THE KURDS AND KURDISTAN: A GENERAL BACKGROUND Lokman I. Meho GEOGRAPHY AND POPULATION 1 Kurdistan, or the homeland of the Kurds, is a strategic area located in the geographic heart of the Middle East. Today, it comprises important parts of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. These parts were created at two different occa- sions: first, in 1514 when Kurdistan was divided between the Ottoman and Per- sian empires following the battle of Chaldiran and, second, in 1920-1923 when Britain and France further altered the political contours of Kurdistan by dividing Ottoman Kurdistan among Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Today, estimates of the size of the land where the Kurds constitute the dominant majority range from 230,000 to 300,000 square miles in size, divided as follows: Turkey (43% of the 1 A few sources have been extensively used in this Introduction. Rather than repeatedly citing these sources, they are listed here: Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1992); Gerard Chaliand, ed., A People Without A Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan (London: Zed Press, 1993); Nader Entessar, Kurdish Ethnonationalism (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992); Edmund Ghareeb, The Kurdish Question in Iraq (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1981); Michael Gunter, The Kurds and the Future of Turkey (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Michael Gunter, The Kurdish Predicament in Iraq: A Political Analysis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); Amir Has- sanpour, Nationalism and Language in Kurdistan, 1918-1985 (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992); International Journal of Kurdish Studies 11, nos. 1-2 (1997), pp. 251-257; Mehrdad Izady, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (Washington, D.C.: Taylor & Francis, Inc., 1992); David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996); David McDowall, The Kurds. 7 th ed. (London: Minority Rights Group, 1996); Robert Olson, The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism and the Sheikh Said Rebellion, 1880-1925 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1988); and Robert Olson, ed. The Kurdish Nationalist Movement in the 1990s: Its Impact on Turkey and the Middle East (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996).