Twenty-three days after the University of Zakho in Duhok in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq hung a map of greater Kurdistan on a faculty entrance on 8 August, the map has been removed with no official explanation, the Shar Press news agency reported.
While university administrators contacted by Shar Press refused to discuss the map, there were students willing to speak to the news agency, who said it had been removed on the request of a minister from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) under pressure from Turkey.
The minister saw the map on the wall during a visit to the university and later asked the presidency of the university to remove it and replace it with a map of South Kurdistan in order to avoid tensions with Turkey, Shar Press added.
“Turkey has influence over the KRG. We asked the presidency of Zakho University not to remove the map, but unfortunately, they said the order had come from above”, Akram Gulli, a graduate from the university, told Shar Press.
Gulli added that students had expected the map to be removed since Turkey would view a representation of Greater Kurdistan as a threat to its unity, Shar Press said.
The region of North Kurdistan lies in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeastern provinces. Turkey’s official policy is to deny the existence of Kurdistan and block Kurdish efforts to gain autonomy in the region.
With an estimated population well above 40 million, Kurds are known as one of the world’s largest stateless ethnicities. The traditional Kurdish homelands were divided between Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran as new states were partitioned during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century.