Kurdistan is a land, not a country on most maps. It is the area where many Kurds live, across parts of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Armenia. There is no independent state called Kurdistan that the whole world agrees on. Though actually, the picture is messier than that. Northern Iraq has an official Kurdish region with its own government; people often call that Iraqi Kurdistan, and its main city is Erbil. Some Kurds want a full independent country; other people in those states strongly do not. So when you hear “Kurdistan,” ask what the speaker means: the wide cultural area, the Iraqi region, or a hoped-for state. The name is Kurd + -istan, a piece that means “land of.”