Turkey continues to target Kurdish journalists and civilians with drones in Kurdistani segments of Syria and Iraq. In response, human rights groups and others have been largely silent. When Myanmar’s junta began slaughtering Rohingya Muslims, Gambia brought a case before the International Court of Justice. In October 2022, the United Nations General Assembly rejected calls to debate China’s genocide against its Uyghur Muslim population. In December 2023, South Africa sought to use the International Court of Justice to compel Israel to stop its operations in the Gaza Strip. Without any sense of irony, Turkey then lent its support to the South African effort. Such inconsistency raises a question: What leads certain states to represent some peoples on the international stage while ignoring others?
The international community has mostly ignored the Kurdish struggle for self-determination. The Turkish government has periodically massacred Kurds for a century, most recently flattening Kurdish cities in Turkey in 2015 and 2016, and then targeting Kurdish towns and villages across the border in Syria and Iraq. Meanwhile, Kurds have suffered disproportionately as the Syrian regime seeks to Arabize them and the Iranian government tries to Persianize them. Iran has disproportionately executed Kurds relative to other national or ethnic groups in Iran.
Through this entire history of repression across Kurdistan, the United Nations has not proposed, let alone passed, a single UN resolution on Kurdish self-determination. The reluctance of states to act against Kurdish repression both undermines the integrity of the international legal system and exposes the ideological biases that influence global politics.
Two coalitions regularly downplay or ignore the Kurdish plight, often as they promote cases that are far less morally clear. Leftist and Islamist states might embrace different exegesis, but the result is the same, at least regarding Kurds.
Socialist states that trumpet anti-imperialist ideologies prioritize cases in which the perpetrator ideologically opposes them. They may support anti-colonial movements if they can knock the West down a notch but are silent when states formally under an imperial thumb like Iran, Iraq, or Syria are the aggressors. Turkey itself was an imperial state in its previous incarnation at the seat of the Ottoman Empire, but the Turkish embrace of the rhetoric of “decolonization” and “liberation” too often goes unchallenged.
Religion also provides cover for repression. Even though most Kurds are Muslim, they tend to be more moderate in their practice than Saudi-funded Salafis or the Qatar-supported Muslim Brotherhood. Even governments that are nominally secular will wrap persecution in religious symbolism. Often, this involves Quranic language and references to justify operations against the Kurds. In 1980, the Islamic Republic named its campaign against Kurds al-Fath (“the conquest”) while Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein named his campaign against the Kurds al-Anfal (“the spoils”). For all Turkey depicts itself as a country that separates mosque and state, it has used religious language to name its operations — “Olive Branch” against Kurds in Syria in 2018, and kafir (“infidels”) in the election campaigns within Turkey.
Where does this leave the West? Many Western states are neither anti-colonial nor Islamist. Although the United States and European countries have supported the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq and the U.S. military supports the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (known as Rojava), the West often subordinates its Kurdish policies to interests surrounding host governments.
Certainly, Western countries should have an interest in creating a more coherent Kurdish policy. Many migrants freezing in the Belarusian forest or drowning in the English Channel are Kurds fleeing uncertainty, instability, or corruption at home and in their host states. Certainly, Kurds have agency and cannot blame all corruption on outsiders, but corruption thrives in the grey area in which regional states prop up warlords but do not allow Kurds to create accountable government.
Kurds also cannot assume that one size fits all for strategy to achieve their aims. While Kurdish officials may lobby the West and seek more subsidies and enhanced representation, Kurdish leaders must create a roadmap to even firmer commitments not subject to the whims of Ankara, Baghdad, or Tehran.
Kurds may need another strategy to reach out to left-leaning, anti-colonial countries in Africa that are willing to voice the same level of support for Kurds as they do for Rohingya or Palestinians. Such a strategy should extend to highlighting the consequence of the hypocrisy with which the International Court of Justice and UN General Assembly have approached the ambitions of the Kurdish nation.
Finally, Kurds must call out the cynical appropriation of religion by Islamists bent on oppressing a people that numbers in the tens of millions. They must understand, intellectually and diplomatically, that overcoming oppression requires tailored approaches rather than a one-size-fits-all strategy on the global stage.
Loqman Radpey, an expert on Kurdistan and the Middle East, is a Middle East Forum fellow based in the UK and the author of Towards an Independent Kurdistan: Self-Determination in International Law.
