ABSTRACT
The map of the Middle East was completely redrawn in the aftermath of the First World War. By the mid-1920s most Kurds lived in the Turkish Republic, and in Iraq and Syria - two new Arab states under British and French mandate - and in Iran after a change of regime there. A small community of Kurds found themselves under Soviet rule in the southern Caucasus. How did the Kurds become dispersed among five states? What were the political forces that culminated in the drawing of the frontiers of Iraq, Iran, Syria, the Soviet Union and Turkey? Why did the Kurds fail to establish a state of their own?
