Turkey has a complex history.
It is NOT an indigenous people!
Most people do not realize that the Turks are no more indigenous to “Turkey” then Brits or Norwegians are to the USA.
The Turks come from the steppes. They invaded what is now Turkey 500 years ago, conquering both the last remnant of the Roman Empire, “Byzantium,” and the Arab caliphates.
The biggest part of their conquest was not Turkey, but the lands rules by Byzantium and by the Arabs. Murad I, the fist Ottoman Caliph, conquered of Edirne in 1362 and Selim I conquered the Arabs, becoming the defender of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina . Among the many indigenous peoples under Turkish rule before WWI were the Arabs, the Kurds, the Jews, the Greeks, parts of Eastern Europe, etc.
In many ways, it was the Turks that enabled the foundations of modern Israel because under the Ottomans indigenous peoples has a lot of self-rule and the Caliphs invited Jews back to Palestine.
One of the peoples under Turkish, aka Ottoman, rule was the Kurds. When the Ottoman empire fell in WWI. The Kurds are ana ancient people .. with roots deeper than the Arabs. Their homeland fought for its identity with the Assyrians, the Persian, the Greeks, the Arabs, and the Turks.
With the fall of the Ottoman empire in WWI, various peoples sought their independence from the remnant of the Ottomans under the new Turkish state. The Armenians were massacred in a genocide .
The Kurds were not just left inside what became Turkey but inside the domains of the conquerors of the Turkish caliphate .. the French, the Brits and the Soviets. These powers assigned parts of the Kurdish people to their proxies .. Kurdistan, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The Kurds were and still are denied a homeland.
The Kurds remaining in Turkey were and are especially oppressed .. more or less like Uigar in China, Jews in Palestine before 48, Arabs in occupied Palestine .
Stern Gang has turned to terrorism. This makes Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds difficult for Israelis. Israel, from its founding has been naturally sympathetic to the Kurdish cause. Israeli agents have worked with the Kurds not just in Syria but in their occuopied lands in Iraq and Iran.
What is left out is Mustafa Atatürk who founded modern Turkey. Freed from the past of the Ottoman Empire. Now the current rulers of Turkey seek to bring back Turkey. Show the troublesome Arabs who is in charge. Will a new Ottoman empire emerge and will the Turks go home or keep taking up pieces of Syria and perhaps Iraq and then further south.
The Turks are a lot like the post imperial Americans.