Mr. Erdogan’s war is an ethnonationalist attack on Kurdish people and their aspirations, and an attempt at using Turkish military might to engineer demographic changes on land that belongs to more than one nation.

The history of anti-Kurdish militant nationalism in Turkey is much older than Mr. Erdogan, and his party and goes back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. While Kurdish autonomy was suggested in the first post-war treaty, those terms were renegotiated after the Turkish war of independence and set the borders of modern Turkey and left the Kurds without a self-ruled region. Colonial mapmaking divided the Kurdish regions between the Turkish-, British- and French-mandated states of Iraq, Syria and Iran. The Kurds ended up being persecuted minorities in each of these countries.

In the eyes of the Turkish state, the Kurds didn’t exist. Our names were replaced with Turkish names, our language banned, our music criminalized and our existence denied. Kurds were forcefully assimilated into being Turkish. Large Kurdish populations in Turkey fled to neighboring Syria during violent Turkification campaigns in the first half of the 20th century.

In Syria, Kurds were forced into a precarious existence. Ideologically driven by pan-Arabism, policies in post-independence Syria denied citizenship to Kurds in the northeast, rendering the entire community stateless. Stamped out between Turkification and Arabization, statelessness for the Kurds means much more than the simple lack of a Kurdish nation-state. It means the lack of basic protection from any of the states they naturally inhabit.

When my father was born, his mother tongue was a crime. Until 1991 the Kurdish language was officially forbidden in Turkey, which made speaking, writing or listening to Kurdish illegal. In my father’s Yazidi -Kurdish village in Turkey, every day students at his school would have to read an oath that ended with the line, “My existence shall be dedicated to the Turkish existence.” The oath was recited in schools until 2013.

My parents were university students in Ankara, when in another part of Kurdish geography another state attacked the Kurdish right to exist. Saddam Hussein launched a genocidal campaign against Kurds in northern Iraq in 1988. Tens of thousands ran to the Turkish border to escape annihilation.

My parents traveled to Diyarbakir in Turkey’s southeast and helped build shelters for those seeking refuge after the chemical attack in Halabja, which killed 5,000 civilians instantly. My mother would tell me that her friends in college were arrested for reading a statement condemning massacres committed by the Iraqi dictator. Those who publicly expressed solidarity with Mr. Hussein’s victims were persecuted in Turkey for promoting Kurdish separatism.