Kurds are the largest people in the world without their own ethnic state. There is approximately 27 million Kurds are spread all over the world today, the vast majority live in the Middle East, especially in Turkey. Large Kurdish communities can also found in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Germany, and Sweden. The majority of the Kurds in Syria immigrated from Turkey to the French Mandate the 20th century, in order to escape the harsh repression of the Kurds in that country.