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The Kurds: A People Whose Time Has Come
Considered to be the largest unreached people group in the world without a country, the Kurds are a fragmented people. Occupied by strong powers on every side, divided from within, guilty of persecuting and killing Christians, the Kurds have no friends. One of their famous expressions is, “We have no friends but the mountains”… where they have spent most of their lives in retreat from annihilation. With a population of 40 million, they are located primarily in Iraq (16%), Turkey (46%), Iran (23%), Syria (7%), Europe (5%) and old USSR (3%). Many consider them to be the most downtrodden of all peoples in the world. In 1992, the U.N. reported 200,000 Kurds in Iraq as murdered. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein gassed the city of Halabja in 1988 where 6,000 were murdered. In 1991, at the close of the Gulf War, Hussein destroyed 4,000 of their villages and forced them into sixty different camps. Television around the world showed images of northern Iraq’s Kurds fleeing through the mountains to Turkey and Iran. In the Eastern part of Turkey, 2,800 villages were destroyed in the 1990’s in retaliation to hit and run guerrilla activities against Turkish government forces. One million Kurds have migrated to Istanbul and other Turkish cities in the last ten years where they hope to start over. In Syria, any dissent is met with brutal repression. Kurds claim Kurdistan as their nation even though it is not officially recognized by the U.N. Kurdistan was erased from the world's maps after World War I when the Allied Powers carved up the Middle East and denied the Kurds a nation-state. Throughout the 20th century their struggles for political and cultural autonomy were opposed by the region's countries and the Kurds were often used as pawns in regional politics. The Kurds are a regional catalyst. Their native Mesopotamia has driven the events of the Middle East since the dawn of recorded history. In April 1991, following the March uprising of Kurds in the north and Shi’a Arabs in the south against the central Iraqi government, a so called Kurdish safe haven was implemented to give security and humanitarian assistance to refugees in camps along the Iraq-Turkey border. Under considerable constraint and against strong external and internal opposition, the Kurdish safe haven has been successfully governed for a decade by the Kurds themselves. This has bought relative peace to the area which has allowed the Kurds to begin to normalize their lives and homeland to some extent. |
WHO IS EPIC? Click here to find out more information about us and EPIC International...  VIDEO - The Kurds: Out of the Shadows  Play Short Version (7:15) Play Long Version (15:29) FREE DOWNLOADS Right click and 'Save As' 7 Days of Prayer for the Kurds
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LINKS EPIC International TheKurds.net Brigada Resource List |
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