Iraq’s Kurds have been making international headlines since September after forging ahead with their independence referendum, despite regional and international warnings. They are the only one of the Middle East's Kurdish communities to have their own regional government. The other notable communities are in Turkey, Iran and Syria. So who are the Kurds? Origins “They are a separate ethnic group, living in the Middle East where Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq meet. They have been there as long as we know,” says Michael Gunter, a professor at the Tennessee Technological University, who has been researching and writing about the Kurds for over 30 years. And as Gérard Gauthier, an anthropologist and researcher at the Kurdish Institute of Paris, adds ”You also have Kurds in the former Soviet Union [….] There have been Kurds in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Georgia, you even have Kurds, I suspect, in China as well. So they are present in a lot of places. But basically the heart of their area is the Middle East.” While an actual Kurdish state is harder to trace in history, the fact remains that the Kurdish people have been in the Middle East region since as far back as 400BC. Contact with ancient Greece In fact, an ancient Greek general by the name of Xenophon details this in his work, Anabasis (The March Up Country). “Xenophon was the head of a troop of 10,000 Greek mercenaries and they were working for a Persian king," explains Gauthier. "And they were defeated and they had to leave Tsifphon, which is near Baghdad, at the time and had to walk all the way back to Greece. At one point they found a tribe of mountain people who blocked their passage, and those people described themselves as Kardokhoy.” It's hard to verify 100 percent if the Kurds were in fact this Kardokhoy or Karochi group and another theory states they are descendants of the Medes, an ancient people who lived in the north-west of what is now Iran. “The Kurds themselves claim to be the descendants of the Medes," adds Gunter. "The Medes were an Assyrian empire in 612BC. But we're not absolutely sure of that. The origins of the Kurds are lost in history. But they certainly have been there for a long time." Tribal allegiances The Kurds speak a language that is similar to Persian but unrelated to Arabic or Turkish. In fact, Gunter points out that the Kurds are a “separate ethnic group, completely different from the Turks and Arabs. [They] speak an Indo-European language, so they are related to the Iranians.” Even though there was a common language and culture among the Kurds, as was the case among other ethnic groups in the area, Kurdish unity was often based on tribal lines. This idea of fidelity to tribal lines goes back as far as the Middle Ages, says Gauthier, as it was important in “ keeping the communities together in times when you had the big wars and destruction” such as the Crusaders and the invasion of the Mongols. He adds that such events brought along destruction to the Middle East and so divisions along tribal lines would have been reinforced. Arrival of Islam During the seventh century, Islam spread from the Arabian Peninsula, bringing another unifying element to the Kurds: religion. Although uniting the Kurds under one banner was not really what was happening. “Because at the time of the empires -- Ottoman empires, Persian empires -- even before when it was the Caliph and you had a united Middle East with a Muslim caliph, then you had a lot of different communities in there. You had Turks, you had Arabs, Persians, Kurds, and the people they had unity and the banner of Islam basically,” explains Gauthier. He adds that like the other groups within the Ottoman Empire, the Kurds would also have spoken several languages. One famous Kurd from the Abbasid Muslim Caliphate was Saladin; he was a sultan, though he also received