulative outcome of a long history of booby-trapped agreements crafted by the powerful and imposed on peoples who were never genuine partners in their making. Agreements written in the language of diplomacy, yet implemented through the logic of force; signed in the name of stability, yet producing successive cycles of violence, displacement, and fragmentation.

The price of these agreements has been paid in Kurdish blood—through destroyed villages, emptied cities, and political elites exhausted between betting on external actors and fearing internal repression. With every new disappointment, the same question resurfaces: is the problem rooted in the Kurds themselves, or in the political structure governing the region and the world?

Here, history imposes its answer with clarity: the problem was never a lack of Kurdish sacrifices, but rather the absence of genuine international guarantees, and a logic of interests that views the Kurdish question as a bargaining chip rather than a liberation cause.

From this perspective, this study seeks to deconstruct the organic relationship between the current Kurdish situation and the series of international and regional agreements that have shaped its historical trajectory—not as isolated events, but as an interconnected chain of policies that have produced a chronic crisis, continually renewed in different forms. To understand the Kurdish present requires a return to those pivotal moments when fate was decided without the presence of its rightful owners, and to those agreements written on paper but engraved in Kurdish collective memory as open wounds that have yet to heal.

First: Sykes–Picot (1916)… The Foundational Moment of Denial

One cannot speak of the modern Kurdish tragedy without pausing at length at the Sykes–Picot Agreement as the first foundational moment of the logic of systematic political denial directed against the Kurds. This agreement was not merely a colonial arrangement to divide spheres of influence between Britain and France in the Middle East after the decline of the Ottoman Empire; rather, at its core, it constituted a forced reengineering of geography, identity, and sovereignty—one in which an entire people was ignored as if it had no historical or political existence.

Sykes–Picot approached the region through the logic of empty maps, where borders were drawn according to the interests of the great powers rather than the realities of history or political society. In this context, the Kurds were not an exceptional case forgotten by accident; they were the victims of a conscious decision of exclusion. A people stretching across a contiguous geographic space, with a long history of social and tribal organization and active participation in the military and political struggles of the Ottoman Empire, was treated as a detail that could be erased at little political cost.

Under the logic established by Sykes–Picot, Kurdish geography was divided among four emerging states—Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran—without any consideration for the right to self-determination, or even for the cultural and national specificity of this people. The Kurdish question was not raised in substantive deliberations, nor was it recognized as an independent issue; instead, it was fragmented within broader files related to “regional stability” and the “protection of colonial interests.” Thus, Kurdistan was transformed from an integrated historical–geographical space into disputed peripheries within artificially constructed political entities.

The danger of Sykes–Picot lies not only in its division of land, but in its establishment of what can be described as an artificial Kurdish political vacuum. At this critical juncture, the Kurds were not defeated in a war to justify punishment, nor presented as a hostile force to warrant exclusion, nor classified as a marginal minority to be ignored. On the contrary, they were present and active, yet their presence did not align with the new equations of power. They were therefore ignored not because they were weak, but because recognizing them would have disrupted the project of reshaping the region according to the logic of the centralized nation-state.

From here emerged the structural problem that would haunt the Kurdish question throughout the twentieth century and beyond. The Kurds:

• were not defeated in a war that could justify their exclusion or the stripping of their rights;

• were not consulted about their fate, despite being the people of the land;

• were not recognized as an independent political actor, but were treated as a human mass that could be forcibly absorbed into other states.

The most dangerous aspect of Sykes–Picot is not merely that it ignored the Kurds, but that it legitimized this ignorance and made it the legal and political foundation of the subsequent regional order. The states that emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire inherited this logic and dealt with the Kurds as an internal problem rather than as the cause of a people with historical rights. In this way, denial shifted from the international level to the state level, transforming from a colonial decision into a sovereign policy.

Sykes–Picot thus produced an exceptionally harsh equation: a people without a state, divided among states that viewed its very existence as a threat to their national unity. Over time, this division became an instrument of control and domination, with each part of Kurdistan held hostage to the calculations of the state to which it was annexed, while any unified Kurdish framework was excluded from official recognition. In this sense, Sykes–Picot was not the end of a phase, but the beginning of a long trajectory of exclusion, fragmentation, and systematic denial.

Understanding Sykes–Picot as a foundational moment does not mean attributing sole responsibility for the Kurdish tragedy to it alone; rather, it means recognizing that it laid the groundwork upon which all subsequent treaties and agreements were built. Without this initial act of exclusion, later policies of denial—from Lausanne to regional security agreements—would not have found such solid ground on which to stand. Thus, Sykes–Picot marks the point at which modern Kurdish history began to be written without the Kurds, their fate drawn by others’ pens on maps that acknowledged their existence only as a marginal detail that could be ignored.

Second: Sèvres (1920)… A Promise Never Meant to Be Born

The Treaty of Sèvres represents a pivotal moment in the modern political history of the Kurdish question—not because it genuinely did justice to the Kurds, but because it clearly exposed the utilitarian nature of the relationship between international powers and the rights of peoples. For the first time, Sèvres introduced an international recognition—albeit theoretical and conditional—of the Kurds’ right to self-government, while opening the possibility of independence at a later stage. Yet this recognition was not the product of a moral conviction or a legal commitment to the principle of self-determination; rather, it was the outcome of a fleeting political circumstance imposed by the weakness of the Ottoman state and the post–World War I balance of power.

In that context, the victorious powers employed the principle of “minority rights” as a negotiating tool, not as a stable normative reference. Kurdish rights, like those of other peoples, were incorporated into the treaty texts only insofar as they served a specific objective: dismantling what remained of the Ottoman Empire and reshaping the geopolitical landscape in line with the interests of the victors. Accordingly, the inclusion of the Kurdish question in Sèvres was not an expression of genuine recognition of a people with national rights, but rather a pressure card—used when convenient and withdrawn once circumstances changed.

The Treaty of Sèvres contained provisions that explicitly referred to the possibility of establishing a Kurdish entity with autonomous status, and potentially independence, subject to later conditions and local referenda. However, these formulations were, in essence, open to postponement and obstruction. They were not accompanied by any binding implementation mechanisms or enforceable international guarantees. Here lies one of the most salient features of the “Sèvres promise”: a promise without instruments, recognition without protection, and a text devoid of a real political will to be implemented.

When the balance of power shifted, the discourse changed entirely. The rise of the Turkish nationalist movement under Mustafa Kemal, and its transformation into a political and military force capable of imposing a new reality, led to a reordering of great-power priorities. Kurdish rights—and even the provisions of Sèvres themselves—ceased to matter in the face of the need to stabilize the new Turkish state as a potential regional partner. Thus, the Kurds moved from the position of “a people to be promised” to that of “an obstacle to be overcome.”

Sèvres was not annulled because it was unjust or unrealistic, but because it was no longer useful. This is the core of the tragedy. Justice was never the governing criterion in international politics; interest and power were. When Sèvres became a burden on the new arrangements, it was simply abandoned—without any moral or legal accountability. With its annulment, the first international recognition of the Kurdish question was effectively nullified, returning the Kurds to square one, or rather to a position even worse.

In this context, recognition of Kurdish rights was reduced to a forgotten footnote in a forgotten document, recalled only in historical debates or in Kurdish discourse as the “missed opportunity.” Yet describing Sèvres as a missed opportunity can itself be misleading, because it was not, in truth, a genuine opportunity to begin with. That recognition was born weak and destined to be buried quickly, because the conditions that produced it did not stem from a will to deliver justice, but from a game of temporary balances.

More dangerously, the experience of Sèvres established a pattern that would recur throughout the history of the Kurdish question: an international promise without guarantees, offered at a moment of the adversary’s weakness, then withdrawn once equations change. This pattern would reappear in later agreements, autonomy declarations, and regional arrangements, in which the Kurds are invoked as a temporary ally, only to be marginalized as soon as the need for them passes.

From this perspective, Sèvres cannot be read as a mere historical episode, but must be understood as a profoundly harsh political lesson. It taught the Kurds—at an exorbitant cost—that unprotected recognition has no value, and that international texts not anchored in a binding political will can at any moment become discarded papers in the archives of diplomacy. Thus, Sèvres became a symbol not only of an unfulfilled promise, but of a promise that was never meant to be fulfilled in the first place—because its very birth was conditioned by a brief moment in time and by an interest that was never meant to endure.

Third: Lausanne (1923)… The Codified Great Betrayal

If the Treaty of Sèvres represented a fragile promise, liable to annulment from the very moment of its birth, the Treaty of Lausanne came to play a far more dangerous and profound role: the official and codified execution of the Kurdish question. Lausanne was not merely a correction of a previous political course; it was a complete reversal of everything that had been suggested—even theoretically—regarding Kurdish national rights. In Lausanne, the Kurds were not only marginalized; they were erased from the text, from recognition, and from the legal imagination of the new regional order.

Lausanne explicitly or implicitly annulled all provisions of Sèvres concerning the Kurds and recognized the borders of the modern Turkish state, not as a multiethnic polity, but as a rigid nation-state founded on a single identity, a single language, and a single official history. Through this recognition, the international powers granted full legitimacy to the Turkish nationalist state project at the expense of non-Turkish peoples, foremost among them the Kurds. The central question was no longer: How are the rights of these peoples to be guaranteed? It became: How can the new state be governed with the least possible instability? And the answer was clear—through denial, forced assimilation, and repression when necessary.

The danger of Lausanne lies in the fact that it did not merely ignore the Kurds; it legitimized policies of their denial. From that moment on, the negation of Kurdish national existence was no longer just an internal authoritarian practice, but a policy enjoying indirect international cover. Thus, the Kurds were transformed from a people whose cause had been—however theoretically—present on the international stage, into an “internal problem” left to the discretion of the states concerned to handle as they saw fit.

Since Lausanne, the position of the Kurds in the official political discourse of the states that divided them has fundamentally changed. They were no longer regarded as a people with historical rights, but were forcibly redefined through security and cultural frameworks designed to strip their existence of its national character:

• In Turkey, Kurds were reduced to the derogatory label “Mountain Turks,” in an attempt to erase their national identity and recast it as a mere geographical or dialectal difference devoid of political meaning.

• In Iraq, Kurds were portrayed as a “rebellious minority,” rather than as a people and an equal partner in the state, thereby justifying repeated campaigns of repression and military operations against them.

• In Syria, Kurds were placed under the category of a “security problem,” treated through a logic of permanent suspicion, and deprived of the most basic civil and political rights.

• In Iran, Kurdish presence was framed as a “threat to national unity,” opening the door to policies of marginalization and exclusion under the banner of protecting the state.

These classifications were not merely linguistic descriptors; they were political instruments aimed at delegitimizing any Kurdish claim to rights and transforming it into an act of rebellion, separatism, or threat. Here lies one of Lausanne’s most dangerous consequences: it did not put an end to the Kurdish question, but rather redefined it as a deviation from the existing political order.

Lausanne established a long-term system of denial based on three fundamental pillars:

1. Legal denial: the absence of any international text recognizing the Kurds as a people with national rights.

2. Political denial: the reduction of the Kurdish question to a purely internal matter, closed to any form of internationalization.

3. Cultural denial: nation-building policies of forced assimilation targeting language, identity, and collective memory.

Over time, this system became something akin to the region’s “political nature,” whereby denying the Kurds became commonplace in state discourse and acceptable—or simply ignored—on the international stage. This apparent stability was nothing more than the product of continuous repression, periodic explosions of violence, and recurring uprisings that served as constant reminders that the issue had not been resolved, but buried alive.

In this sense, Lausanne is not merely a historical treaty, but a pivotal turning point whose effects remain present to this day. It granted international legitimacy to the exclusionary nation-state logic in the region and closed the door to any just solution to the Kurdish question for decades. Without understanding Lausanne as a codified betrayal rather than a diplomatic miscalculation, it is impossible to grasp why denial persisted and why Kurdish demands— in the eyes of ruling regimes—were transformed from legitimate rights into an “existential threat.”

Thus, it can be said that the post-Lausanne era was not a phase of peace or stability, but one of prolonged international silence, in which the Kurds were left to face their fate alone within states whose legitimacy was founded on denying them, and whose stability was built upon their exclusion.

Fourth: The March 11 Statement (1970)… The Promise as a Tactic of War

The March 11, 1970 Statement constitutes one of the most ambiguous and controversial moments in the political history of the Kurdish question in Iraq. It was presented at the time as a historic breakthrough and a framework for a long-term peaceful settlement, while in essence it functioned as a tactical instrument for managing the conflict rather than a genuine project for resolving it. The statement emerged at a moment when the Iraqi regime was suffering sustained military and political attrition as a result of the Kurdish revolution, and when it was unable to achieve a decisive military victory. Accordingly, the statement did not stem from a conviction in Kurdish rights, but from the regime’s need to catch its breath and reorganize its cards.

Within that context, the March 11 Statement appeared as an official recognition of Kurdish rights, as it included promises of autonomy, recognition of the Kurdish language, political participation, and an end to the state of war. Yet these provisions, despite their theoretical importance, lacked from the outset two decisive elements: genuine political will and binding constitutional mechanisms. Autonomy was not enshrined within a clear constitutional framework, nor was a precise timeline for its implementation defined, rendering it vulnerable to delay, manipulation, and circumvention.

The Iraqi regime used the statement as a means of buying time on multiple levels. Militarily, the temporary cessation of hostilities allowed it to rebuild the army, modernize its arsenal, and strengthen its control over strategic areas. Politically, the regime sought to fracture the Kurdish ranks and weaken the unity of the liberation movement by exploiting internal divisions and cultivating elites tied to the central authority. Internationally, the statement projected a deceptive image of a “reformist” state seeking to resolve its internal problems through dialogue, thereby easing external pressure and granting the regime greater room for maneuver.

Conversely, the Kurdish leadership approached the statement with cautious hope. It was seen as an opportunity to spare the Kurdish people further devastation and to secure official recognition of long-denied rights. Yet this hope was surrounded by deep skepticism, particularly in light of a long history of broken promises. Over time, signs of retreat became increasingly evident: deliberate delays in implementing provisions, manufactured disputes over the boundaries of autonomy, the effective exclusion of Kurds from decision-making centers, and the continuation of security policies in Kurdish regions.

Thus, autonomy remained ink on paper, while war was being prepared behind the scenes. Instead of transitioning into a phase of confidence-building, the regime transformed the “peace” period into a comprehensive preparation for the next confrontation. Once the balance of power shifted in Baghdad’s favor—especially after strengthening its regional and international relations—the regime did not hesitate to fully renege on the statement and return to the military option as the definitive solution to the “Kurdish question.”

This reversal led to the resumption of war with greater ferocity and inaugurated a new phase of conflict marked by the extensive use of force and the expansion of military operations against Kurdish villages and regions. The failure of the March 11 Statement was not a technical or administrative failure, but a structural political one, rooted in the fact that the regime never regarded the Kurds as partners in the state, but as a problem to be contained or subdued.

The danger of the March 11 experience lies in the fact that it entrenched a pattern that would recur in later dealings with the Kurdish question: temporary recognition as a tool for conflict management rather than resolution. Promises of autonomy, when not protected by a constitution and international guarantees, are transformed into tactics of war—extended in moments of weakness and withdrawn in moments of strength. This is what made the statement, instead of being a step toward peace, yet another station in the long trajectory of Kurdish disillusionment.

At a deeper level, the failure of the March 11 Statement deepened the rift between the Kurds and the Iraqi state and eroded trust in any subsequent initiatives. It also paved the way for a far harsher phase of conflict, one that later culminated in major humanitarian and political catastrophes. From this perspective, the March 11 Statement can only be read as a classic example of how political promises are used as deferred weapons—temporarily sedating the conflict, only for it to resume with far more violent tools once conditions allow.

Fifth: The Algiers Agreement (1975)… Bargaining with a Revolution

The Algiers Agreement stands as one of the most painful moments in contemporary Kurdish political history, not only because of its immediate catastrophic consequences, but because it revealed, with utmost clarity, how revolutions are sold in the marketplaces of regional interests, and how the cause of an entire people can be reduced to a secondary clause in a border deal. In this agreement, the Kurds were not a party to the negotiations, despite being the true subject of the settlement; their fate appeared only as a price to be paid in order to achieve reconciliation between two rival states.

The Algiers Agreement emerged within the context of a complex regional conflict between Iraq and Iran, in which the Iranian Shah employed the Kurdish card as a strategic instrument of pressure against Saddam Hussein’s regime. Since the early 1960s, the Kurdish revolution in Iraq—particularly the September Revolution led by Mullah Mustafa Barzani—had constituted a serious source of disruption for the Iraqi state, forcing it into prolonged military and political attrition. In return, Iran provided military, logistical, and political support to the revolution, not out of commitment to Kurdish rights, but as part of calculations related to border disputes and regional influence.

Once the conditions for a settlement between Baghdad and Tehran matured, the Shah’s Iran did not hesitate to abandon the Kurds entirely. In Algiers, an agreement was reached whereby Iraq made territorial concessions regarding the Shatt al-Arab in exchange for the termination of Iranian support for the Kurdish revolution. Thus, the Kurds were transformed from a temporary ally into a negotiable burden, and from an effective pressure tool into a card to be discarded the moment its political utility expired.

The consequences of this bargain were devastating at every level. With the sudden withdrawal of Iranian support, the military balance upon which the Kurdish revolution relied collapsed, leaving Kurdish fighters to face a superior Iraqi military machine without regional or international cover. This collapse was not merely military; it was also psychological and political, striking at the very core of the Kurdish movement and deeply shaking Kurdish society’s trust in all external actors.

This breakdown led to a series of humanitarian catastrophes:

• The collapse of the September Revolution, which for a full decade had symbolized Kurdish struggle in Iraq.

• Widespread massacres against civilians, carried out under policies of collective punishment.

• Mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Kurds, particularly in border regions.

• The dismantling of the social and political infrastructure of the Kurdish movement, paving the way for later policies of Arabization, the Anfal campaigns, and systematic genocide.

The Algiers Agreement was not an isolated event; it marked a strategic turning point in how regional regimes dealt with the Kurdish question. It sent a clear message that the Kurdish cause was tradable, that alliances built on interests rather than legal guarantees could collapse at any moment, and that comprehensive repression could proceed without international accountability so long as it was embedded within broader regional arrangements.

On the internal Kurdish level, the agreement left a deep wound in political consciousness. The loss was not merely that of a battle or a revolution, but of trust itself—trust in allies, in promises, and in the possibility that external support could serve as a genuine lever for liberation. From that moment on, a central question in Kurdish political thought became unavoidable: how can a liberation project be built without being held hostage to the interests of others?

Here, a harsh lesson was firmly inscribed—one that would recur in different forms throughout subsequent stages of Kurdish history: external support without binding international guarantees is a trap, not an alliance. When the cause of a people is tied to the interests of another state, it becomes expendable the moment the balance of profit and loss shifts. The Algiers Agreement was simply the clearest embodiment of this logic, burying an entire revolution beneath the rubble of a deal signed far from the blood and sacrifices of its rightful owners.

In this sense, the Algiers Agreement cannot be read as a mere military defeat; it must be understood as a historical rupture that reshaped the trajectory of the Kurdish movement for decades, and engraved in Kurdish collective memory a bitter truth: revolutions that lack international political guarantees can be traded away at negotiating tables without hesitation, and the blood of peoples is often cheaper than border lines in the calculations of states.

Sixth: The Adana Agreement (1998)… Security Against Rights

The Adana Agreement represents a qualitative turning point in the regional handling of the Kurdish question, because it was not built on political promises open to negotiation or on any form of recognition—however symbolic—of rights. From its very inception, it was founded on a purely security-based logic that excluded politics altogether and criminalized the very act of demanding rights. In Adana, the Kurdish issue was not discussed as the cause of a people, nor as a political conflict requiring just solutions; rather, it was entirely reduced to a transnational security file to be addressed through force and intelligence coordination.

The agreement emerged amid escalating Turkish pressure on Syria in the late 1990s, when Ankara employed direct military threats to impose its conditions, relying on an imbalance in regional and international power relations. Instead of this moment becoming an opportunity to reintroduce the Kurdish question in its political dimension, it was exploited to establish a new model of exclusion—one that transformed the Kurds from political actors into a shared “security threat” around which the interests of regimes could converge.

Within the Adana Agreement, no political rights were proposed, no form of cultural or linguistic recognition was acknowledged, and not even the roots of the conflict were discussed. What was put forward was solely a package of security measures:

• The exchange of intelligence information regarding Kurdish activities.

• Joint pursuit of activists and organizations across borders.

• Direct security coordination aimed at suffocating any space for Kurdish political or social mobilization.

In this sense, Adana was not merely a bilateral agreement between two states, but a theoretical and practical framework for generalizing the logic of security at the expense of rights. It institutionalized the idea that the Kurdish question could—and indeed should—be managed through security mechanisms, and that any form of Kurdish political expression would automatically be classified as a threat to stability, regardless of its nature or demands. Here, denial shifted from ignoring rights to criminalizing them.

What is most dangerous about the Adana Agreement is that it transformed the Kurds from a people with political demands into a common enemy against whom the interests of different regimes could intersect, despite their deep contradictions in other arenas. The agreement demonstrated that hostility toward the Kurds could serve as the strongest common denominator among rival regimes, and that “national security” could be invoked as a pretext to justify cooperation even between traditional adversaries.

Adana also entrenched the principle of “shared security sovereignty,” whereby borders ceased to function as barriers to pursuit and repression and instead became lines of coordination. This development was extremely dangerous, as it effectively eliminated any geographical margin that could serve as a refuge or breathing space for Kurdish activism, opening the door to cross-border repression that transcended both national and international legal constraints.

Politically, the Adana Agreement closed the door to any negotiating horizon. When an issue is defined from the outset as a security matter, dialogue becomes a luxury, politics is replaced by security agencies, law by directives, and rights by intelligence reports. Thus, the Kurds were once again removed from the position of a “potential political party” and relegated to that of a “permanent security target.”

The Adana Agreement did not end Kurdish mobilization, but it fundamentally altered the rules of engagement with it. It contributed to the normalization of repression, conferred regional legitimacy on cross-border pursuits, and entrenched a discourse that stripped the Kurds of their political humanity. In this sense, Adana was not a passing agreement, but a foundational brick in the construction of a regional system that views rights as a threat and security as a substitute for justice.

Since Adana, it has become clear that regimes no longer even feel compelled to offer empty promises. It suffices to raise the banner of “counterterrorism” to justify every policy, confiscate every right, and crush any voice. Thus, the Kurdish question was transformed from a deferred political file into a closed security dossier—managed by force rather than dialogue, and by coordinated repression rather than just solutions.

Seventh: The Aftermath of the 1991 Uprising… Deferred Protection

The March 1991 uprising in Iraqi Kurdistan represented a rare historical moment in which the Kurds moved from a logic of waiting to an act of direct rebellion, driven by a major illusion: that the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s regime in the Gulf War would open the door to a moment of historical justice, or at least prevent the regime from exacting revenge. What followed the uprising, however, once again revealed a constant rule in the international handling of the Kurdish question: delayed support, conditional protection, and postponed sacrifice.

The uprising erupted spontaneously, broadly, and on a popular scale, encompassing the major cities of Kurdistan. Centers of authority collapsed rapidly, and the Iraqi army withdrew in a state of disintegration. Yet this advance was not protected by any genuine international cover. The major powers—chief among them the United States—which had implicitly encouraged rebellion against the regime, were not interested in its complete collapse, but rather in keeping it weakened, contained, and manageable.

Here, the tragic scene began to unfold.

The Kurds were left alone to face a brutal machinery of retaliation. The regime returned with its air and ground forces, employing every tool of repression, triggering one of the largest waves of displacement in the modern history of the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands fled toward the mountains and toward the Turkish and Iranian borders under catastrophic humanitarian conditions. This was not merely a failure of protection, but a harsh test of the value of Kurdish blood in international calculations.

The no-fly zone imposed later over northern Iraq was not an expression of recognition of Kurdish rights, but an emergency measure to contain a humanitarian crisis that was on the verge of becoming a global moral scandal. Protection was granted not because the Kurds deserved it, but because the images could no longer be concealed and the catastrophe had exceeded the limits of silence.

Here lies the great paradox:
protection came after the price had been paid;
the safe zone was imposed after blood had been shed;
and international attention moved only after displacement became a media tragedy.

Even the experience of the emerging Kurdish administration in the 1990s was not the result of explicit political support, but rather the byproduct of a vacuum imposed by power balances. The Kurds were left to govern themselves not because they had become partners, but because they were no longer a priority. Thus, a fragile, besieged entity took shape—burdened by internal conflicts and deprived of any genuine legal recognition.

The post-1991 period encapsulates a recurring logic in modern Kurdish history:
no preventive protection, no lasting guarantees, and no consistent moral commitment. Whatever is granted to the Kurds is granted late, temporarily, conditionally, and is always subject to withdrawal at the first shift in balances.

From that phase, the Kurds learned a deeply painful lesson: the international community does not move to protect peoples, but to manage crises—and justice, when it arrives, always comes too late.

Eighth: The 2017 Referendum — Silence After Encouragement

The Kurdistan Region’s independence referendum in September 2017 came as the culmination of a long accumulation of political illusions—not because it reflected a moment of Kurdish weakness, but because it revealed with unprecedented clarity the internationally permitted limits of the Kurdish dream. The referendum was not an isolated event; it was the outcome of a trajectory extending back to 1991, during which a quasi-independent entity emerged, with de facto borders, institutions, a parliament, and military forces that fought on behalf of the world against ISIS. All of this created a false impression that the time had ripened, and that independence was no longer taboo.

Before the referendum, international opposition was not firm. On the contrary, a form of indirect encouragement prevailed: calculated silence, double messages, and vague reassurances about “understanding Kurdish aspirations.” The major powers issued no unequivocal warnings, nor did they activate political deterrence mechanisms early on. It was as if there were those who wished to push the Kurdish leadership to test the red line—not to cross it, but to measure the cost of crossing it.

Yet the moment the ballot boxes were set, the scene changed.

Immediately after the results were announced, international discourse shifted from understanding to indifference, from ambiguity to coldness. The substance of the right to self-determination was not discussed; instead, the issue was reduced to an “inappropriate timing” and a “unilateral step.” And when the Iraqi army, backed by regional powers, moved in and seized Kirkuk and the disputed territories, a disturbing international silence prevailed—a silence that can only be interpreted as tacit consent.

Kirkuk was not merely a city; it was a symbol of a long history of exclusion, conflict, and deferred promises. Yet it fell within hours, not so much because of military weakness as because of total political exposure. Washington did not move, Europe did not intervene, and no protection mechanisms were activated, despite the fact that the Region had been a direct ally in the war on terrorism. Here, the old lesson was reaffirmed in a new form:
those who are used as temporary allies are abandoned when they become a burden.

More dangerous than the event itself was what it revealed about the logic governing the international management of the Kurdish file. Support was never strategic; it was tactical, tied to a specific function—fighting ISIS, controlling geography, maintaining a temporary balance. But when the ally transformed into a bearer of an independent political project, it stepped outside the role assigned to it.

The referendum was not a sin in itself; the sin lay in believing that the international system rewards loyalty, or that the sacrifices of the Peshmerga could be translated into political recognition. What happened after 2017 proved that, in the eyes of the major powers, the ceiling of Kurdish rights does not extend beyond constrained autonomy, and that any attempt to move from a “security partner” to a “people with sovereignty” is met with punishment or neglect.

Thus, the referendum shifted from a moment of hope to a moment of exposure—exposure of the discourse of international support, exposure of the notion of partnership, and exposure of the illusion that history is written by merit alone.

In 2017, the Kurds were not defeated militarily alone; they once again collided with a bitter truth:
that international silence is not neutrality, but a position.

Ninth: Post-2016 Understandings — Geography in Exchange for Deals

With Russia’s direct military intervention in Syria in 2015, and the consolidation of the Astana process after 2016, the Kurdish issue in Syria entered a new phase of systematic exclusion—one based not merely on rhetorical denial, but on the re-engineering of geography through deals. The issue was no longer framed in terms of sovereignty or territorial integrity, but rather through the conversion of land itself into a bargaining chip among regional and international powers.

In this context, unwritten Turkish–Russian–Iranian understandings took shape—unofficial, yet unmistakably clear in their outcomes:
any independent or semi-independent Kurdish influence in northern Syria was to be regarded as a threat that must be curtailed, not because it posed a real danger, but because it disrupted the balances these powers had drawn for their mutual spheres of influence.

Despite the fact that the Kurds, represented by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), were the most effective ground force in defeating ISIS—and despite the enormous human cost they paid in defense of the world at large—they once again found themselves excluded from the decision-making room. They were not invited to Astana, not represented in Sochi, and not recognized as a political party. Instead, they were treated as a “field detail” that could be recalibrated whenever necessary.

Afrin (2018) marked the first blatant exposure of this logic. The political umbrella was withdrawn, lines of engagement were rearranged, and Syrian airspace was opened to Turkish aircraft with a Russian green light in exchange for broader understandings related to Idlib and Damascus. Afrin was not a military burden to anyone, but it was a negotiating card. The outcome was occupation, demographic engineering, the displacement of tens of thousands, and an almost total international silence.

The same pattern was repeated even more crudely in Sere Kaniye (Ras al-Ayn) and Girê Spî (Tal Abyad) in 2019. Here, the matter was no longer limited to a Russian–Turkish understanding, but involved indirect American participation in the logic of deals. U.S. forces withdrew suddenly—not because the threat had vanished, but because priorities had shifted. Kurdish areas were left exposed to invasion, then refilled with other forces under new security arrangements in which political rights and self-recognition had no place.

The bitter paradox is that these areas were not battlefields against the Syrian state; they were relatively stable regions, governed through a pluralistic local administration and comprising Arab, Kurdish, and Syriac components. Yet it was precisely this model that was deemed undesirable, because it offered a political alternative outside the equation of authoritarianism or nationalist domination. Thus, it was not fought because it failed, but because it succeeded enough to pose a symbolic threat.

Within these understandings, Kurdish geography was transformed into an open space for division:
Turkey secured a security belt, Russia expanded its role as guarantor, Iran entrenched its presence deep within Syria, and the regime regained nominal legitimacy. As for the Kurds, their share was sheer loss.

More dangerous than the occupation itself was the normalization of occupation within an international discourse that spoke of “security concerns” and “stability imperatives,” as if the security of a nation-state could be built upon uprooting a people from their land. The cases of Afrin, Sere Kaniye, and Girê Spî were not raised in international forums as ongoing violations, but as concluded events, absorbed into the new maps of influence.

Thus, the post-2016 understandings reproduced the same historical rule:
when Kurdish rights clash with major deals, the rights are erased and the deals proceed.

The exclusion of the Kurds from the table was not a procedural detail, but an accurate expression of their position within the regional order: a military actor without political rights, a wartime partner without a voice in peace. Within this contradiction, the Kurdish tragedy is renewed in modern forms, yet with an old essence:
geography is decided from above, and the Kurds are always asked to pay the price.

Tenth: The March 10 Agreement between the SDF and the Interim Damascus Authority — The Deception of Settlements and the Reproduction of Exclusion

The March 10 agreement between the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the interim Damascus authority represents a new link in a long chain of agreements that were never designed to do justice to the Kurds, but rather to manage their existence, regulate their role, and then curtail their rights when the moment of bargaining arrives. Despite the political and media fanfare that accompanied its announcement, it quickly became clear that the agreement was not actually implemented on the ground, nor did it translate into any clear constitutional or political process guaranteeing Kurdish national rights in Syria.

In its essence, this agreement was not an expression of genuine recognition of the Autonomous Administration or of Kurdish political rights. Rather, it functioned as a multi-layered tactical maneuver involving Turkey, the United States, and the interim Damascus authority—each for its own reasons, but all at the expense of one party: the Kurds.

From the Turkish perspective, the agreement served merely as a tool to reproduce the discourse of “the unity of the Syrian state” as a political cover to strike any independent democratic Kurdish project. Turkey, having failed militarily to eliminate the Autonomous Administration experiment, shifted toward politically hollowing it out by pushing it into vague understandings with Damascus—understandings that keep the Kurds within the same centralist framework that had denied their existence for decades.

As for the United States, it treated the agreement as a temporary de-escalation card rather than a strategic commitment. It encouraged dialogue not out of a desire to uphold rights, but to ease tensions with Turkey, its NATO ally, and to manage its military presence at the lowest possible political cost. Thus, the same pattern was repeated: indirect encouragement, followed by a step back at the first serious test.

In contrast, the interim Damascus authority viewed the agreement as an opportunity to reassert symbolic influence without offering any substantive concessions. There was no discussion of constitutional recognition of the Kurds, no political decentralization, and no genuine power-sharing. The objective was clear: the return of sovereignty without altering the structure of the state—that is, the restoration of control while preserving the same logic of denial, albeit in more flexible language.

The January 18, 2026 agreement then came as a continuation of this compounded deception. It was not a rupture with the March 10 agreement, but a deepening of its trajectory: consolidating security understandings, smoothing political angles, and rearranging roles in a way that secures the interests of Turkey, the United States, and Damascus—while once again leaving the Kurds outside the equation of decision-making. Here, the picture became even clearer: the American ally with whom the Kurds had fought ISIS and built an accumulated field partnership did not hesitate to abandon that ally when interests collided.

Yet, contrary to what these agreements seek to impose, their failure is not merely a possibility, but a likely trajectory, no matter how long it takes. Any agreement built on the denial of rights cannot be stable. Any settlement that ignores the fact that the Kurds have become a political, social, and geographic force that cannot be erased will remain fragile, prone to collapse at the first shift in the balance of power.

The flaw of these agreements lies not only in their political deception, but also in their shallow reading of reality. They assume that the Kurds can be pushed back to a pre-2011 condition, or reduced to a limited security or administrative role—ignoring the fact that the Kurdish experience in Syria has produced a new political consciousness, institutions, social networks, and sacrifices that cannot be erased by top-down understandings.

Here, the same historical rule is reaffirmed, albeit with new faces:

• Every agreement that is not founded on explicit constitutional recognition of Kurdish national rights.

• Every understanding that does not guarantee genuine political partnership.

• Every settlement governed by the logic of security rather than the logic of justice
  is an agreement whose failure is merely postponed.

These agreements may succeed in buying time, calming fronts, and appeasing capitals, but they are incapable of producing a solution. The Kurdish issue in Syria is no longer a file that can be closed with a statement, nor a security problem that can be contained through coordination. It is a question of rights—and rights, no matter how long they are circumvented, always return to the forefront.

Thus, just as Sykes–Picot collapsed morally, Sèvres failed politically, and Lausanne became a historical curse, the March 10 and January 18 agreements are likely to be added to the archive of booby-trapped agreements—written to manage denial, not to end it.

Intellectual and Political Conclusion

The historical trajectory of the Kurdish issue cannot be read as a series of self-inflicted failures or local political mistakes. Rather, it must be understood as a direct reflection of a profound structural imbalance within the international system itself. At its core, the problem is not a lack of Kurdish sacrifices, nor a weakness in Kurdish social or political presence, but a global order that does not protect the weak and recognizes rights only when they intersect with the interests of the powerful. Within such a system, the justice of causes is not measured by the معيار of right, but by the balance of power, and the destinies of peoples are managed according to the logic of deals rather than principles.

Historical experience has demonstrated that every agreement not grounded in explicit constitutional recognition of Kurdish national rights, and not supported by binding international guarantees, inevitably turns into an instrument of deferred betrayal. Agreements signed in the name of de-escalation, stability, or national unity have functioned merely as mechanisms to recalibrate control, buy time, and fragment Kurdish movements from within—before turning against them militarily or politically once the balance of power shifts. The problem has never been limited to the texts of these agreements, but rather to the context in which they were produced: a context that excludes the Kurds from genuine partnership and keeps them outside the equation of decision-making.

In this sense, history does not offer a simple narrative of victimhood, but reveals a recurring pattern of international behavior: the instrumentalization of the Kurds as a bargaining chip when needed, followed by their abandonment once their functional role expires. From Sykes–Picot to Lausanne, and from Algiers to Afrin and Kirkuk, the same rule reappears in different forms: Kurds are summoned to the battlefields, yet excluded from the peace tables. They are asked to be allies or tools, but are never allowed to become partners.

The current Kurdish condition—in Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran—is not the result of a single event or a particular agreement. It is the cumulative outcome of agreements in which the Kurds were not active participants in their formulation, but rather the object of negotiation. Their existence has been treated as a problem to be contained, not as a political reality to be recognized; their rights as a revocable margin, not as a foundation for building stability.

Therefore, any future political project that ignores this reality, or reproduces the logic of top-down settlements and verbal guarantees, is doomed to repeat the same tragedy—even if it carries new names and different slogans. The solution lies not in new agreements per se, but in breaking the historical pattern itself: shifting from managing the Kurdish issue to resolving it; from the logic of security to the logic of rights; and from treating the Kurds as instruments to recognizing them as a people with full rights.

The final conclusion imposed by this history is not a call for despair, but for awareness—an awareness that justice is not granted, but claimed through an independent political project, and that any peace not founded on genuine recognition and equal participation is not peace at all, but merely a temporary truce awaiting a new round of exclusion.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

1. McDowall, David. A Modern History of the Kurds. London: I.B. Tauris, 2004.
2. Jwaideh, Wadie. The Kurdish National Movement: Its Origins and Development. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006.
3. van Bruinessen, Martin. Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan. London: Zed Books, 1992.
4. Gunter, Michael M. The Kurds and the Future of Turkey. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
5. Fromkin, David. A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1989.
6. Hurewitz, J. C. The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

Add comment