In the battle for Kobane on the Syrian border, everyone talks about the enemy - IS - and the frightening ideas that drive them. No one talks about the Kurdish defenders and what inspires them.
Adam Curtis
We must openly call for the establishment of a Kurdish state that separates Iran from Turkey, one which will be friendly towards Israel.
Ayelet Shaked
The Kurdish people are a partner for the Israeli people.
Under Saddam Hussein, the nation of Iraq possessed and used chemical weapons against both their own Kurdish population and Iranian military forces.
Charles B. Rangel
It wasn't just Shia that would go to Tehran and see the commander of the Quds Force and others and the legitimate government leaders. It was also Kurdish leaders and Sunni Arabs who would even link up with Qassim Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force - maybe not in Tehran but in Turkey or somewhere else.
David Petraeus
As we used to say when I was privileged to be the commander there, Nineveh province has the most diverse human terrain in all of Iraq - Sunni Arab majority to be sure, but also Shia Arabs, numerous Kurdish communities, and they are broken out into several different political parties.
A Turkey under a dictatorial regime, providing haven to violent radicals and pushing its Kurdish citizens into desperation, would be a nightmare for Middle East security.
Fethullah Gulen
The Kurdish people have the right of self-determination like every other nation in the world.
Jalal Talabani
The Kurdish people welcome the no-fly zone protection, contrary to the Iraqi regime that is against it.
Prime Minister Maliki, released from American restraint, acted on his worst instincts, creating enormous distrust in Iraq's Kurdish population and deeply embittering Sunnis in western Iraq's Al Anbar, who lost any confidence in a Baghdad government they saw as adversarial.
Jim Mattis
We ought to be providing protective sanctuaries for the Kurdish rebels. That means finding some places where they can come and to which we will then be able to provide food and water and medical help.
Les Aspin
Long-term, we must figure out a way that the Kurdish territory within Iraq operates with a certain amount of autonomy so that they feel comfortable and safe going back.
I first visited Kurdistan in 2003. I arrived in the town of Sulaimaniyah, courtesy of smugglers who drove me across the border from Iran. Sulaimaniyah was a small, charming provincial Kurdish town.
Luke Harding
The Kurds will not be allowed to have an independent country because Turkey wouldn't stand for it; they have their own Kurdish population.
Molly Ivins
By very conservative estimates, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of more than a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital, Diyarbakir, from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside.
Noam Chomsky
Turkey must find its place if, of course, it can heal its internal sores, and none is more malignant than the perennial Kurdish issue.
I have had it up to here with the prosecutions, the government's attitude, the judiciary, the media's stance and the majority of Turks who view the Kurdish people's justified cause through a nationalist lens.
Osman Baydemir
A U.S. war with Iran could end with a Kurdish enclave in Iran's northwest tied to Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran's Azeri north drifting toward Azerbaijan, and a Balochi enclave in the south linked to Pakistan's largest province, Balochistan, leaving Iran only Persia.
Pat Buchanan
The Turkish government will never tolerate the creation of a Kurdish state.
Peter Bergen
The Kurdish problem is not only the problem of one part of my nation: it is a problem of every one of us, including myself.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
There is no Kurdish problem.
Attempts by one ethnic group to exercise sovereignty over another are not fair. It doesn't matter if that ethnicity is Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, Chaldean or whatever.
Initially, before the modern state of Iraq was created, there were three separate provinces here: a Shiite in the south, a largely Sunni one in the middle, and a Kurdish one in the north.
If one does not wish to take the word of journalists, human rights groups, and the United Nations that Iraq conducted a deliberate campaign to eradicate the Kurdish population, there's always the word of the Iraqis themselves.
Whenever a Kurd wants to measure the depth of some foreign leader's commitment to Kurdish autonomy, he listens for one particular word. That word is 'federal.' Anyone who will say he favors Kurdish federalism can be counted a friend of the Kurds.
