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.
Famous quotes containing the word population:
“A multitude of little superfluous precautions engender here a population of deputies and sub-officials, each of whom acquits himself with an air of importance and a rigorous precision, which seemed to say, though everything is done with much silence, “Make way, I am one of the members of the grand machine of state.””
—Marquis De Custine (1790–1857)