Kurdish-inhabited areas in 1992
Kurdistan is a geocultural historical region located between the northwestern Zagros Mountains in the east and the eastern Taurus Mountains in the west in present-day Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. The Kurdish peoples are descended from the Persian inhabitants of the Seleucid kingdom of Corduene, and they gradually adopted Islam following the Muslim conquest of Persia in the 7th century AD. Several independent Kurdish emirates existed during the Middle Ages, and, in the 16th century, Kurdistan was divided between the Turkish Ottoman Empire and the Persian Safavid Empire, starting in the aftermath of the 1514 Battle of Chaldiran and being formalized with the 1639 Treaty of Zuhab. After World War I, Turkey was awarded much of Kurdistan, upsetting Kurds who desired their own nation-state. Kurdish nationalist groups emerged in each of the four countries overlapping with Kurdistan, namely the PKK in Turkey, the PYD in Syria, the KDP and PUK in Iraq, and the KDPI in Iran. In 1992, Iraqi Kurdistan was granted autonomy by the Arab nationalist and Ba'athist government of Saddam Hussein, and it exercised greater autonomy during the Iraqi Civil War. Likewise, the Kurds of northern Syria formed an autonomous, multiethnic adminstration in northern and eastern Syria, Rojava, in January 2014 amid the Syrian Civil War. The dictatorial AKP government of Turkey feared that Kurdish autonomy in Syria and Iraq would strengthen the PKK's insurgency in Turkey, causing the Turks to ally with genocidal Arab paramilitaries in both countries and assist them in pushing back against the Kurds. By the 2020s, however, a united and independent Kurdistan was still far out of reach due to a lack of international governmental support for Kurdish autonomy or self-determination.