Kurdistan Education

Kurdistan, upland region, southwestern Asia, homeland of the Kurds. It covers large areas of northwestern Iran and extends into northeastern Iraq, Armenia, eastern Turkey, and northeastern Syria. Major cities include Al Mawsil and Kirkuk, in Iraq; Sanandaj and Saqqiz, in Iran; and Erzurum, in Turkey. Landforms include the northwestern Zagros Mountains and their oil-rich foothills; the eastern Anatolian Plateau; Lake Van, in Turkey; Lake Urmia, in Iran; and Mount Aragats, in Armenia.
Most of Kurdistan was conquered by the Arabs in the 7th century and later became part of the Ottoman Empire. Following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the creation of an independent Kurdistan, promised by the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), was dropped later from the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). Since then, the unsettled issue of Kurdish autonomy, at times expressed in violent and brutally quelled Kurdish rebellions, has kept the nations with large Kurdish minorities politically unstable. In 1961, Iran established the semiautonomous Kurdistan Province, and during 1974-1975 it supported a Kurdish movement for autonomy in Iraq. The latter effort did not succeed in creating an acceptable settlement, however, and fighting between Kurds and Iraqis has continued to flare since that time, most notably in the period following the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Since 1984 Kurdish guerrillas have fought Turkish troops in southeastern Turkey.