War in West Asia: Why the US is again turning to the Kurds amid attacks on Iran

Who are the Kurds, and why are some of them opposed to the Iranian regime? What is their association with the US? We explain.

Stateless group

The Kurds are the world’s largest stateless ethnic group, with a population of around 25 million to 35 million. They live in the highlands of southern and eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, northwestern Iran, and parts of southern Armenia, and are a minority in each of these countries. Small communities live in Iran and elsewhere.

AK Ramakrishnan, a former professor of West Asian studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, earlier explained that the Kurdish language, with its various dialects, is a major unifying factor in their dispersion across countries.

Kurdish nationalists claim a history going back 2,500 years, but they became identifiable as a distinct community only in the 7th century, when most tribes in the area adopted Islam. The majority of them today are Sunni Muslims, but there are adherents of other faiths too, including Sufism.

The Kurds have long had a reputation for being fearless fighters, and they have served as mercenaries in many armies over the centuries.

Quest for an elusive homeland

Their numbers and distinct cultural and ethnic identity notwithstanding, the Kurdish people have never had their own independent national homeland.

At the Versailles peace conference after World War I, the Kurdish Ottoman diplomat Mehmet Sherif Pasha proposed borders of a new Kurdistan that covered parts of modern Turkey, Iraq, and Iran; however, the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), which partitioned the old Ottoman dominions, marked out a much smaller territory, entirely in what is now Turkey.

Turkey negotiated with the Allied powers and, in 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne overtook Sèvres and ended the idea of a self-governing Kurdistan.

Over time, the Kurds made repeated attempts at establishing a de facto Kurdistan and, in the process, attracted Turkish repression, including bans on the Kurdish language, names, songs, and dress. In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Ali Hassan al-Majid al-Tikriti (or “Chemical Ali”) attacked them with chemical weapons, and in Iran, their uprisings of the 1980s and 1990s were crushed.

Notably, the Kurds in Iran have also had grievances with both the Islamic Republic regime and the Pahlavi dynasty before them over state repression.

In 1978, the Marxist revolutionary Abdullah Öcalan formed the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK in Kurdish) to set up an independent Kurdistan. PKK guerrillas fought the Turkish army from 1984 until Öcalan’s capture in 1999, during which some 40,000 Kurdish civilians were killed. Sporadic terrorist attacks continued until 2013, when the PKK declared a ceasefire. This collapsed when Turkey joined the war against the Islamic State in 2015 and started to bomb PKK targets in Iraq.

Islamic State, Assad, the US

As the Islamic State swept across Syria and Iraq in the early 2010s, the only fighters who were able to resist the onslaught were the Syrian Kurdish militias, the most powerful of which was the People’s Protection Units, known by its Kurdish initials, YPG.

The Kurds, who lived mostly along Syria’s border with Turkey, had begun an armed defence of their areas after the civil war started in 2011-12. In 2014, as the US joined the war against ISIS, it found in the YPG a helpful regional ally. From the US perspective, the Kurds also served as a military counterpoint against the Iranians and Russians (who supported the Syrian regime), and provided some leverage in a future deal to end the war.

This was not the first such extension of support. As Al Jazeera reported, “Washington has been a historical ally, particularly of Iraqi Kurds. The US provided tactical support in the form of no-fly zones that protected Kurdish groups during the 1991 uprising (the same year that Iraq lost the Gulf War), although Washington was criticised for prompting the revolt and then abandoning people as Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein responded violently.”

The no-fly zone allowed the creation of a de facto Kurdish-controlled region in northern Iraq, called the Kurdish Regional Government, which was officially recognised in 2005, the report added.

In Syria, once the US-backed Kurds had forced ISIS out of the northern region, they took over the recaptured land along the Syria-Turkey border, home mainly to ethnic Kurds, Arabs, and some other groups. The YPG has close links with the PKK, and for Erdogan’s regime, this seemed like a serious security threat.

For the US, the problem was balancing decades-old hostilities and suspicion between its two allies — Turkey was part of NATO and an ally against Assad, while the Kurds had just helped defeat the Islamic State at the cost of losing over 11,000 fighters.

As Ramakrishnan wrote, over time, the region in Syria developed with decentralised governing institutions. “The nature of autonomy expanded and shifted — from Kurdish institutions, parties, forces and administration to a wider area comprising the Arabs and other ethnic groups in northern and eastern Syria. The current form of Kurdish-led multi-ethnic autonomous system is known as the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES),” he wrote.

On the nudging of the Obama administration, the Syrian Kurdish militia sought to cover its links with the Turkish guerrillas, changed its name to Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and started to enlist larger numbers of non-Kurdish fighters.

Current status

With the fall of the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria in December 2024, a more US-friendly regime is now in power. The current government is keen for the state to regain control over territory after years of civil war, and in the process, has offered some concessions to Kurdish groups by recognising their cultural rights.

As a result, it had seemed that the importance of the Kurds for the US establishment was waning. The US envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, said in a January social media post that while the SDF had been the “most effective ground partner against IS,” the situation has “fundamentally changed” today, and the SDF’s original purpose has “largely expired”.

These changing dynamics also led to fighting breaking out between the Syrian government and Kurdish forces earlier this year, which was halted by a ceasefire.

Now, with the events surrounding Iran, another shift may be underway. Three Iraqi Kurdish officials told the AP that US President Donald Trump and the heads of the two main Kurdish parties in Iraq spoke on Sunday to discuss the situation in Iran and offer military support to the Iranian Kurdish groups.

Axios reported Secretary of State Marco Rubio telling the US Congress in a closed-door briefing on Tuesday: “We’re not arming the Kurds. But you never know with the Israelis.” The country’s historic support for Kurdish groups in the region is linked to its historically fraught ties with Arab nations.

Apart from the Kurds, Iran also has a sizable population of other ethnic minorities, including the Azeri Turks (comprising around 15 to 20% of Iran’s total population of 90 million) and the Baloch (around 2 to 3% of population). All have their own grievances with the state, but not all have the same degree of political mobilisation against the regime.

A September 2025 report for Atlantic Council said the Azeris’ less active political role “can largely be attributed to their Shia identity and long-standing integration into Iran’s ruling structures — most notably through the legacy of Turkic dynasties such as the Safavids, who institutionalized Shiism, and later the Qajars. Today, both Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Masoud Pezeshkian are of Azeri Turkish background, reflecting that legacy of incorporation into the state.”