WORLD RELIGIONS

Detailed explanation-1: -Syria’s Kurds have long been suppressed and denied basic rights. Some 300, 000 have been denied citizenship since the 1960s, and Kurdish land has been confiscated and redistributed to Arabs in an attempt to “Arabize” Kurdish regions.

Detailed explanation-2: -Indigenous to a mountain region in the northern Middle East, the Kurds are the largest stateless nation in the world. The fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East, around 25 million Kurds live in a territory that spans the borders of modern-day Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran and Armenia.

Detailed explanation-3: -Earliest known persecution of Kurds was after World War I, the newly declared Turkish Republic leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk repudiated the Treaty of Sèvres which proposed a referendum be conducted in the Kurdish homeland. As a result, conflict continued between the Turkish military and the Kurds.

Detailed explanation-4: -As a percentage of the total population, the largest share of around 19 percent is in Iraq. A total of about 27.2 million people worldwide speak Kurdish as their mother tongue.