The Kurds are an ethnic group indigenous to a region often referred to as Kurdistan, an area which includes adjoining regions of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. However, Kurdish communities can also be found in Lebanon, Armenia, Azerbaijan. In recent decades, Kurds also inhabit some European countries as well as the United States.
Ethnically related to other Iranian cultural groups, they speak the language of Kurdish, an Indo-European language of Iranian origins.
Since Armenia was part of the Soviet Union from the 1930s-80s, Kurds there had the status of a protected minority under Soviet Law. They had their own state-sponsored newspaper, a radio broadcast and were allowed to hold cultural events. During the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, many non-Yazidi Kurds were forced to leave their homes. Upon the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Kurds in Armenia were stripped of their cultural privileges, and most of them fled to Russia or Western Europe.
 |
