Once again, the Kurds appear to be pushed to the front lines of someone else’s war. As Iran faces internal pressure, armed Kurdish groups are allegedly being nudged into cross-border operations—serving as deniable ground forces for a familiar trio: the US, Israel, and Turkey.

The usual suspects appear to be nudging Kurdish actors toward cross-border operations, quietly positioning them as ground forces and deniable hired guns.

Using stateless peoples as expendable instruments and then discarding them when the geopolitical weather shifts is the standard MO for the US and its friends in the region, and not only in this region, but in many other places around the world.

To understand how the Kurds repeatedly end up in this role, one only needs to look no further than the Sykes-Picot agreement. Negotiated in secrecy prior to the end of the First World War (1914-1918), the agreement between Britain and France carved the remains of the Ottoman Empire into artificial “nation-states,” drawn with ruler-straight lines and imperial indifference.

The map was not designed to reflect history, ethnicity, or stability—it was designed to control the region and its resources.

Enter the Kurds

The Kurds, one of the oldest peoples of the region and a recognized nation within the Ottoman framework, were deliberately excluded from this new order. Their statelessness was not a bureaucratic oversight but a strategic choice. Even the Russian Empire was promised its slice of the post-Ottoman pie—until the Russian Revolution intervened—making moot the role that Imperial Russia would have played.

The Kurds, by contrast, were offered nothing at all. A century later, they remain the region’s most reliable shock troops and its most disposable allies. And once again, they........

© New Eastern Outlook