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Kurdish mother and child, Van, Turkey. 1973 Iraqi Kurds fleeing to Turkey in April 1991, during the Gulf War Before the foundation of Turkey, the Kurds were recognized as their own nation. [ 33 ] The Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal also recognized the Kurds as a nation at the time and stated that provinces in which the Kurds lived shall be granted ...
Kurdish nationalist uprisings have periodically occurred in Turkey, beginning with the Turkish War of Independence and the consequent transition from the Ottoman Empire to the modern Turkish state and continuing to the present day with the current PKK–Turkey conflict.
[50] [51] [52] Extreme paranoia also increased in Turkey, where Kurds were often baselessly dragged into many theories, including Sèvres syndrome. [53] The PKK was founded in 1978, during a time period when Anti-Kurdism was very widespread, and any indication of Kurdish identity was punishable by law. [54]
Kurdish sources claim there are as many as 20 or 25 million Kurds in Turkey. [176] In 1980, Ethnologue estimated the number of Kurdish-speakers in Turkey at around five million, [177] when the country's population stood at 44 million. [178]
The Kurdish population of Turkey has long sought to have Kurdish included as a language of instruction in public schools as well as a subject. An experiment at running private Kurdish-language teaching schools was closed in 2004 because of the poor economic situation of local people. [35]
The total number of Kurds in Istanbul is estimated variously from 3 to 4 million. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] Because Istanbul is widely accepted to house the largest Kurdish population in any city in the world, it is often dubbed as the biggest Kurdish city .
Turkish Kurdistan or Northern Kurdistan (Kurdish: Bakurê Kurdistanê) is the southeastern part of Turkey [1] where Kurds form the predominant ethnic group.The Kurdish Institute of Paris estimates that there are 20 million Kurds living in Turkey, the majority of them in the southeast.
The Republic of Turkey has an official policy in place that denies the existence of the Kurds as a distinct ethnicity. The Kurds, who are a people that speak various dialects of Northwestern Iranic languages, have historically constituted the demographic majority in southeastern Turkey (or "Turkish Kurdistan") and their independent national aspirations have stood at the forefront of the long ...