The Kurdish people are an Aryan/Iranic ethnic group, descendants of Medes, whose origins are in the Middle East. They are the largest ethnic group in the world that do not have a state of their own. The region of Kurdistan, the original geographic region of the Kurdish people and the home to the majority of Kurds today, covers contemporary Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. This geo-cultural region means "Land of the Kurds". Kurdish populations occupy the territory in and around the Zagros mountains. These arid unwelcoming mountains have been a geographic buffer to cultural and political dominance from neighboring empires. Persians, Arabs and Ottomans were kept away, and a space was carved out to develop Kurdish culture, language and identity.
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“O for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through! Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)