Who are the Kurds? A user's guide to Kurdish politics

Who are the Kurds? A user's guide to Kurdish politics

Kurds dream of a state, but aren't as united as you might think. Now their factions could shape the Middle East. Here is a guide to who is who

By Richard Spencer in the Telegraph newspaper

For the first time, fighters from all the big Kurdish factions in the Middle East, the whole alphabet soup of KDP, PUK, PKK and YPG, will be fighting alongside each other in the same battle – the defence of Kobane from Isil in Syria. For the Kurds – who aspire to statehood, it's a hugely powerful moment. But just who are all these factions, and why do they matter?:

Here is a cut out and keep guide to Kurdish political groups:

• KDP: Kurdistan Democratic Party, currently the dominant faction in Iraqi Kurdistan, it is a fiefdom of the Barzani clan, and led by the region’s president, Masoud Barzani. He’s the son of a renowned resistance fighter who led the struggle against Baghdad. The KDP is pro-capitalism, pro-West, and close to Turkey.

• PUK: the second faction in Iraqi Kurdistan, and a fiefdom of the rival Talabani clan, led by Jalal Talabani, who was figurehead Iraqi president until this year. It is close to Iran, though not unfriendly to the West.

• PKK: the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a Marxist group that fought a bloody war with Turkey for more autonomy in the Kurdish south-east from 1984 to a ceasefire last year. Its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, known throughout the Kurdish world as Apo, or Uncle, has been in a Turkish prison since 1999.

• PYD/YPG: the Democratic Union Party and its armed wing, the People’s Protection Units, have used the Syrian civil war to carve out a mini-state in three parts of northern Syria, of which Kobane is the one in the middle. It is regarded as so close to the PKK as to be almost a subordinate entity.

• KNC: the Kurdish National Council is a coalition of Syrian Kurdish parties not aligned with the PYD/YPG. It is close to Mr Barzani’s KDP – to the extent that some see it as part of his battle with Mr Ocalan for leadership of the Kurdish world.

What has happened is that Turkey has decided to allow Iraqi Kurdistan’s army, the Peshmerga, to join the YPG, the PKK’s Syrian affiliate, in defending Kobane.

The Kurds of south-east Turkey cheering the Peshmerga convoy as it passes are of course hoping they will save their fellow Kurds in Kobane. But they are also cheering the new-found unity of the Kurdish cause. For once, the faction-fighting of their leaders has been set aside in a common purpose, and the Kurd in the street feels anything is now possible.

If you are confused about which Kurdish group is which, we are partly to blame. For years, television stations and newspapers, like my own, have shielded the viewer and reader from the full niceties of Kurdish politics. We may have been wrong to do so, but we did it in your own interest.

That is not because we don’t like the Kurds. On the contrary, the Kurds – particularly in Iraq – welcome the West's businessmen, politicians, armies, and journalists, in return for its support for their fledgling mini-state.

Many of us remain vaguely sympathetic even to the guerrillas fighting for Kurdish rights in Turkey, the PKK, though they are a proscribed terrorist organisation and not averse to the occasional bit of murder and mayhem themselves.

The reason for our reticence was that it was all too complicated. It was difficult enough explaining the fraught factional politics of the Arab world – and the Arabs had states that made them important. The Kurds were just another oppressed minority.

Try selling editors in London stories about the war between the two largest Kurdish factions in Iraq, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), or about the ideological battle between the pro-Western, capitalist KDP and the Marxist PKK, and you could hear the blood draining from their faces.

But with a fragile peace holding in the long war of the Turkish Kurds against Ankara; with the Kurdish regional government in Iraq now everyone’s favourite ally in the war against Isil; and with the Syrian Kurds being helped to do what was once unthinkable – carve out their own region autonomous from the Assad regime – the Kurds, denied self-rule after the First World War, can now dare to dream of their own state.

They are the largest ethnic group in the world without their own independent state, and while they are nowhere near achieving one, their aspirations are one step closer to being recognised by world powers.

That is why so many Kurds are cheering.

There is one thing that all their factions agree on: whatever the future holds for an autonomous or even independent Kurdistan, its greatest current threat is the jihad of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Most Kurds want some form of democratic, secular state, whatever the machinations of their egotistical and often corrupt leaders.

The battle for Kobane has thus become a symbol of their aspirations.