Kurds in Turkey in the context of "Republic of Turkey"

Turkey, officially the Republic of Türkiye, is a country mainly located in Anatolia in West Asia, with a relatively small part called East Thrace in Southeast Europe. It borders the Black Sea to the north; Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran to the east; Iraq, Syria, and the Mediterranean Sea to the south; and the Aegean Sea, Greece, and Bulgaria to the west. Turkey is home to over 85 million people; most are ethnic Turks, while Kurds are the largest ethnic minority. Officially a secular state, Turkey has a Muslim-majority population. Ankara is Turkey's capital and second-largest city. Istanbul is its largest city and economic center. Other major cities include İzmir, Bursa, and Antalya.

First inhabited by modern humans during the Late Paleolithic, present-day Turkey was home to various ancient peoples. The Hattians were assimilated by the Hittites and other Anatolian peoples. Classical Anatolia transitioned into cultural Hellenization after Alexander the Great's conquests, and later Romanization during the Roman and Byzantine eras. The Seljuk Turks began migrating into Anatolia in the 11th century, starting the Turkification process. The Seljuk Sultanate of Rum ruled Anatolia until the Mongol invasion in 1243, when it disintegrated into Turkish principalities. Beginning in 1299, the Ottomans united the principalities and expanded. Mehmed II conquered Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) in 1453. During the reigns of Selim I and Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire became a global power. From 1789 onwards, the empire saw major changes, reforms, centralization, and rising nationalism while its territory declined.

Demographic features of the population of Turkey include population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population. As of 1 July 2025, the population of Turkey was over 85.8 million with an annual growth rate of 0.36%. This official population number excludes the registered Syrian refugees under temporary protection status which have a population of about 2.6 million as of the date.

Turks are the largest ethnic group, comprising 70–75% of the population while Kurds are the second largest with 19%. The others, including Armenians, Arabs, Assyrians, Albanians, Bulgarians, Bosniaks, Circassians, Chechens, Georgians, Greeks, Pomaks, Rum, Russians, Romani, Jews, Laz people and others make 6–11% of the population according to a 2016 estimate by the CIA.

Arabs in Turkey (Turkish: Türkiye Arapları; Arabic: عرب تركيا) are about 1.5 million or 5 million (including the Syrian refugees) citizens or residents of Turkey who are ethnically of Arab descent. They are the third-largest minority in the country after the Kurds and the Circassians and are concentrated in a few provinces in Southeastern Anatolia. In addition to this native group, millions of Arab Syrian refugees have sought refuge in Turkey since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011.

The Kurdish population of Syria is the country's largest ethnic minority, usually estimated at around 10% of the Syrian population and 5% of the Kurdish population.

The majority of Syrian Kurds are originally Turkish Kurds who have crossed the border during different events in the 20th century. There are three major centers for the Kurdish population in Syrian, the northern part of the Jazira, the central Euphrates Region around Kobanî and in the west the area around Afrin. All of these are on the Syria-Turkey border, and there are also substantial Kurdish communities in Aleppo and Damascus further south.

Throughout the 20th century, Iraq witnessed multiple periods of instability and conflict that prompted the creation and flight of many refugees. Earlier examples include the exodus of Iraqi Jews and the flight of Iraqi Kurds. The Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980 and the ensuing Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988) triggered a deterioration of ties among the country's various ethnic and religious communities, and also exacerbated in violent events like the Ba'athist Arabization campaigns in northern Iraq (1968–2003), which led to the killing and displacement of thousands of minorities. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (1990) and the ensuing Gulf War (1990–1991), which ended with Iraq's defeat and the application of United Nations sanctions (1991–2003), also resulted in the creation of many Iraqi refugees. It was not until the beginning of the ongoing Iraqi conflict, however, that sustained waves of Iraqi refugees would be created, numbering in the millions: the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the ensuing Iraq War (2003–2011) killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, both internally and externally, and the later War in Iraq (2013–2017) forced even more people to flee from the country. Many Iraqi refugees established themselves in urban areas of other countries rather than in refugee camps.

In April 2007, there were approximately four million Iraqi refugees around the world, including: 1.9 million within Iraq; two million in neighbouring Arab countries, as well as in Iran and Turkey; and approximately 200,000 outside of the Middle East entirely. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has led the humanitarian efforts for Iraqi refugees. The number of displaced persons and refugees from the Iraqi conflict is considered to be the largest in the Middle East, though this figure may now be lower than that of the refugees of the Syrian civil war.

The Peoples' Democratic Party (Turkish: Halkların Demokratik Partisi, acronymized as HDP; Kurdish: Partiya Demokratîk a Gelan), or Democratic Party of the Peoples, is a Turkish political party mainly representing ethnic minorities in Turkey, especially Kurds. Generally left-wing, the party places a strong emphasis on participatory and radical democracy, feminism, minority rights, youth rights, and egalitarianism. It is an associate member of the Party of European Socialists (PES), a consultative member of the Socialist International, and a party within the Progressive Alliance (PA).

Aspiring to fundamentally challenge the existing Turkish–Kurdish divide and other existing parameters in Turkish politics, the HDP was founded in 2012 as the political wing of the Peoples' Democratic Congress, a union of numerous left-wing movements that had previously fielded candidates as independents to bypass the 10% election threshold. The HDP is in an alliance with the Kurdish Democratic Regions Party (DBP), often described as the HDP's fraternal party. From 2013 to 2015, the politicians of the DBP participated in peace negotiations between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).