Historically the Kurds were valued auxiliary troops for the Ottoman state, which for a long period of time relied heavily on transplanting Turkic groups into conquered territories or buying the loyalty of their Turkic kinsmen who had already migrated into said territories. The Kurds even even controlled their own principalities in vassalge in eastern Anatolia and Iraq, which meant that they got away with a lot of shit they themselves would instigate against Albanians, Arabs, Armenians and Assyrians or even their Turkmeneli kindred.

Prior to WW1, the Ottoman Sultan Hamid attempted to build a reliable paramilitary force in Eastern Anatolia on the same lines as the Russian Cossacks. This resulted in a semi-independent Kurdish paramilitary that was only legally bound by military trials by their superiors (aka other Kurds), which lead to significant ethnic cleansing in Anatolia of Armenian and Assyrian civilians. It got worse in WW1 when the Armenians sided with the Russians (as they were wont to due for a few generations as the Ottoman elite drew inwardly into their Turkic roots) and the Turks decided to just cut the weeds at the stem.

It's only in the aftermath of WW1 when everyone else got some sort of nation-state that they started becoming victims. Before that they were significant power players in both the Ottoman and Iranian regimes and at times commanded the Middle East as Sultans (see Ayyubids of Egypt).