Kurdistan is a region that has existed in turmoil and is the country “never was”. The Kurds are the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East and number between 20 and 25 million. About 15 million live in the regions of Türkiye, Iraq, Iran and Syria, an area called Kurdistan, but they have no country of their own. Formal attempts to establish such a state were repressed by the largest and most powerful countries in the region after both world wars. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I, the Kurds were promised their own independent nation in the Treaty of Sèvres. In 1923, however, the treaty was broken allowing Turkey to retain its status and not allowing the Kurdish people to have a nation to call their own. The end of the Gulf War, the Iran-Iraq War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War reinvigorated the Kurdish nationalist movement. The movement is a powder keg ready to explode. With the majority of Kurds living within its borders, no country faces this threat more than Türkiye. Due to the Turkish concept of a unified and cohesive nation – in which the existence of minorities is not recognized – these tensions in Türkiye are more difficult to manage than elsewhere. In southeastern Türkiye, Kurds use extreme fighting and guerrilla tactics in support of their political parties. The Turkish army is currently stationed in this area. There are several political parties that represent the needs of the Kurdish people. They are the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) which represents the needs of Turkish Kurds and they are the most violent terrorist group, the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) which is active politically but not militarily, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP ) made up of the Iraqi Kurds and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which also represents the Iraqi Kurds. The PKK was created in 1974 as a Marxist-Leninist rebel group composed mainly of Turkish Kurds seeking an independence movement. Its first and only leader, Abdullah Ocalan, or Apo as he came to be called, was at that time a political science student at Ankara University. From the late 1970s, Ocalan worked closely with both the then Soviet Union and Syria, whose governments were attempting to generate a political collapse in Turkey. In 1977, the PKK published a series of "com...... middle of paper ... for years. In 1980, Ocalan actually moved into Syria and used Syrian facilities and training camps in the Bekaa Valley to train terrorist groups for cross-border attacks on targets in Turkey. Greece, a NATO ally, supports the PKK and its affiliates with every means at its disposal. The PKK is a very harmful organization and a radical group in the pursuit of its independence They believe that their human rights are oppressed by the Turkish people and that they deserve the land that is theirs, no matter the cost. The only forces that stand in their way are Turkey, the PUK and the KDP if these organizations fail to stop the PKK. a new nation will be formed in the name of Marxism. And other countries may soon follow suit, changing what we know as the Middle East. Bibliography http://burn.ucsd.edu/~ats/PKK/pkk5-3.html http ://www.fas.org/irp/world /para/pkk.htm http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/mfa-t-pkk-s.htm http://web .nps.navy.mil/~library/tgp/ kurds.htm http://www.turkey.org/apo-pkk/apo1.htm http://www.comebackalive.com/df/dplaces/kurdista/The movement Kurdish nationalist in the 1990s; Robert Olsen, editor; The University Press of Kentucky, 1996