With the breakup of the Ottoman polity in the aftermath of the Great War, the Ottoman Kurdish population found itself residing in three different nation-states (Turkey, Syria and Iraq). Of this, the most significant section resided within the boundaries of the new Turkish Republic. Nevertheless, with the Anglo-Iraqi annexation of Mosul, the newly formed Iraqi state also found itself with a sizable Kurdish minority. This included many intellectuals and men of letters who had formerly served the Ottoman state, but returned to their native lands after war. From the political perspective, these men’s primary concerns were affairs in what had become Iraqi Kurdistan and, more broadly, the affairs of the Iraqi state. Nevertheless, given that many of these individuals - such as Rafiq Hilmi, Mohammad Amin Zeki Bey and Abdulaziz Yamulki – had lived and worked in Ottoman Istanbul and given that the majority of their ‘ethnic kin’ lived ‘north of the border’ in Turkey, they could help but discuss the nature of Kemalist policies towards the Kurds and, more broadly, towards modernisation. It is with this point in mind that this paper will examine the attitudes of Iraqi Kurdish intellectuals in the interwar period, towards the Kemalist regime in Turkey.