Kurdish population

The Kurdish people live in the historical Kurdistan region, which today is split among Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria, and was ruled by the Persian and the Ottoman Empire since the 16th century. The estimated population is 35 million.

A rough estimate by the CIA Factbook has populations of 14.5 million in Turkey, 6 million in Iran, about 5 to 6 million in Iraq, and less than 2 million in Syria, which adds up to close to 28 million Kurds in Kurdistan or adjacent regions. Recent emigration resulted in a Kurdish diaspora of about 1.5 million people, about half of them in Germany.

A special case are the Kurdish populations in the Transcaucasus and Central Asia, displaced there mostly in the time of the Russian Empire, who underwent independent developments for more than a century and have developed an ethnic identity in their own right. This groups' population was estimated at close to 0.4 million in 1990.

Kurdistan

The Kurds are often dubbed "the largest ethnic group without a state", which statement (apart from the fact that more numerous stateless nations ostensibly do exist) has been rejected as misleading by Kurdologists, as it glosses over the significant cultural, social, religious, political and ideological heterogeneity between Kurdish groups. The bulk of Kurdish groups in Kurdistan are Sunni (mosty of the Shafi'i school), but there are significant minorities adhering to Shia Islam (especially Alevis), Yazidism, Yarsanism, Christianity and Judaism.