The Gaming Den

So the past couple of days I've seen reports of Kurdistan beating up on ISIS and evacuating hundreds of thousands of refugees. This kind of clearly white hat behavior always makes me suspect some kind of ulterior motive or dark side, and while it's hard to be the wrong side of a fight when the other guys are slaughtering civilians en masse, I am wondering about the skeletons in the Kurds' closet.

So, do the Kurds have any skeletons in their closet?

So far as I know, nothing particularly spectacular. Since they're a group in the Middle East that wants independence there are probably some terrorist attacks in their past if you dig deep enough, and they clashed with the Maliki government before the Islamic State became everyone's primary concern, but they mostly seem happy with being a collective of semi-autonomous regions.

It is worth pointing out that their actions are not purely altruistic, though. The Yazadi faith is most common among ethnic Kurds, and it's not like the Islamic State would leave them alone.

The Kurds have only ever had states with the sponsorship of the Soviet Union, which created a Soviet Socialist Republic in the 20s and a Soviet Client State in the late 40s. Both were disbanded because Kurdish tribal bullshit and infighting proved more than the Soviets were willing to put up with (Stalin ended up deporting most of the Kurds from the region that is now Azerbaijan to what is now Kazakhstan because Stalin was a very strange person). Since then, the Kurdish independence movement has largely been Maoist in nature and has been fighting a low grade terrorist insurgency against Iran, Iraq, and Turkey for decades.

As of 2013, they supposedly have a ceasefire with Turkey, but as far as I can tell that ceasefire isn't actually worth anything.

Whether you think Kurdistan has skeletons in its closet depends largely on how you feel about radical feminist Maoism and whether you think that combat operations against Turkey and Iran are self defeating or necessary against the various sundry oppression of those regimes. NATO officially considers the Kurdistan People's Defense Force to be a terrorist organization (largely because Turkey is a NATO member).

Certainly, there are worse people in the Middle East. I don't think there's a lot of argument on that.

-Username17

The thing about Kurdistan is there is no Kurdistan. I mean yes, there's a province called Kurdistan in Iraq where the Kurds are and they're going to try and breakaway again, but there's also a Kurdistan in Iran and Syria. The Kurds have wanted their own little patch of earth to call home for forever, but the line-drawing after WWII didn't favor them and all independence efforts tend to fail...usually because they end up attacking two nations at once, or they end up fleeing into a hostile nation.

The Iraqi Kurds are apparently at least provisionally willing to give a unified Iraqi government a shot, although they've made it pretty clear they're willing to walk.

They might have been considering using the chaos as an opportunity to break away while everyone in the region was busy, but after the Islamic State's leader declared himself Caliph that doesn't seem particularly likely. They would likely have to fight him eventually anyway.

What D&D race/culture does Kurdistan most easily correlate to?

Human

The Turks used Kurds as their hatchetmen during the Armenian Genocide, but that was a hundred years ago and in a different country. Iraqi Kurds were the best local allies we had over there.

I never know who 'we' is on the interwebs. Are we talking the Nazi Secular Party 'we', the Zionist Conspiracy Martyrs 'we', or the Union of Superintelligent Gorillas 'we'? Or are we, given your title and location, the Knightly Order of American Crusaders 'we'?

The Union of Superintelligent Gorillas. Without a doubt.

W.E. is an acronym for "White E-merican", who are the principal conquerors of the electronic frontier, the Wild Wild Web.