ERBIL, Kurdistan – Central Asian and Caucasian Kurds are fully behind an independence drive by the autonomous Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq, community leaders and intellectuals from Azerbaijan to Kyrgyzstan told Rudaw.
Ramazan Saidov, chairman of the Kurdish Association in Kyrgyzstan, has written to Kurdistan Region President Massoud Barzani, offering to recruit fighters to join the Peshmerga fighting against Islamic State (IS) militants.
“We pledge our allegiance to join your Peshmerga for the defense of our fatherland, Kurdistan,” Saidov said in his letter. “We Kurds from Kyrgyzstan remain loyal to your commands and remain mobilized for your signal to join your Peshmerga at any time.”
“We hope to show that the Kurds in Iraq have allies here in Central Asia. We are here and support our people 100 percent,” said Saidov, who has distant roots in Duhok, which he has visited twice.
Hejar Shamil, a journalist and author born in Azerbaijan but living in Kyrgyzstan, attended a Kurdish meeting where there was unanimous support for Iraq’s Kurds.
Shamil sees the IS offensive as a great and historic opportunity for Iraqi Kurdistan to declare independence.
In Kazakhstan renowned Kurdish intellectual and Kurdish Association chairman, Professor Knyaz Ibrahim, told Rudaw: “We are with our heart and soul supporting Kurdish aspirations of an independent state.
"The Kurds now have a historic opportunity, which they should not let pass: we must stand together,” said Ibrahim, who was born in Armenia but moved to Kazakhstan after Armenia’s 1992 war with Azerbaijan.
"If you do not stand together then you will disappear one by one," Ibrahim said, quoting from the late Kurdish poet Cigerxwin.
Rafik Mirzoyev, an active member of the Kurdish Association in Kazakhstan’s largest city, Almaty, also pledged his support to the Kurds of Iraq.
"The Kurds have for centuries been suppressed by various rulers, and now they have a chance to break away from an already divided country like Iraq. Kurds in the entire world should support them," said Mirzoyev, who has mixed Kurdish roots which he traces to the city of Van in eastern Turkey.
Many Kurds living in Central Asia and the Caucasus today arrived here during the Ottoman-Persian war of the 15th and 16th centuries, and due to Ottoman persecutions.
Shortly after World War II, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin deported many of the Caucasian Kurds to the Central Asian republics. It is believed that many died of disease and starvation.
After the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union, many Kurds moved to Russia or Europe for economic reasons.
Despite centuries of exile, many Kurds still speak Kurdish. But those in Azerbaijan have been assimilated and others, especially Yezidi Kurds in Armenia and Georgia, deny that they are Kurds at all.
Ibrahim, who has visited the Kurdistan Region and given a talk on the literature of Kurds in Kazakhstan, said: "We live in Central Asia, but Kurdistan is still our mother and our country.
“Today Iraqi Kurdistan, tomorrow hopefully Kurds in the other three parts,” he said.
