Kurdish Americans

The Kurds are an Iranic people without a state of their own. They are indigenous to Kurdistan, a region of about 100,000 square miles to 150,000 square miles that includes parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Armenia. The closest Kurds enjoy to self-rule is the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan established within Iraq in 1970, after years of conflict.

The Iran-Iraq War, which transpired over most of the 1980s, was followed by an uprising of Iraqis against Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War; both events wreaked havoc on Iraqi Kurdistan, driving many refugees to the surrounding areas and into the Kurdish diaspora. Since the end of the Hussein regime in 2003, many Kurds have immigrated to Iraqi Kurdistan, which has also attracted a number of non-Kurdish immigrants drawn to the region's relative stability.

There are about 10,000 Kurdish Americans as of the most recent statistics released by the U.S. Census Bureau, most of whom are Sunni Muslims. Many of them immigrated from Kurdistan, but many also came from the Kurdish diaspora, which includes enclaves in Georgia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Lebanon, Israel, and Europe. Waves of Kurdish immigration followed World War I, the 1958 Iraqi Revolution, the 1979 Iran Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, the Gulf War in 1991, and the invasion of Iraq by U.S. forces in 2003.

The Gulf War wave was the largest, as reprisals against the Kurds by Hussein's government were severe; because Kurdistan overlaps with both Iraq and Iran, many of the Kurds supported Iran in the Iran-Iraq War, and the supposedly autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan was invaded by Hussein's forces. Kurds were attacked with chemical weapons, an action condemned by the international community.

The largest Kurdish American community is found in the Nashville, Tennessee, metropolitan [Page 1312]area: nearly a quarter of Kurdish Americans live here. In the last few decades, Nashville has been a popular city for recent immigrants, especially those who are not drawn to an established ethnic community settled by earlier immigrants; the area offers employment opportunities and a low cost of living relative to the coastal cities.

Nashville has large Cambodian, Laotian, Vietnamese, and Bantu communities in addition to the Kurdish Americans. (Nashville also has a climate similar to these countries, lacking the harsh winters of northeastern cities.) Many of them settled in the area in the 1990s, after Hussein's attack on Kurdistan and the subsequent civil war between Iraqi Kurdistan's two major political factions. The U.S. government assisted with the evacuation of many Kurds to Guam, from where they later immigrated to the mainland United States as refugees.

The first Kurds in Nashville, however, settled there in 1976, assisted by the Catholic Charities of Tennessee. They were refugees fleeing Iraqi Kurdistan after an attempted uprising against Hussein that had been supported by Iran and the United States. More Kurds settled in Nashville following the Iranian Revolution a few years later.

Nashville's Kurdish community has received some media attention for being the home of the only known Kurdish American street gang, the Kurdish Pride gang, consisting of a few dozen young Kurds. Unlike most street gangs, most of the Kurdish Pride gang members come from middle-class two-parent families; the Nashville police have identified ethnic pride and pressure from gangs of other ethnicities as the motives driving the gang. Except for this aberration, Kurds fit in well in Nashville, where the strong religious culture underpins a conservatism Kurdish Americans appreciate. The Muslim community meets at the Salahadeen Center of Nashville, established in 1998.

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