Nations are a strange thing, logically having no real reason to exist, yet somehow managing to bring together millions upon millions of people under one banner, claiming to be one people. While Western countries have been busy trying to systematically destroy the idea of one national culture over the past few decades, the rest of the world has been trying to overthrow the incoherent 'nations' that were imposed on them by the West in their rapid decolonisation during the 50s and 60s. One region which has still not managed to do so is that of Kurdistan.
What is today called the Kurdistan region is an area crossing four countries, inhabited by people with a shared culture and heritage who call themselves Kurds. Unlike many of the people groups in the region, the Kurds are a fairly recent group, first noted as a distinct people group in around the 12th century and not being firmly established until at least the 16th. It is believed they draw their heritage from various tribal groups of Persia, but have over some hundreds of years come together as one culture and language.
Today, the Kurds mostly live in an area that actually intersects four different countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. There are mild differences between the Kurds in each of these countries, but not significantly enough to prevent them being grouped as one people. For much of the past century, the Kurds have been left behind by successive nationalist regimes, as they have no country to call their own, being a significant minority in all four of the aforementioned. Now, with two of these four countries crumbling against the force of the Islamic State, the Kurds may be approaching the day where they can declare their independence. Were the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds to do so, no-one could really stand in their way...except for Turkey.
The history of the Turkish Kurds, which make up the largest proportion of Kurds in the world, is the most difficult and storied of the group. Turkish nationalism, and the Turkification of the new republic that happened from the 1920s onwards, naturally found an enemy in the Kurds, who were quite happy being Kurds, not Turks. Thus forms the basis for an century-old internal conflict, one which is today represented in two political parties: Justice and Development (AKP), which currently hold government; and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which doesn't focus so much on elections as it does in being the army of the Turkish Kurds. The Turkish government and the PKK have been fighting on and off for years, with the former trying to ensure the Kurds remain in Turkey, and the latter trying to make sure they don't.
Having agreed to their most recent ceasefire in 2013, these two are now once again fighting each other, with both blaming the other for the resumption of hostilities. Unlike past conflicts, though, this one is potentially a three-cornered context, thanks to the Islamic State.
First, some context. A suicide bomber blew himself up in Suruc, a Kurdish town in Turkey, killing 32 people. The Turkish government blames the Islamic State, but at least some Kurds believe Turkey colluded with IS. Therefore, the PKK shot two Turkish policeman as a response, thereby ending the ceasefire on their side. Because they believe Turkey was at least partly responsible for the bomb, they could claim that the ceasefire had already ended. In any case, Turkey proceeded to bomb IS fighters - and bombed the PKK at the same time.
Furthermore, Turkey announced that they would work with the United States to create a buffer zone on their border with Syria. As it happens, this zone would also act as a buffer for another group: the Syrian Kurds. The latter's army, the YPG, has close ties with the PKK, and has carved out a zone of control in northern Syria which is beginning to extend beyond the extent of the Kurdish population in Syria. Not helping matters is Turkey's approach towards IS thus far, which has been more or less tolerant of their existence, due to a preoccupation with getting Bashar al-Assad out of the Syrian presidency and with controlling the PKK.
The question being asked now is whether Turkey truly intends to fight IS, or whether they are using IS as a pretext to put down any potential emerging Kurdistan. As it stand today, Iraqi Kurdistan seems on the verge of being its own nation. It has been autonomous within Iraq for a decade, but the continual weakness of the Iraqi government means that if Kurdistan were to announce independence, there is little they could do. Syrian Kurdistan is in a similar position, but is more bound by geography. There is only a fairly thin border between Iraqi and Syrian Kurdistan, one that is still contested between them and IS. On the Turkish side of the border, though, there is plenty of space with which to work. This presents a significant problem for Turkey, as both IS and the PYG/PKK have shown little care for national borders.
Above all, this presents a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the Turkish government. Having spent a century defining itself as a secular nation with a secular government, a Turkey that loses Kurdistan could well face a national dispute over which way to take in the future - whether to embrace the secularism they claim to have, and do away with the increasing Islamisation of society; or whether to go the other way, and drop the pretence of secularism.
Turkey stands as the gateway of cultures, and it is on the Kurdish question that its direction will be decided.
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