The systemic and historical structure of Turkish-Iranian competition over Kurdish geography is one of the oldest geostrategic riddles of the Middle East. Through its long history, the Kurdish lebensraum, which roughly corresponds to the Taurus-Zagros mountain corridor, has separated the Anatolian, Persian, and Mesopotamian plains and, in doing so, has historically been squeezed between three imperial geographies: Romans versus Parthians and Sassanids; Byzantians versus Seljuks; and later, Ottomans versus the Safavids and Mamluks. When the Ottomans conquered Mamluk lands in early 16th century and the Safavids adopted Shiism as the official imperial religious doctrine, this geopolitical riddle turned into an ideological regional superpower rivalry, between two equally powerful Muslim empires adopting different religious ideologies.
As these two empires fought proxy wars around Baghdad, the Kurdish homeland became the northern flank of a war between religious denominations. Although the end of World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire led to the fragmentation of this Kurdish homeland into four separate countries (Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey), their role as a buffer between the Anatolian and Persian plateaus didn’t change. The Kurds, in their rugged highlands, have developed multiple political and linguistic identities – a state of fragmentation, which has been amply exploited by adjacent empires in the past.
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