Berdasarkan sejarah, bangsa Kurdi tidak pernah berhenti daripada memperjuangkan kemerdekaannya, dan kerana sebab ini telah berperang melawan Sumeria, Asyur, Parsi, Mongolia, Tentera SalibEropah serta Turki. Kaum ini yang mempunyai anggaran jumlah penduduk seramai 30 juta orang merupakan salah satu kelompok etnik terbesar di dunia yang tidak memiliki negara bangsa yang tersendiri. Pada abad ke-20, Turki, Iran dan Iraq telah menghapuskan siri-siri pemberontakan yang dilakukan oleh kaum Kurdi.
^Konda Poll gives a figure of about 11.4 million, s.v. [1]
^Juvenile Nonfiction, “ The Handbook of Middle East ”, Publisher: 21st Century, 2002. pg 144:”About 20 percent of Turkey ’s population is Kurdish.”
^Kemal Kirisci, Gareth M. Winrow, “The Kurdish Question and Turkey ”, Routledge, 1997. pg 119: “According to Turgut Ozal there were 12 million Kurds in Turkey . .. Van Bruissen has argued that a ‘reasonable and even conservative’ estimate for the size of Kurdish population in 1975 was 7.5 millions, which amounts to 19 percent of the population”
^ Sandra Mackey , “The reckoning: Iraq and the legacy of Saddam”, W.W. Norton and Company, 2002. Excerpt from pg 350: “As much as 25% of Turkey is Kurdish.”
^ abc“Beverley Milton-Edwards, “Contemporary politics in the Middle East” Polity, 2006. pg 231: “They form a population in all four states, making 23 percent in Turkey, 23 percent in Iraq, 10 percent in Iran and 8 percent in Syria (Mcdowell, 2003, p 3-4).”
^Estimate based on 7% of 68,688,433: World Factbook, s.v. Iran;
^Estimate based on 15% to 20% of 26,783,383: World Factbook, s.v. Iraq; Encyclopedia of the Orient, s.v. Iraq: Religions and Peoples.
^ abcThe Kurdish Diaspora, Institut Kurde de Paris (Paris: Institut Kurde de Paris, 2006), http://www.institutkurde.org/en/kurdorama/.
^Lokman I. Meho, The Kurds and Kurdistan: A General Background, in Kurdish Culture and Society: An Annotated Bibliography. Comp. Lokman I. Meho & Kelly Maglaughlin (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), p. 4, viewable on Google Books
^ abRalat petik: Tag <ref> tidak sah; tiada teks disediakan bagi rujukan yang bernama coucileu