September 1, 2017 | Shmuel Levin
Despite being delayed several times before, Iraqi Kurdistan is now set to vote in an independence referendum on 25 September 2017.
The Kurdish people are the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East, at approximately 30 million people. They speak “various dialects of their own language, Kurdish, although governments have sometimes banned its usage”, and are largely Sunni Muslim. Although they have no state of their own, they are indigenous to a mountainous region which covers territory in present day Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran and Armenia.