Top 83 Kurds Quotes & Sayings

The Kurds were the only people in Iraq who were completely unguarded in expressing their gratitude to the United States for setting them free.

The Kurds will not be allowed to have an independent country because Turkey wouldn't stand for it; they have their own Kurdish population.

Kurds are going to have to strike a bargain with Bashar Assad that will keep them in the Syrian state and under some kind of Syrian authority, so that they can have the protection of international legitimacy and the Syrian army against the Turks. How they can bargain with Assad is unclear. What kind of negotiations they can come to, unclear. We will see whether they get something like the Kurds in Iraq, which is a large measure of autonomy, or something less than that. That will be one of the big negotiations to come out of this process.

Syria is a multi-confessional state: in addition to Sunni and Shia Muslims, there are Alawites, Orthodox and other Christian confessions, Druzes, and Kurds.

The Kurds are an ancient, democratic, peace-loving people that have never attacked any country.

The Kurds' achievement was outstanding, both militarily and diplomatically. European governments recognized this and abandoned their resistance to weapons deliveries. Germany, too, acted correctly. Now, we need a joint military leadership so that the Kurds and the army can retake Mosul.

If they make the deadline because the Shiites and Kurds essentially rammed a draft through over Sunni Arab objections, there will be hell to pay.

Most Turkish Kurds want a quiet life and improved economic conditions. But the Kurdish regions of Turkey are mountainous; they're ill-favored climatically; they're poor; and there's a limit to what the government can do there without wasting a lot of resources. Developing the south east may mean decamping a large part of its population. But the thing that will improve the lot of the Kurds more than anything else will be the stabilization of Iraq in the first place, because then the Turkish southeast stops being a dead end. It can become a bridge, with trade flowing in both directions.

We need to embed our forces - our troops inside the Iraqi military. We need to arm directly the Kurds. And all of that has to be done in concert with the Arab nations.

Kurds are like fire, if approached kindly they will warm you, if approached badly they will burn you

Erdogan's persecution of his people is not simply a domestic matter. The ongoing pursuit of civil society, journalists, academics and Kurds in Turkey is threatening the long-term stability of the country.

The problem of ISIS is not recent. Ever since the Second World War, people in this region have been, and are today, living under brutal dictatorships governed by nationalistic fervor. As for the Kurdish question: nobody from the Arab world is serious about fighting ISIS. It's only the Kurdish people who are standing firm against ISIS. And I think Europe, the United States, and most other democratic countries of the world are beginning to look at the Kurds in another way. The Kurds are really becoming their partners in the region.

We respect the will of our citizens, whether they are Kurds or Arabs or Turkmen, but will not allow an illegal and unconstitutional procedure done under the threat of weapons to yield results.

Where were the peacekeepers? Where was the UN? Why was the entire world ignoring Saddam's attack upon his own people? Were we Kurds considered so unworthy, so disposable? I longed to stand at the top of the mountain and shout out, Where are you, world? Where are you ?

There's a certain amount of sympathy here for the Bush administration's problem, which is they would like to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they would like to have the Kurds autonomous.

The one thing that unites Sunni, Shiites and Kurds is they want the Americans out.

Iran is barely over 50% Persian, and Arabs, Baluchis, Azeris, Kurds and many other groups feel left out of the society. That regime has a lot more weaknesses than people see.

In the 20th century, the Muslim world created a vision of religious nationalism. Turkey, for example, had to be ethnically Turkish. Kurds, Armenians, other minorities didn't have a place in such a vision of a nation-state.

Whenever a Kurd wants to measure the depth of some foreign leader's commitment to Kurdish autonomy, he listens for one particular word. That word is 'federal.' Anyone who will say he favors Kurdish federalism can be counted a friend of the Kurds.

The Iraquis can see it. The Kurds can feel it. The jihadists are counting on it.

The country of Iraq is somewhat of an artificial creation going back to colonial days. And so you have the Kurds and then the Sunnis in the north predominantly and Shias in the south.

My readers are surprisingly mixed. I have conservative readers - for instance, women with headscarves - but also many liberal, leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, and secularist readers. Next to those are mystics, agnostics, Kurds, Turks, Alevis, Sunnis, gays, housewives, and businesswomen.

The Arabs are victims. You have Shia Arabs, under Arabization under Saddam Hussein, who were forcibly moved up there... You have Kurds who were displaced by these Arabs that were moved up there by Saddam Hussein. Kurds have been displaced from Kirkuk for hundreds of years.

By very conservative estimates, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of more than a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital, Diyarbakir, from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside.

The Kurds know that they won't achieve their own state by force of arms but through international recognition. And they have certainly heard what the German foreign minister said in connection with the arms deliveries: There is no Kurdish state. But that shouldn't prevent the Kurds from continuing to develop their own institutions. Still, the best thing for them would be to remain a part of Iraq, but in return we must treat them with respect - their nationality, their language and their culture.

I do believe that the Kurds are in a difficult situation. They do have some American support. How consistent that will be is unclear. But they have built up a strong military, and they have begun to build the institutions of an autonomous life in Northern Syria. Turkey's enmity towards the Kurds and their desire to make sure there is no independent Kurdish state or even really autonomous enclave is going to push the Kurds into Bashar Assad's hands over time.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein had and used significant weapons of mass destruction on his own people, both the Kurds and the Iranians.

My priorities? Assisting our allies, the Kurds, in their fight against ISIS.

The Kurds are the greatest fighting force and our strongest allies. They're Muslim.

Adding to your list of enemies is never a sound strategy, yet ISIS' ferocious campaign against the Shia, Kurds, Yazidis, Christians, and Muslims who don't precisely share its views has united every ethnic and religious group in Syria and Iraq against them.

The Kurds in Iraq just don't have enough military equipment - they also need humanitarian relief.

The U.S. cannot force Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds to make peace or to act for the common good. They have been in conflict for 1,400 years.

Erdogan wants a caliphate. We Kurds are in his way. Erdogan can't stop us politically, so he is denouncing us as terrorists.

Nothing worse than Kurds in your milk. General, make sure i never see another Kurd again.

There are sort of Kurdish districts there in Mosul, or there used to be, but the Kurds mostly fled or were driven out. The same is true of the Christians.

The United States did not act in Iraq in 1988 when gas was being used on the Kurds or when gas was used in the Iranian-Iraq War.

There is a difference between Iraq, where you have Sunni, Shia, and Kurds put together after the First World War by the Western powers. It doesn't work. It needs to break up into three parts.

America sold VX nerve gas and anthrax to Iraq for years, even after the Halabja gas attack, which killed thousands of Kurds.

To move any regime you need to have co-operation and co-ordination between Kurds, Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs, the people and the army. Until we have this we cannot change the regime.

We need to use overwhelming air power. We need to be arming the Kurds. We need to be fighting and killing ISIS where they are.

The allies we formerly relied on - the Kurds and the Syrian Democratic Forces - will have little interest in helping us after we abandon them to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Back when Saddam Hussein was in power, the Americans didn't care about his crimes. When he was gassing the Kurds and gassing Iran, they didn't care about it. When oil was at stake, somehow, suddenly, things mattered.

Iraqi national identity under Saddam Hussein never truly incorporated Shiites or Kurds. Sunnis, who identified most closely with the Iraqi nation, remain in some ways disenfranchised relative to the other groups, or at least they perceive themselves that way.

Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who can't write their own language.

Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who cant write their own language.

The Kurds had always had a bad time. They were oppressed by the Ottoman empire. Then, at the end of the First World War, they were promised a homeland, but the new Turkish state refused to give them any land, while the British went and created the new state of Iraq and sent aircraft to bomb the Kurds there into submission.

No torture has yet been devised that could get a liberal to mention the poor, beleaguered Kurds dancing in the streets because Saddam is gone.

So the idea that you could put Kurds, Shiite Arabs, and Sunni Arabs in a nice, liberal, federal system in Iraq in a short amount of time, six months or a year, boggles the mind.

I always tell the Kurds who defend independence: Let's say we declared the independent Kurdish state and Syria, Iran, Iraq and Turkey imposed sanctions on us, without waging a war. How would we survive under those circumstances?

There's been so much bad blood between the Kurds and the Turks.

I used to be someone who would not even tread on an ant. But this is a war for honor and self-defense. A 100 percent elimination policy (by Ankara of the Kurds) has forced me to defense and it has become a glorious defense of a people.

I feel pretty safe in saying that most Americans can't tell you off the top of their head who the Kurds are or what the U.S. relationship with them is - let alone how that factors into Iran, Russia, China, Turkey and Syria.

We seem to be afraid to give the Kurds weaponry. We like to send it for some strange reason through Baghdad, and then they only get a tenth of it.

Turkey is saying that it wants to preserve Sunni dominance in Mosul. Obviously, there, the Kurds, the Shia, the Iraqi government have their own agendas.

This current government in Iraq has never fulfilled the commitments it made to form a unity government with the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shia. We have worked hard with them within the confines of our ability to do that but we can't dictate to them.

Now the world believes in Kurds, as they have become partners in that region. The West doesn't believe in the Iraqi government - not in Maliki before or Abadi today. It doesn't believe in Syria in any way, nor in Iran. So the Kurds could maybe work together with the Western world to bring stability to the region. It's a nice change, coming as it is after hundreds of years of the struggle of the Kurds.

The Kurds have fought, bled and died fighting alongside the U.S.

While our goals in Syria were never clearly enumerated by then-President Obama or President Trump, throughout the war one of our most committed and effective allies in the fight has been the Kurds.

What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites? That's a huge question, to my mind.

Syrians have a national identity beyond the sectarian divide. Syria's national identity would be weaker and poorer if it didn't have this beautiful pluralism between Arabs, Kurds, and sects.