page_title: Kurds
section_title: Women
hierarchical_section_title: Kurds / Culture / Women
caption_attribution_description: English: YPJ fighters shake hands with one another
context_page_description: Kurds or Kurdish people are an Iranic ethnic group native to a mountainous region of Western Asia known as Kurdistan, which spans southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, and northern Syria. There are exclaves of Kurds in Central Anatolia, Khorasan, and the Caucasus, as well as significant Kurdish diaspora communities in the cities of western Turkey and Western Europe. The Kurdish population is estimated to be between 30 and 45 million.
  Kurds speak the Kurdish languages and the Zaza–Gorani languages, which belong to the Western Iranian branch of the Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. A majority of Kurds belong to the Shafi‘i school of Sunni Islam, but significant numbers practise Shia Islam and Alevism, while some are adherents of Yarsanism, Yazidism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity.
  After World War I and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the victorious Western allies made provision for a Kurdish state in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres. However, that promise was broken three years later, when the Treaty of Lausanne set the boundaries of modern Turkey and made no such provision, leaving Kurds with minority status in all of the new countries.
context_section_description: In general, Kurdish women's rights and equality have improved in the 20th and 21st century due to progressive movements within Kurdish society. However, despite the progress, Kurdish and international women's rights organizations still report problems related to gender equality, forced marriages, honor killings and in Iraqi Kurdistan also female genital mutilation (FGM).
caption: YPG's female fighters in Syria
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