Ref: Rugs & Carpets. A pastoral group mainly living in Iran and Turkey in small villages or as semi-nomads and who have a strong and prolific weaving tradition. Because they are scattered throughout the Middle East, there is a great variety to their designs and structure as they would adopt local traditions.

Kurds are a non-Arab, Middle Eastern minority who live in a region known as Kurdistan. They are devout Sunni Muslims who claim the region of Kurdistan as home. Kurdistan is not an independent nation, but a region in Southwest Asia that includes parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Armenia. As of the late 1990s, more than 20 million Kurds lived in the Kurdistan region, about half of them in Turkey.

A group of people who live in areas throughout the Middle East but have no country of their own, they make up about 19 percent of the population in Iraq. They are Muslims, although they speak a different language and have different traditions than the Arabs who make up the majority of Iraqis.