Abu’l-Aswar or Abu’l-Asvar Shavur ibn Fadl ibn Muhammad ibn Shaddad was a member of the Shaddadid dynasty. Between 1049 and 1067 he was the eighth Shaddadid ruler of Arran (today in western Azerbaijan) from Ganja. Prior to that, he ruled the city of Dvin (in what is now Armenia and …

Map of the Caucasus in 1207 AD A number of wars between the Kingdom of Georgia and Ayyubid Sultanate over the Armenian lands in eastern Anatolia, fought from c. 1208 until 1210. This brought the struggle for the Armenian lands to a stall,[1] leaving the Lake Van region in a …

Mir Xanzad (or Khanzad) was a military commander and ruler of the Soran Emirate in the late 16th or early 17th century Xanzad was the sister of Mir Sulaiman, who ruled the Soran Emirate in the Ottoman Empire around 1620. After her brother was murdered by one of his military …

  Bedir Khan Beg (Kurmanji: Bedirxan Beg, Turkish: Bedirhan Bey; 1803–1869) was the last Kurdish Mîr and mütesellim of the Emirate of Botan.[1] Hereditary head of the house of Rozhaki whose seat was the ancient Bitlis castle and descended from Sharafkhan Bidlisi, Bedir Khan was born in Cizre (now in …

Ahmad Khani, also spelled Ahmad-i Khani (Kurdish: Ehmedê Xanî‎; 1650, Hakkari – 1707, Doğubayazıt), was a Kurdish writer, poet, astronomer and philosopher.[1] He was born amongst the Khani’s tribe in Hakkari province in present-day Turkey. He moved to Bayezid in Ritkan province and settled there. Later he started with teaching Kurdish (Kurmanji) at basic level. Khani was fluent in Kurdish, Arabic and Persian. He wrote his Arabic-Kurdish dictionary “Nûbihara Biçûkan” (The …

NALÎ (Pers. Nāli), the pen-name of Mela Khidrî Ehmedî Šaweysî Mikâʾîlî (b. Ḵāk o ḵol, 1797 or 1800; d. Istanbul, 1855 or 1856), Kurdish poet who contributed immensely to making Sorani the literary language of southern Kurdistan, that is, most of present-day Iraq and the neighboring districts in Iran (FIGURE …

MAWLAWI, ʿAbd-al-Raḥim Maʿdumi (b. 1806, d. near Ḥalabja, 1882-83), a leading Kurdish poet of the 19th century who wrote in the Gurāni dialect of southeastern Kurdistan (FIGURE 1). He used the pen name Maʿdumi, but he is better known as the Kurdish Mawlawi (Mawlawi-e Kord). He was born in the …

    Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were executed during a systematic attempt to exterminate the Kurdish population in Iraq in the Anfal operations in the late 1980s. They were tied together and shot so they fell into mass graves. Their towns and villages were attacked by …

The Marwanids, a Kurdish dynasty to have governed in al-Jazira (Upper Mesopotamia) from 983 to 1085, merit special and separate mention in Diyarbakır’s history. The near-century-long rule of the Marwanids in this area is, in many ways, a unique parenthesis that may be deemed ahead of its time for the …

The family of Baban (1649–1850) ruled a Kurdish principality which encompassed areas of present-day Iraqi Kurdistan and western Iran from the early 17th century until 1850. The Baban principality played an active role in Ottoman-Persian conflict. The founder of the princely Baban family is thought to be Ahmad Faqih or Faqi Ahmad from the district of …