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Although the Kurds have been resisting physical and cultural decimation for the last 4,000 years, these struggles have fierce urgency in the era of modern nation-states.

At the signing of the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, a state named "Kurdistan" was conceived by European powers, in order to bring the work of nation-building to bear on the oil-rich area. However, three years later, Kurdistan was abolished at the Treaty of Lausanne, denying Kurdish leaders one of the few viable methods for self-determination. This geopolitical area is currently governed by Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, states largely carved out by the Allied powers after World War I.

Since the formation of Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, the Kurdish people have struggled to survive as each of these governing nations were not interested in negotiating wih the Kurds. These four states have collaborated many times to execute socioeconomic and genocidal actions to undermine Kurdish self-determination, often with the complicity of Western nations. Kurdish empowerment is seen as threatening to national identities, status quo social relations and control over natural resources.

Since the 1920s, thousands of Kurdish villages have been bombed, flooded and razed by Turkish, Iranian and Iraqi governments. In Syria, the Kurds are considered non-citizens, consigned to the lowliest of jobs and denied hospital care, passports, or visas. In southeast Turkey, campaigns aimed at destroying sustenance, dignity and hope have slaughtered livestock, poisoned water supplies, and burned acres of forests and fields to ashes. Those responsible for these atrocities have refused to even acknowledge the existence of the Kurdish peoples.

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein's Anfal Campaign which included the Halabja massacre, killed more than 180,000 Kurds and Shi'a Muslims. Throughout Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, armies and secret police have unjustly imprisoned, viciously tortured, raped and killed Kurdish men, women and children. These states have fomented new and widespread forms of hatred and violence toward Kurds in their popular cultures.

The formation and rise of Kurdish liberation armies, political parties and demands for a separate Kurdish state (Kurdistan) are responses to the relentless brutalization of Kurds by the states occupying their lands.