In this week’s episode of “Our Middle East,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs president Dan Diker hosts Suzan Quitaz, a Kurdish-Swedish journalist based in London.

Quitaz’s family was deported from Iraqi Kurdistan when it was under the control of Saddam Hussein, and she grew up in Sweden.

The Kurds, an ethnicity numbering 40 million people, live divided between four states: Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. Kurds have long struggled for a fully autonomous region in the Middle East, and Israel has backed Kurdish independence since before the establishment of the Jewish state.