“…There are also Kurdish groups in the former USSR (around 60,000), concentrated mostly in Turkmenistan (for details, see Asatrian 2001: 41-42;also Vil' evskij 1944;Minorsky 1945); and in the north-eastern regions of Iran, in Khorasan, having been forcibly settled there during the 17th-18th centuries (Madih 2007). In the beginning of the 20th century, there was a vast group of Kurds living in the territory of the present-day Azerbaijan Republic, assimilated later among the Azerbaijanis during the Soviet period (see Müller, D. 2000). At present, in Armenia and Georgia, there live respectively 52,000 and 26,000 Yezidis, who are, in fact, a separate ethno-religious entity, with their own identity and ethnic characteristics, though they speak a dialect of Kurdish, the so-called Kurmanji or Northern Kurdish (see Egiazarov 1891;Driver 1922a;Asatrian/Poladian 1989;Asatrian 1999Asatrian -2000aAsatrian/Arakelova 2002: 17-21;Arakelova/Davtyan 2009;etc.).…”