# Kurds The Kurds are an Iranic ethnic group of roughly 30–40 million people spread across a contiguous homeland — "Kurdistan" — that straddles Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and [[Syria]]. Often called the world's largest stateless nation, they have been promised and denied a state repeatedly across the past century, and their fate is woven through Iraqi history at every turn. ## Genocide Under Saddam In Iraq, the Kurds were the principal victims of [[Saddam Hussein]]'s most systematic atrocities: the [[Anfal Campaign]] of 1986–1989, which destroyed thousands of villages and killed tens of thousands, and the [[Halabja Massacre]] of 1988, the largest chemical-weapons attack ever directed at a civilian population. That history is why Iraqi Kurds broadly welcomed the 2003 [[Iraq War]] and the fall of Saddam — and why post-Saddam Iraqi Kurdistan emerged as a semi-autonomous region with its own government and security forces (the Peshmerga). ## The Reliable, Disposable Ally The Kurds recur in American policy as the ally the United States repeatedly uses and then abandons. Iraqi Kurds were encouraged to rise against Saddam after the [[Gulf War]] and then left exposed; Syrian Kurdish forces became the West's most effective ground partner against [[Islamic State]], only to be left to a Turkish offensive when Washington's priorities shifted. For the vault, the Kurds are a standing case study in the gap between American rhetoric about freedom and self-determination and the realpolitik that governs which allies are protected and which are sacrificed. *See also: [[Iraqi History Hub]], [[Halabja Massacre]], [[Anfal Campaign]], [[Saddam Hussein]]*