Brushing over a depiction of 25 centuries of history in half an hour is obviously a tough task. That means about one minute per century! In this quick skimming through 1 can limit myself to merely pointing out a few major landmards and mentioning facts likely to help in the understanding of the present situation of the Kurds. 1 hope the specialists present here won't hold this approach of reducing and simplifying against me and, in response to questions raised during the discussion, I'd be happy to consider any aspect, which seems to you to have been insufficiently covered, in more depth.

The first question which comes to mind is that of the origins of the Kurds. Who are they? Where do they come from? Historians generally agree to consider them as belonging to the Iranian branch of the large family of Indo-European races. In prehistoric times, kingdoms called Mitanni, Kassites and Hourites reigned these mountainous areas, situated between the Iranian plateau and the Euphrates. In VII BC, the Medes, the Kurds' equivalent of the Gauls for the French, founded an empire which, in 612 BC, conquered the powerful Assyria and spread its domination through the whole of Iran as well as central Anatolia. The date 612, is moreover, considered by Kurdish nationalists as the beginning of the 1st Kurdish year; for them we are at present in 2601!

The political reign of the Medes was to end towards the end of 6 BC, but their religion and civilization were to dominate Iran until the time of Alexander the Great. From this date right until the advent of Islam, the fate of the Kurds, who geographers and Greek historians call Karduchoi, was to remain linked to that of the other populations of the empires which succeeded one another on the Iranian scene: Seljuks, Parthes and Sassanids.

Having put up fierce resistance to the Arabo-Muslim invasions, the Kurds ended up joining Islam, without, as a result, becoming Arabized. This resistance continued for about a century. The Kurdish tribes resisted the Arab tribes for social rather than religious reasons. All methods were used to coax the Kurds and convert them to Islam, even, for example, the matrimonial strategy, the mother of the last Omayyad caliph, Marwan Hakim, was Kurdish.