When in 1990 Saddam Hussein overreached into Kuwait, the Kurds went on to seize their chance to make history and turn Kurdistan into the reality they had been promised after the First World War in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), but never granted. At the tail end of the Gulf War conflict, the Kurds rose up, the Allied forces declared a “safe zone” into which Iraqi forces were not allowed, and a de facto Kurdistan began to take shape.
