The Spatial Demographics of Turkey versus ISIS

ISIS is currently taking over the Syrian town of Kobani (aka Ayn al-Arab) that sits right on Turkey's southern border, yet the government of Turkey has been reluctant to do anything about it. The reasons are as complex as everything else about the mess in Syria, but spatial demographics certainly play a role. A quick look at any map shows you that the southwestern half of Turkey borders the Aegean Sea, but the southeastern half of Turkey shares a land border with Syria and Iraq. The region of northern Syria, northern Iraq, and southwestern Turkey is predominantly Kurdish (who represent about 20 percent of the population of Turkey), as the map below from the Washington Post illustrates:

The Kurds are predominantly Sunni Muslims, as are almost all Turks and are the members of ISIS, so religion is not the issue. Rather, it is what we tend to think of as ethnicity. Kurds are not Turks, nor are they Arabs (which is mostly what ISIS is), but are ethnically related to Persians and speak a language that is neither Turkish nor Arabic. And, they have high the highest fertility rates in Turkey, as the map below shows (taken from an excellent paper by Orguz Isik and M. Melih Pinarcioglu, "Geographies of a Silent Transition: A Geographically Weighted Regression Approach to Regional Fertility Differences in Turkey,” European Journal of Population 22:399-421, 2006.

The Kurdish southeastern corner of Turkey has not only high fertility, but high levels of illiteracy, and relatively low levels of female employment. It is, in other words, a very different place from western Turkey, where Istanbul is located and where people are likely to have in mind when they think of Turkey. And, as we know all too well throughout the world, differences can (and often will) be used against you. The Kurds have been discriminated against throughout the region, but are sufficiently different even among themselves that they have been unable to create a unified group.