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Monster Energy. Everybody knows White Monster Zero Ultra, that's the OG it kicked off this whole zero sugar energy drink thing. But Ultra is a whole lineup now. You've got Strawberry Dreams, Blue Hawaiian Sunrise, and Vice Guava. And they all bring the Monster Energy punch. So if you've been living in the White can branch out. Ultra's got a flavor for every vibe, and every single one is Zero Sugar Tap the banner to learn more. They have been called devil worshippers. They've been accused of heresy. They've had fatwas issued against them for centuries, religious edicts declaring them apostates worthy of death. And yet Kurdish communities have kept their religious traditions alive, traditions that reach back thousands of years in Iranian history. They've preserved ideas and motifs with roots that are even pre Islamic. They've maintained faith and have survived for centuries in the mountains when empires tried time and time again to erase them. The Kurds are the largest ethnic group on earth without a country. 40 million people spread across four different countries. But what most people don't know is that the Kurdish story isn't just political. It is deeply, profoundly religious. From the Peacock angel to the Sufi sheikhs, the sacred valley of La Lish, to the philosophical mysticism of the Yis, the Kurds have one of the most fascinating, complex, and misunderstood religious traditions in the entire world. And today, we are exploring the spiritual world of Kurdistan, the faith that evolved over centuries in the mountains, the. The persecution that nearly destroyed them. And the enduring question, how do you keep your faith alive when everyone around you wants you dead for it? Well, if you are interested in geopolitics and matters of the divine, well, this is the episode for you. So sit back, relax, and welcome to Religion Camp. What's up, dude? Welcome back to camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent, where every single week, we explore the most interesting, fascinating, and controversial stories from around the world. From all time, forever. Yes, this is religion Camp. This is the place where I try to understand what everyone believes. I've said it time and time again, I don't think you can understand a people without understanding the God that they worship. And if you truly want to connect with your fellow humans, you got to at least know the holy books that they're reading. All right, that is kind of my M.O. and I'm just trying to figure out, what does everyone think is going on? All right? And ultimately, where does everyone think we're going? All right, this is basically my way to amalgamate all the good teachings from every religious tradition from around the world and apply them to my life so I can be a better human. Now, the show's not possible without you. Yeah, you watching right now, listening in your AirPods, driving your car. This is. This is my thank you to you, truly, for clicking this video, for watching the pod, for listening to the link, whatever, however you got here. I just want to say thanks, because every time you engage with thanks content, you make my dreams possible. You keep the lights on, and ultimately you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. Now, I also want to thank Christos Papadopoulos. Christos, what do you know about the Kurds? Not much. All right, good, because I'm going to explain everything word for word, bar for bar. Okay, I'm going to put you on game about who the Kurds are, what happened to them, why they're. Why everyone hates them, and, yeah, kind of what they believe. Also, David's here anyway, so. All right, let's just jump in. Okay, I just want to say a few things up top. First off, I'm not Kurdish. I don't know if you guys knew that from looking at me. I don't. I don't, like, embody, like, the Kurdish archetype. So if I mispronounce anything or if I get anything wrong here, just. My bad, all right? I'm doing my best, okay? I'm really. I'm trying. All right? So if you have any adjustments, if there's anything I missed completely, if there's anything I got wrong or anything of that nature, please, by all means, drop a comment, let me know, okay? I'm not immune to the truth, if anything. That's the whole reason I do this show. I want to know the reality. Furthermore, if I mispronounce stuff. My bad, okay? I don't speak Arabic or Kurdish or the. The litany of different things that these words are, are, are presented in. So forgive me. So to understand the Kurdish people, you got to understand the Kurdish religion. And to understand the religion, you need to understand Kurdish geography. So traditionally speaking, the Kurdish homeland, the mountainous region that they call Kurdistan, stretches across southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and northern Syria. And it's this rugged landscape of, you know, snowy mountains and valleys and plateaus that are all across, you know, this, like, very dynamic part of the Middle East. Many scholars and Kurdish nationalists link the Kurds to the ancient Medes, the Iranian people who helped topple the Assyrian Empire in 612 BC. Though this connection is obviously debated today, the Medes built an empire that stretched from modern day Turkey to Afghanistan before being absorbed into the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great. Here's what matters for our story. Ancient peoples in this region practiced pre Zoroastrian Iranian religions. They worshiped like elemental forces, so fire, water, earth, air, airbender, all right, they believed in angels and divine emanations. They practiced forms of sun worship. And you know, they were almost animistic. They saw the natural world as sacred. And when Zoroastrianism spread through the Persian Empire, Kurdish regions absorbe absorbed some of these teachings as well. So this cosmic battle between good and evil, the importance of, you know, fire is like this, you know, purifying, sacred symbol, the belief in divine beings who mediate between God and, you know, us humans. But here's what makes the Kurds unique. In the remote mountain villages of Kurdistan, elements of those ancient Iranian beliefs persisted, merging and mixing with later Islamic and Sufi influence, and ultimately contributed to new distinct religious traditions found nowhere else on earth. Except of course, in the mountains of Kurdistan. So the Kurdish people have this deep spiritual connection to these mountains, to this specific place that they call home because it is built almost on this animism, right? We've done an episode on Shinto and ultimately it is this animistic religion or philosophy that these different, you know, geographical features within Japan have a spiritual essence. So it's almost intrinsic to the Japanese people and to the islands of Japan that Shinto exists there. And one cannot really exist without the other because it is fundamental. So Mount Fuji is only in Japan and therefore Shinto can only really exist in Japan. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but you can understand how the Kurds feel about this region. There's actually an old Kurdish proverb that captures it kind of perfectly. Kurds have no friends but the mountains. And that saying isn't just a reference to the political strife that they have endured. It's also representative of their survival strategy in a way. Whenever a larger power has tried to convert them by force, the Kurds retreated higher into the mountains and they regrouped and they waited and they've outlasted everyone. I mean, the Mongols, the Arabs, and you know, they kept core elements of their older beliefs alive within new religious forms. Of all the Kurdish religious traditions that have evolved over the centuries, none have suffered more or been more misunderstood than Yazidism. The Yazid are a Kurdish speaking community whose religion developed through a complicated historical process. It combines elements of pre Islamic Kurdish belief and ancient Iranian religions and the teachings of Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir, a 12th century Sufi mystic who settled in the valley of La Lish, which is now northern Iraq. Now, Yazidis are monotheistic. They believe in one God, a being whom they call Quede. And they believe that this being created the world and entrusted it to the care of seven holy beings, often called the seven angels. These angels emanated from God's own light before the creation of the earth. The leader of these seven angels is Tawusi Melek, the Peacock angel. And then there's a tragedy. For centuries, Muslims and Christians have falsely associated the Peacock angel with Satan. The Yazidis were labeled devil worshippers, a misconception that has incited centuries of violent religious persecution. And let me be clear, okay? This characterization is not just offensive to Yazidis, but it's also just technically wrong. Yazidis believe Tawusi Melek is not a source of evil or wickedness. He is the leader of the archangels, not a fallen angel. The Yazidis consider themselves Melek, the nation of the Peacock angel. And they venerate him as God's greatest servant, a being who has entrusted, you know, who's been entrusted by God with the care of the world. But of course, the devil worshiper slander basically stuck around, and it's now used to justify atrocity after atrocity. So the Yazidis have their own word for these massacres for months, and they've been keeping count for centuries by Yazidi reckoning. The ISIS genocide of 2014, that was the 74th Vermont, the 74th campaign of extermination against the Yazidis and, you know, the Kurds at large, and they remember it in their collective history. 74 campaigns of violence driven heavily by religious hatred. And that's alongside the political and cultural motives that, you know, vary from era to era. So part of Yazidi belief is that every person is expected to make a pilgrimage at least once in their lifetime to La Leash. This is a small valley roughly 58 kilometers northeast of Mosul in Iraq. It is the holiest site in Yazidism, and it is ultimately the spiritual center of the faith. You can imagine something similar to the Hajj in Islam where you take a pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Now, at the heart of Lish sits the tomb of Sh Adi ibn Musafir. This is the 12th century Sufi mystic who's considered a divine figure in Yazidi theology. His shrine with, you know, the conical spires is the focal point of Yazidi worship. Lalish is ancient springs flow through the sanctuary, and Yazidis believe That the water itself is sacred, connecting all the way back to the creation of the world itself. Fire and water, the main elements that are held sacred in ancient Iranian traditions, are also central to rituals that they perform here. So when Yazidis enter La Leash, they first remove their shoes. They tie special knots in cloth at the doorway, and each knot represents a prayer or a wish or a connection to the divine. The walls are blackened by centuries of oil lamps kept burning in honor of God and, of course, the angels. And for much of history, Laleish was protected by its remoteness. The mountains kept it safe when Yazidis in the plains were being slaughtered. But in 2014, when ISIS swept through northern Iraq, the militants came within miles of La Leash itself. And fortunately, they were stopped by Kurdish peshmerga, which are the Kurdish fighters and American airstrikes. But the terror that leash might fall, you know, that the holiest site of one of the most persecuted religious communities, of one of the most persecuted people groups on earth might be destroyed. It really sent shockwaves through the entire global Yazidi community. And today La Leleash still survives, and the faith endures as it always has. But that fear remains. While Yazidism is the most well known indigenous Kurdish religion, there's another face, another faith just as fascinating, but a lot more secretive. And that faith is Yarsanism, also known as Al I Haq, the people of truth. It's this esoteric religion founded by Sultan Shahak in the late 14th century in Western Iran. Its followers are, you know, there's not a ton. It's somewhere between like 500,000 to maybe 3 million on higher estimates. And they live primarily in Iran's Kermanshah province or in parts of Iraqi Kurdistan. YM is built on profoundly mystical beliefs, and at the core is the concept of divine manifestation, the idea that God has appeared in human form multiple times throughout history. Yes. Believe that different epochs of the world have seen different incarnations of this same divine being. According to the second epoch, the primary divine manifestation was Ali IBN Abi Talib, the fourth caliph and the first imam of Shia Islam. This has led some outsiders to call Yahi, or worshipers of Ali, a label that the Yarsanis themselves actually reject as a just a blatant misunderstanding of their beliefs. Now, in the fourth epoch, the current era, the divine manifestation was Sultan Sahak himself. And according to Yasani tradition, Sultan Sahak's mother was a Kurdish virgin named Katun e Resbar, who became pregnant miraculously when a pomegranate kernel fell into her mouth from a tree. Yarsanism also teaches that transmigration of souls. So basically the belief that the soul passes through successive bodies in a cycle of spiritual purification. And this is what they call the changing of garments or dunaduni. Now, like yazidism, ym emphasizes a group of seven divine beings, the haft, than, or these seven persons who are charged with the affairs of the spiritual realm. Their sacred texts are written in gorani, this ancient Kurdish language that few yis can read today. And for centuries, yis have practiced their faith in secret. They have no formal, like, mosque or church. Religious ceremonies take place just in homes, also known as jamkhanas, where the sacred tenbor, this stringed instrument, is played during worship. What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break real quick because I gotta ask you a question. Are you the type of person that just wakes up in the morning and immediately, like, hits your vape or gets a coffee or throws in a pouch because you just want to feel anything at all? Like, you just throughout the day, you're like, okay, coffee pouch. Coffee pouch. Vape. Coffee pouch. I mean, to be honest with you, that was me. Like, I was just going from cold brew to pouch to cold brew to pouch all day. And my heart felt like it was gonna explode. Like, I was just, like, felt strung out, like, all day. Truly. I was, like, just kind of anxious and I didn't even know why. And I was trying to, like, eat clean. I was lifting weights, mean, while I was also chemically nuking my nervous system. And that's why I started these ultra patches. I'll be honest with you, I found these on my own. And then I reached out to the company. I was like, hey, I would love to work with you guys because I love what you guys do. Ultra is amazing because it's nicotine free and caffeine free, and it still gives you that focus and energy. It's really the best. Like, I'm like, okay, there's no nicotine or caffeine. I was like, well, what is it? Well, basically, they partnered with neuroscientists to put together a blend of, like, nootropics and adaptogens to actually help you focus and get energized and kind of, you know, help with that oral fixation. No ditty without, like, the jittery crash. So it's got like, L theanine, infinity, PX alpha, GPC, vitamins B6 and B12. And I'll be honest, they taste great, they make you feel great. And I don't know if it's just me or what, but like, I truly feel like I'm more locked in when I'm taking them and there's no crash. And the craziest thing is that, you know, sometimes I'll still use nicotine. It just helps me cut back and I feel way better now. Caffeine and nicotine are going to wreck your resting heart rate. It's going to make you feel anxious if you're taking them all the time. And on top of that, it's going to destroy your sleep. So that was my biggest issues. I felt cracked out, I felt anxious and I wasn't sleeping that good. But ever since I've been taking Ultra, I'm still getting that same little kick. I'm getting that thing to do throughout the day and I just feel better in general. Ultra is absolutely amazing. And if you're interested in checking them out, I have great news. You're gonna go to takeultra.com that's t-a k e ultra.com and you're gonna use the promo code camp and you're gonna get 15% off when you use that code. That's takeultra.com and use a code camp for 15% off. And when you check out, they're gonna ask where you heard. Just please tell them that we sent you over at Camp Cagna. It really helps us out a lot. Thank you guys so much. Feel better, sleep better. Get less anxious, but stay locked in. What's up people? We're going to take a break really quick cuz I want to tell you about a sponsor we have that I'm so stoked about. Yes, it's Chubby's. If you never heard of Chubby's, I've been wearing these since legit, like late high school. Yeah, I'm so stoked. 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Let's get back to the show. Now, the Tanbor is not just an instrument to the Arsanis. It is a sacred symbol of their faith. And they believe that the instrument itself actually carries a divine power. Because of their secretive nature and their beliefs about Ali and Ali's divinity, yis have faced persecution from both Sunni and Shia Muslims. And during the ISIS onslaught, y villages in Iraq were specifically targeted and militants considered them heretics worthy of death for the belief their ancestors had held for 600 years. When the Arab Muslim conquest swept through the Middle east in the 7th century, large portions of the Kurds gradually converted to Islam or reverted technically. And today a clear majority of Kurds, roughly 2/3 to 3/4, identify as Sunni Muslims. But Kurdish Islam has never been, you know, ordinary Islam. For one thing, most Sunni Kurds follow the Shafi. This is a school of Islamic jurisprudence, not the Hanafi school, which is followed by their Arab and Turkish neighbors. And this distinction might seem technical, but for many Kurds, it is an identity marker. And more importantly, Kurdish. Sunni Islam is saturated with Sufism. And Sufism is basically the mystical tradition within Islam that emphasizes a direct experience of Allah now, basically, that you can connect with God in the present reality. And it has very, you know, there's very much the guidance of spiritual masters and a very much a charismatic movement within the faith. And there are two Sufi orders that dominate Kurdish religious life, the Naqshbandia and the Kadiriya. These orders are organized around shakes, basically spiritual leaders who serve as intermediaries between ordinary believers and the divine. The sheikhs deployed their influence through khalifas. They were basically deputies who live amongst the people. Now. Historically, these Sufi sheikhs wielded enormous political power. In the 19th and 20th century, some of the most important Kurdish nationalist leaders were also Sufi sheiks, men like Sheikh Saeed or Sheikh Ubaidullah of the Naqshbandia order. This fusion of religion and nationalism actually makes a lot of sense. The sheikhs had networks, they had followers, they had moral authority to call people to action. And when the Kurds fought for independence, they often fought under the banner of their faith, basically, if not more than the banner of their ethnicity. And it's worth noting that Kurdish religious identity is broader than Yazidism or Yarsanism or Sunni Sufism. There are also Alevi Kurds, particularly in Turkey's Tunsely province, who practice a distinct syncretic tradition. There are Shia Kurds in parts of Iran or Iraq. There are Kurdish Christians, some belonging to ancient churches, others more recent converts. And there are secular and atheist Kurds, especially among the urban classes. The religious map of Kurdistan is extremely complex, but not all Kurds in the mountain villages converted to Islam. Pockets of Yazidis and Yis and Christians held out. Some converted nominally while continuing to practice their ancestral faith in secret, while others retreated to, you know, even higher in the mountains, as they always have, beyond the reach of politics and armies and, you know, people trying to, you know, collect taxes. The Islamic authorities called them kafirs, meaning infidels. They issued for months, calling for their death and elimination. But again, the mountains provided protection, and to this day, their faith has survived. Now, here's something that most people don't know. One of the most celebrated figures in all of Islamic history was actually Kurdish Saladin, the Sultan who recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187. Saladin was born in Tikrit, in what is now Iraq, to a Kurdish family. He founded the Ayyubid dynasty, united the Muslim world against the Crusaders, and became a legend across the Islamic world. Historically, even his enemies respected him. Richard the Lionheart of England reportedly called Saladin one Of the greatest princes of his age, Saladin was known not just for his military genius, but for his mercy to prisoners and his chivalry and his piety. However, there's an interesting irony here. Saladin is celebrated across the Arab world as an Arab hero. Like, there's statues of him in Damascus and in Cairo, but he was Kurdish, one of the most famous figures in Islamic history, kind of misidentified for generations. And for Kurds, Saladin represents proof of their place in broader Islamic history. They weren't just converts who came to the faith. They produced one of the greatest champions of Islam. But the irony cuts both ways. The same Islamic civilization that venerates Saladin has for centuries persecuted other Kurds simply for practicing different faiths. The Yazidis and the Yarsanis, who share Saladin's mountains, who speak his language, who are ethnically his people, have also been called devil worshippers and heretics and have been killed by the thousands. The Kurdish religious experience contains both the height of Islamic achievement and the depths of religious persecution by their Muslim brothers. Under the Ottoman Empire, religious persecution of the Yazidis would intensify. For example, in 1516, when Sultan Selim the Grim conquered Syria, Yazidis briefly held positions of power. Some served as emirs or local governors. But this period of tolerance didn't last long. By the mid 16th century, the Ottomans had turned against the yazidis. And in 1566, the Grand Mufti of the Ottoman Empire, Abu Al Saud Al Ahmadi, who was himself a Kurd, issued fatwas that legitimized the killing of Yazidis and the enslavement of Yazidi women and even the sale of Yazidi slaves in markets. Now the Yazidi homeland was declared Dar al Harb, the realm of war, where Islamic law permits military conquests and the taking of spoils. Sunni Kurdish princes, particularly those of the Badinan principality, repeatedly requested Ottoman permission to eliminate people, to eliminate the Yazidis. And Ottoman documents from 1568 survive in which local rulers asked for Fermans. Basically, the ethnic cleansing to end the corruption of the Dasini sect. Dasinis being just another colloquial name for the Yazidis. And these massacres continue for centuries. Every few decades, a new campaign of violence would sweep through Yazidi villages and men would be killed, women would be enslaved, and children were then forcibly converted to Islam. Yazidi tradition remembers over 70 such campaigns, though historians debate the exact number and characters of each. Some were large scale military expeditions, some were localized pogroms. What is not in doubt is the pattern. Wave after wave of violence targeting a community because of its faith. Now, by the time the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I, the Yazidis had endured centuries of persecution, and the 20th century would still bring more if the Ottoman era was brutal. For The Yazidis, the 20th century was catastrophic for all Kurds, regardless of their faith in Iraq. Saddam Hussein viewed the Kurds as a threat that needed to be eliminated. His response was the Anfal campaign, a military operation between 1986 and 1989 designed to permanently solve Iraq's Kurdish problem. The name itself was a religious desecration. Anfal comes from a chapter of the Quran where, you know, Saddam appropriated Islamic language to justify his plans for genocide, which is extremely messed up considering how many Kurds identify as just regular Muslim. The campaign involved the destruction of approximately 4,500 Kurdish villages. Men and boys were separated from women and children, loaded into trucks, driven to mass graves in the desert, and executed. The most notorious single event was the chemical attack on Halabjah on March 16, 1988. Iraqi aircraft dropped a combination of mustard gas and sarin and Taboon and VX on a town of 70,000 people. And roughly 5,000 civilians died in a single afternoon. Many of them were children. It remains the largest chemical weapons attack directed against a civilian population in human history. The victims include Kurds of all faiths. Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, Yazidis, Yasanis, Christians. Saddam didn't discriminate at all. To him, they were all just Kurds, and they all had to die. Human Rights watch estimated between 50 and 100,000 Kurds were killed during the Anfal campaign. But the truth is, the real figure might never be known. And then came August 2014. The Islamic State swept through northern Iraq, conquered territory with terrifying speed. And when they reached Sinjar, the heartland of the Yazidi community, they unleashed horrors that even the Yazidis, with their long memory of persecution, had never seen before. There were mass executions of men and young boys, forced conversion of children, and the systematic enslavement of women and girls sold in markets passed between fighters, sexually abused repeatedly in what ISIS ideologies called religiously sanctioned marriage. ISIS specifically targeted the Yazidis again because of this peacock angel thing. The militants still maintained that these Zidis were devil worshippers and that killing them, enslaving them, and destroying their holy place was actually a religious duty for them to do. The United nations formally recognized what happened at Sinjar as genocide, and the Yazidis added it to their count. By their reckoning, it was the 74th Fermont, the 74th campaign of extermination. In their collective memory, thousands fled to Mount Sinjar, trapped on the mountain without food or water as ISIS surrounded them below. American airstrikes eventually helped break the siege, and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, including many Yazidi themselves, fought house to house to liberate their homeland. Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman who survived ISIS captivity and sexual slavery, actually won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for her advocacy. She became the first Iraqi citizen to receive a Nobel Prize. Thousands of Yazidi women remain missing to this day. Many are believed to still be held captive somewhere in Syria or in Turkey. Now, in the aftermath of the ISIS genocide, something unexpected happened in Kurdistan. Some Kurds began converting to Zoroastrianism. For some, this was a rejection of Islam. They blamed Islamic extremism for the horrors that they had witnessed. The beheadings of slavery, the destruction of these ancient sites. And they wanted a faith that felt authentically Kurdish, untainted by the violence done in the name of Allah. And for others, it was just a spiritual calling. Zoroastrianism's emphasis on this cosmic battle between good and evil, its reference for, you know, its fire and truth, the ancient Iranian, Persian roots, all of that really resonated with Kurds and really helped them find meaning. After this trauma, many say they chose orientastrusm because it felt like a return to their pre Islamic heritage. Though historians note that the relation between ancient Kurdish religion and Zoroastrianism is complicated and contested to this day. In 2015, the Kurdistan Regional Government officially recognized Zoroastrianism as a religion in small Zoroastrian communities. And at least one fire temple have emerged in Iraqi Kurdistan. Estimates speak of hundreds to a few thousands of adherents. And these numbers are once again contested. Difficult to verify, but the symbolism is powerful. After everything, after onfall by Saddam, after isis, after centuries of persecution, some Kurds are reclaiming a piece of their pre Islamic heritage. However, not everyone approves. An Islamic cleric in Suleimaniya called for Zoroastrian converts to be killed if they didn't return to Islam within three days. But the converts continued anyway. They persisted and once again the mountains protected them. The Kurdish religious story is not ancient history, only it's happening right now. There are still Yazidi women in captivity today. There are still Yisra practicing their faith in secret in Iran, afraid of what their neighbors might do if they found out There are still Kurds across four countries who cannot build a church or a temple or a jumkhana without fear. And yet they're still around. They're still here, still practicing, still believing. And every year, thousands of Yazidis still make the pilgrimage to La Leash. They still tie their knots of prayer on the doorway. They still light their oil lamps. The Yis have been called heretics for six centuries. They still play the sacred tanbor in their jumkhanas. They still pass down the teachings of Sultan Shahak. And the Kurdish Sufis have seen their shaykhs imprisoned and executed. They still gather in their tekkes. They still chant the names of Allah. And there's a Yazidi hymn that says God has 1001 names, another that says he has 3003 names. Kurdish communities across all their faiths have been preserving these religious traditions whose roots stretch back millennia, through persecution and exile and chemical weapon attacks and genocide, and they keep speaking those names. And if history has taught us anything, we know that the Kurds are probably never going to stop and the mountains will continue to protect them. And that is a brief overview of the religious and theological background of the Kurdish people. I mean, a fascinating, fascinating group. I mean, it's a. It's a difficult thing. When you are a religious or ethnic minority without a country, you're going to have a tough time. Like, I know people are going to talk about, like, oh, like, Jews get expelled from all these countries. It's like, yeah, dude. Like, if you don't have a country and you are an ethnic or religious minority, you're gonna get effed up. And the Kurds are another example of that. It's like, yeah, if you don't have a country, you don't have Kurdistan. You're just existing between all these other countries. People are gonna try to kill you a lot. It just. It's an unfortunate feature of nationalism that happens when economic times get tough. In our current system, the leaders in place will try to place blame on amongst a population they could scapegoat. It's messed up, but it's true. And this is why presently there's like, a lot of talk about Kurds in Iran, because there's some fear that if there is a Kurdish state that is established, that that creates an existential threat for Turkey, who has, you know, 15 to 20 million Kurds. And people are afraid that basically Turkey would lose a massive piece of their territory, which then would cause more fighting and wars and da, da, da, da. It just never ends. And, yeah, that's one of the casualties of how things were kind of cut up after World War I and World War II, where, you know, countries are reshaped and everyone got new borders, and the Kurds were just shit out of luck. Completely unfair. I mean, 40 million people without a, you know, ability to autonomously govern themselves or, you know, choose their own destiny. But not many people know about them. I feel like people are, like, familiar with, like, the peshmerga, probably, like, if you've ever seen, like, the BBC or you read an article on Alazera. But I'll be honest with you, I'm not an expert. I don't even know that much about curds. But I think we should do an episode about the history of the curds. I think that'd be a fascinating history deep dive. Maybe that'll be the next one that we do. And I'm sure you're wondering, where are you going to do this? I'm glad you asked. We're going to do it at History Camp. History Camp is another channel we do. Basically, we go through a deep dive on everything that's ever happened ever in history. That's kind of the goal, and if this channel is to figure out where we're going. History camps to figure out where we've been in. And, of course, I have Camp Gagons, where I do deep dives and all sorts of other random, miscellaneous stuff that's going on right now. And if you guys want to check this out, we got the links in the description. If you want to get the merch, you can go to Camp R D. If you want to see me live, you go to Mark Gagnon Live. And if you want to just keep rocking with us here at Religion Camp, you more than welcome. Christos, you have anything you want to contribute? What do the Greeks think about the Kurds? I just didn't realize how persecuted they were. It's kind of sick. 74. 74 times, dude. Good thing they have the mountains. Thank God they got the mountains, dude. They got to keep on going up at the very end. It's just gonna be, like, five Kurds at the top of the mountain, just, like, hanging on for dear life. Like, can we get a apartment or something? Can we get anything? Maybe we'll start to go. Fund me for the Kurds Copper Dome or something. Yeah, it was something we could be able to do anyway. Shout out to the Kurds. With any Kurds watching, please let me know. Did I mess this up? Is there anything I got wrong? Please drop a comment. I would love to be the comments in informed, even a little bit more. And if we have Kurdish listeners here at the campsite, how sick would that be? I had no idea. Hit us up in the comments. Drop a comment. I read them all. And be nice to each other. All right? This is not that serious. We're all gonna die. Okay? Nothing. It's. Come on. The world's gonna explode. Your legacy means nothing. Just love your family and drop a comment. All right? Anyway, God bless you, and I'll see you next time. Peace be with you.