There have been Kurds in Transcaucasia since the late Eighteenth Century. Nomads at the time, they traveled over what would become Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, in search of grazing land for their flocks. The Christian communities (Armenians and Georgians) encouraged the settlement of Yazidi Kurds (whom the Muslims branded "devil worshippers'' (1) ) on their lands, while the Azeris tended to take in Kurdish Muslims, either Sunni or Shiite. In July 1994, Armenia expelled groups of Kurdish Muslims, whom it considers a potential Azeri “fifth column.”

The second venue for contacts between Armenians and Kurds is Lebanon. Dating back to the late 1970s (the alliance between the PKK and ASALA: see chronology, 1980), these contacts became official in 1984 at Barr Ilyas, when Ocalan met with the Lebanese Patriarch of the Armenian Gregorian (Orthodox) Church, whose Supreme Patriarchate is at Ejmiatsin, near Yerevan, in Armenia. A photograph of this little chat made the front pages in the Turkish dailies on May 24, 1994. The ties between the Gregorian Church and Dashnak (2)  are very close in the Armenian diaspora. The meeting between the Patriarch and Ocalan therefore suggests an implicit Dashnak-PKK alliance.
 

(1) The "Yazidis" are a little-known gnostic and dualist sect, all of whose adherents (between 100,000 and 300,000) are Kurds. Because the word "yazidi" is an insult among the Twelver Shiites (the Umayyad Caliph Yazid had Imam Husayn put to death at Karbala on October 10, 680), the Yazidis call themselves "Dawasin." They venerate the tomb of Shaykh Adi ibn Musafir (an Ismaili or Nestorian divine), located in northern Iraq, near Mosul. They worship and fear an evil angel in the form of a peacock, and abhor salad greens, perhaps because it brings back bad memories of the vegetarian Manicheans
 (2) The "Armenian Revolutionary Federation," (Dashnaktsutyun or Dashnak), an Armenian self-defense and pro-independence movement, was founded in 1890, when the situation had seriously deteriorated in the Ottoman Empire. The Armenian Archbishop at Ejmiatsin claimed to be the spiritual leaders of all Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as early as the Eighteenth Century