Syrian Kurdistan is a region in northern Syria where Kurds form the majority. It is surrounding three noncontiguous enclaves along the Turkish and Iraqi borders: Afrin in the northwest, Kobani in the north, and Jazira in the northeast.[1]Syrian Kurdistan is often called Western Kurdistan or Rojava,[a] one of the four "Lesser Kurdistans" that comprise "Greater Kurdistan", alongside Iranian Kurdistan,[b] Turkish Kurdistan,[c] and Iraqi Kurdistan.[d][2]
Kurds, widely considered to be the largest stateless ethnic group, are an Iranic ethnic group inhabiting a mountainous region known as Kurdistan that spans parts of several sovereign states in Western Asia, primarily southeastern Turkey, parts of northern Syria, northern Iraq, and western Iran.[3]Although Kurdish origins and migration remain the subject of scholarly investigation and controversy, and several different groups throughout history have lived in Kurdistan, Kurds are traditionally considered to have descended from Indo-European tribes migrating westward toward Iran in the middle of the second millennium BCE.[4]In antiquity, Kurdistan was ruled, in turn, by the Assyrian, Median, Greek, Roman, and Persian empires.[5] After the advent of Islam in the 7th century CE, Kurdish tribes in Upper Mesopotamia and western Iran resisted advancing Muslim armies, but ultimately most Kurds converted to the Shafi'ite school of Sunni Islam.[6]Kurdish cultural and political power re-emerged over the next three centuries, as Kurds in Kurdistan lived semi-autonomously within the Islamic caliphates.[7]
The decline of the Abbasid Caliphate in the 10th century led to the rise of Kurdish dynasties, including the Ayyubids (1171–1260).[7] Since the 11th century, the medieval Crusader castle Krak des Chevaliers in the Syrian Coastal Mountain Range has been known as the "Fortress of the Kurds" or "Castle of the Kurds".[8] The founder of the Ayyubids, Saladin, famous for unifying Muslims and recapturing Jerusalem from Crusaders in 1187, expanded his empire into Syria and beyond.[9]
A group of Kurdish soldiers remained in Damascus after Saladin was buried there in 1193, establishing an enclave in the city known as the "Kurdish quarter", which was a center of Kurdish culture and language into the 20th century.[10] The Ayyubids lost Syria to the Mongols in the mid-13th century, who were quickly driven out by the Mamluks after the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260, who in turn were defeated by the Ottoman Empire in the early 16th century.[11]
Sharafkhan Bidlisi's 1596 epic of Kurdish history from the late 13th century to his own day, the Sharafnama, describes Kurdistan as extending from the Persian Gulf to the Ottoman vilayets of Malatya and Marash (Kahramanmaraş), a wide definition that counts the Lurs as Kurds and which takes an extreme expansionist view of the south. Lying to either side of the Gulf–Anatolia line were the vilayets of Diyarbekir, Mosul, "non-Arab Iraq", "Arab Iraq", Fars, Azerbaijan, Lesser Armenia, and Greater Armenia. Ahmad Khani's 1692 epic Mem û Zîn offers a similar conception of geography. In the 19th century poetry of Haji Qadir Koyi, literary Kurdistan extended across the north of later mandatory Syria, including Nusaybin and Alexandretta (İskenderun) on the Mediterranean Sea's Gulf of Alexandretta.[12]
At the beginning of the 17th century, land on either side of the Euphrates was settled by Kurds forced to migrate there at the Ottoman Sultans' behest from lands elsewhere within the empire. The area on the river's right bank was the main focus of settlement, especially around Kobanî. In the 18th century, some of the Kurdish tribes of Greater Syria (or Bilad al-Sham) remained closely related to those of neighbouring areas of Kurdistan, but some others were assimilated with local Arab tribes.[13]