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Ethnic group in western Asia
The recent surge of anger and violence is rooted less in sudden mass hatred than in a decade of competing governance projects, shifting alliances, and local grievances—especially , its security forces...
is overwhelmingly Twelver Shia—most sources put Shias at roughly 90% of the Muslim population and Sunnis at roughly 5–10%—but that national figure masks stark regional clustering: Sunnis are concentra...
do not speak with one voice on and ; opinions range from pro-Palestinian solidarity to cautious neutrality and even sympathetic ties toward Israel rooted in historical and strategic interactions . whi...
Multiple genetic studies find that many Jewish men—both Ashkenazi and Sephardi—carry Y‑chromosome haplogroups common in the Near East (notably J1/J2) while Ashkenazim show elevated levels of some Euro...
Modern ethnic Turks trace their deep linguistic and cultural roots to Turkic-speaking peoples of Central and East Asia who expanded westward across the Eurasian steppe, while the core genetic and demo...
Available polling and scholarly reporting show are overwhelmingly Muslim in identity across the region, but significant evidence points to diluted observance for many — with recent surveys finding a g...
The claim that “ are the way the West wants the Middle East to go” contains a grain of truth — Western states have repeatedly partnered with Kurdish forces when it served counter‑terrorism and tactica...
The claim that a are not religious is not supported by the available reporting: most Kurds across the main population centers identify as Muslim (predominantly Sunni), with sizable religious minoritie...
has documented and widely studied problems of xenophobia, ethnic and religious discrimination, and what scholars call “” that target , , , , , and other non‑Turkish or non‑Sunni groups . At the same t...
today who are Muslim pray facing the Kaʿbah in (the Islamic qibla), not , because Islamic practice changed the qibla from Jerusalem to Mecca in the early n period (second Hijri year) and that remains ...
’s instrumentalization of Kurdish grievances—what critics call “”—can be framed to generate sympathetic public and elite support for limited interventions in , but the evidence in contemporary reporti...