If you follow the Turkish media, and especially focus on news related to Turkey’s southeastern neighbors, you will notice an interesting nuance: The autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of Iraq is almost never referred to with its official name. Most Turks rather simply call it “Northern Iraq,” with clear intention to avoid the K word. Others who try to be more realistic speak of “the Kurdish Regional Government.” They, in other words, prefer the word “Kurdish” to “Kurdistan,” because the latter is quite toxic for most Turkish ears.

The reason for this widespread Turkish sensitivity is not hard to see: The geographic area that historically has been called “Kurdistan” is divided since World War I between four countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, the last of them having the largest share. Moreover, groups among Turkey’s Kurds have launched almost two dozen rebellions against Ankara in the past 90 years. This had led successive Turkish governments — and especially the bureaucratic establishment, which was politely called “the regime” — to try to “Turkify” the region. Methods included replacing names of Kurdish locales with Turkish ones, banning the very usage of the Kurdish language, and forcing all Kurds to recite Atatürk’s famous motto: “How happy is the one who says ‘I am a Turk.’”

Today, however, almost all of these authoritarian practices have become history. Beginning first with the late President Turgut Özal in the early '90’s, and continuing more extensively under the current Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, the Turkish state acknowledged “the Kurdish reality.” Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan even publicly apologized for past “massacres” committed by Turkish forces against rebellious Kurdish tribes. He also announced, “The era of assimilation is over,” and that Kurds can be proud of their identity as equal citizens of Turkey.

Yet the acceptance of Kurds, a people, does not necessarily mean the acceptance of Kurdistan, a country — despite the fact that Erdoğan’s government has very good relations with the KRG. Because many Turks intuitively fear that if they begin to speak of the autonomous region in their south as “Iraqi Kurdistan,” then questions will arise about “Turkish Kurdistan,” and their homeland will eventually be divided along ethnic lines.