The Kurds were the first to leave, being geographically defined and numerous enough to be able to react when the reality of dictatorship became too much. — Tim Marshall
The Kurdish people have the right of self-determination like every other nation in the world. — Jalal Talabani
Nothing worse than Kurds in your milk. General, make sure i never see another Kurd again. — Saddam Hussein
At the end of the Gulf War conflict, the Kurds rose up, the Allied forces declared a ‘safe zone’ in which Iraqi forces were not allowed, and a de facto Kurdistan began to take shape. — Tim Marshall
The Kurdish people welcome the no-fly zone protection, contrary to the Iraqi regime that is against it. — Jalal Talabani
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. — Les Aspin
Iranians are very proud and don't want to become a pariah state like North Korea. — Edward Luck
Those who say that we want nationality, they are standing against Islam....We have no use for the nationalists. Moslems are useful for us. Islam is against nationality. — Ruhollah Khomeini
It's time to recognise the Armenian Genocide. — Kim Kardashian
They call them terrorists, I call them freedom fighters. — Louis Farrakhan
Those who are opposed to armed uprising ... must be ruthlessly kicked out as enemies, traitors and cowards. — Vladimir Lenin
A process of genocide is being carried out before the eyes of the world. — Pope John Paul II
Oh sons of Arabs and the Arab Gulf, rebel against the foreigner...Take revenge for your dignity, holy places, security, interests and exalted values. — Saddam Hussein
In Uzbekistan, hundreds of protesters were recently killed under the corrupt regime of President Karimov in what human rights groups are calling a massacre. — Ed Markey
Short Kurds Quotes
Kurds are like fire, if approached kindly they will warm you, if approached badly they will burn you — Leyla Zana
There's been so much bad blood between the Kurds and the Turks. — Ahmet Ertegun
The one thing that unites Sunni, Shiites and Kurds is they want the Americans out. — Tony Benn
The Kurds are the greatest fighting force and our strongest allies. They're Muslim. — Jeb Bush
The Iraquis can see it. The Kurds can feel it. The jihadists are counting on it. — Charles Krauthammer
Kurds Quotes
I used to be someone who would not even tread on an ant. But this is a war for honor and self-defense. A 100 percent elimination policy (by Ankara of the Kurds) has forced me to defense and it has become a glorious defense of a people. — Abdullah Ocalan
What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites? That's a huge question, to my mind. — Norman Schwarzkopf
If they make the deadline because the Shiites and Kurds essentially rammed a draft through over Sunni Arab objections, there will be hell to pay. — Wayne White
We need to use overwhelming air power. We need to be arming the Kurds. We need to be fighting and killing ISIS where they are. — Ted Cruz
In the 20th century, the Muslim world created a vision of religious nationalism. Turkey, for example, had to be ethnically Turkish. Kurds, Armenians, other minorities didn't have a place in such a vision of a nation-state. — Feisal Abdul Rauf
So the idea that you could put Kurds, Shiite Arabs, and Sunni Arabs in a nice, liberal, federal system in Iraq in a short amount of time, six months or a year, boggles the mind. — William Odom
I always tell the Kurds who defend independence: Let's say we declared the independent Kurdish state and Syria, Iran, Iraq and Turkey imposed sanctions on us, without waging a war. How would we survive under those circumstances? — Jalal Talabani
Where were the peacekeepers? Where was the UN? Why was the entire world ignoring Saddam's attack upon his own people? Were we Kurds considered so unworthy, so disposable? I longed to stand at the top of the mountain and shout out, Where are you, world? Where are you ? — Jean Sasson
Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who cant write their own language. — Luke Harding
The Arabs are victims. You have Shia Arabs, under Arabization under Saddam Hussein, who were forcibly moved up there... You have Kurds who were displaced by these Arabs that were moved up there by Saddam Hussein. Kurds have been displaced from Kirkuk for hundreds of years. — Raymond T. Odierno
Kurdish Quotes
If my father was alive today, he would have fought for Kurdish rights — Aleida Guevara
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
We used to watch executions. I mentioned that in one of my stories. There was a piece of open ground near the area where we lived and we used to play soccer there. That was where they used to hold public executions for soldiers who deserted the army and members of the Kurdish resistance. — Hassan Blasim
The Western governments will be encouraged and persuaded to deal with the real representatives and listen to the real voice of the Kurdish people. — Jalal Talabani
We will send an additional 475 service members to Iraq. As I have said before, these American forces will not have a combat mission - we will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq. But they are needed to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence and equipment. — Barack Obama
There are sort of Kurdish districts there in Mosul, or there used to be, but the Kurds mostly fled or were driven out. The same is true of the Christians. — Patrick Cockburn
We also have to intensify our air strikes against ISIS and eventually support our Arab and Kurdish partners to be able to actually take out ISIS in Raqqa, end their claim of being a Caliphate. — Hillary Clinton
I think what the president [Barack Obama] understands, and what he's trying to do, is that we have to support the Arab and Kurdish fighters on the ground who are actually doing the fighting. — Hillary Clinton
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. — Recep Tayyip Erdogan
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
We're dealing with such enormous problems today that we have no other choice but to work together. If Iraq fails, if a religious civil war breaks out and the neighboring states are drawn into this conflict, if the Kurds declare independence and al-Qaida takes over an entire province - that's when the consequences will be dramatic. — Zalmay Khalilzad
To move any regime you need to have co-operation and co-ordination between Kurds, Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs, the people and the army. Until we have this we cannot change the regime. — Jalal Talabani
The U.S. cannot force Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds to make peace or to act for the common good. They have been in conflict for 1,400 years. — Peter DeFazio
There's a certain amount of sympathy here for the Bush administration's problem, which is they would like to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they would like to have the Kurds autonomous. — Les Aspin
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein had and used significant weapons of mass destruction on his own people, both the Kurds and the Iranians. — Curt Weldon
Turkey is saying that it wants to preserve Sunni dominance in Mosul. Obviously, there, the Kurds, the Shia, the Iraqi government have their own agendas. — Patrick Cockburn
For the first time the people of Iraq are united. Today on CNN I saw a Kurd, a Shiite and a member of the Republican Guard coming together to cart off a big screen TV. — Jay Leno
America sold VX nerve gas and anthrax to Iraq for years, even after the Halabja gas attack, which killed thousands of Kurds. — Henry Rollins
My readers are surprisingly mixed. I have conservative readers - for instance, women with headscarves - but also many liberal, leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, and secularist readers. Next to those are mystics, agnostics, Kurds, Turks, Alevis, Sunnis, gays, housewives, and businesswomen. — Elif Shafak
Erdogan wants a caliphate. We Kurds are in his way. Erdogan can't stop us politically, so he is denouncing us as terrorists. — Selahattin Demirtas
The Kurds' achievement was outstanding, both militarily and diplomatically. European governments recognized this and abandoned their resistance to weapons deliveries. Germany, too, acted correctly. Now, we need a joint military leadership so that the Kurds and the army can retake Mosul. — Ahmed Chalabi
Syrians have a national identity beyond the sectarian divide. Syria's national identity would be weaker and poorer if it didn't have this beautiful pluralism between Arabs, Kurds, and sects. — Burhan Ghalioun
The situation in Turkey is extremely troubling. A panic-stricken regime, desperate to divide the Kurdish population from non-Kurds because it feared the rise of the HDP, has helped to create a huge crisis in the country. Can it be ended while Tayyip Erdogan remains in power? I don't think so. Erdogan may not be a "joker," but he is definitely a political plagiarist. — Tariq Ali
Every night I get many letters, and after every talk I get many questions from people who say, "I want to change things. What can I do?" I never hear these questions from peasants in southern Colombia or Kurds in southeastern Turkey under miserable repression or anybody who is suffering. They don't ask what they can do; they tell you what they're doing. — Noam Chomsky
Iran is barely over 50% Persian, and Arabs, Baluchis, Azeris, Kurds and many other groups feel left out of the society. That regime has a lot more weaknesses than people see. — John Bolton
We are engaging in the diplomatic efforts that are required within Iraq among the Shia, the Sunni and the Kurd, among friends, like Egypt, and Turkey and Saudi Arabia, but also enemies like Iran and Syria. They have to have buy-in into that process. — Barack Obama
What we would be committed to would be a representative government where all the Iraqi people decide who should lead their nation, and lead it in a way that keeps it together as a single nation and where all parts of the nation - Shia, Sunni and Kurds - are able to live free and in peace and believe that their interests are represented by the government. — Colin Powell
We need to do whatever is necessary to utterly defeat ISIS....We're not using our overwhelming air power. We're not arming the Kurds. Those need to be the first steps. And then we need to put whatever ground power is needed to carry it out. — Ted Cruz
I think that, given the threat that ISIS poses to the region and beyond, as we have sadly seen in our own country, it is important to keep the Iraqi army on a path where they can actually take back territory, to work with the Sunni tribes in Anbar province and elsewhere so that their fighters can be also deployed, to work with the Kurds to provide them the support, but they're doing the fighting. We're doing the support and enabling. — Hillary Clinton
Just as certain Cold War binaries were collapsing, new binaries of Sunni versus Shia or Arab versus Kurd were being created by the new occupation force. It's the corruption of that moment that I am really interested in. — Elliott Colla
Iraqi Kurds, out of desperate necessity, have forged one of the most watchful and vigilant anti-terrorist communities in the world. Terrorists from elsewhere just can't operate in that kind of environment. Al Qaeda members who do manage to infiltrate are hunted down like rats. This conservative Muslim society did a better job protecting me from Islamist killers than the U.S. military could do in the Green Zone in Baghdad. — Michael Totten
We seem to be afraid to give the Kurds weaponry. We like to send it for some strange reason through Baghdad, and then they only get a tenth of it. — Benjamin Carson
If you go into Hasakah province in northeast Syria, that's an area that's as big as Lebanon. It's controlled by the Kurds, the Christians and the moderate Sunnis. And there are airstrips and hotels. You could settle a lot of people there.All we would have to do is be willing to provide them with some weaponry, some defensive weaponry. — Benjamin Carson
There is a difference between Iraq, where you have Sunni, Shia, and Kurds put together after the First World War by the Western powers. It doesn't work. It needs to break up into three parts. — John Kasich
As far as the command centers are concerned in Raqqa and to a lesser degree Mosul, cut those off. Do the same kind of thing that we did with Sinjar , working with our embedded special forces with the Kurds, shut off the supply route, soften them up, then we go in with specials ops followed by our air force to take them over. Those are things that work. — Benjamin Carson
We need to embed our forces - our troops inside the Iraqi military. We need to arm directly the Kurds. And all of that has to be done in concert with the Arab nations. — Jeb Bush
News is like the tilefish which appears in great schools off the Atlantic Coast some years and then vanishes, no one knows whither or for how long. Newspapers might employ these periods searching for the breeding grounds of news, but they prefer to fill up with stories about Kurdled Kurds or Calvin Coolidge, until the banks close or a Hitler marches, when they are as surprised as their readers. — A. J. Liebling
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of kurds quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about kurds to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of kurds quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
