BAHDINAN

   This was the name of a former Kurdish emirate in what is now the Kurmanji-speaking area under the sway of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in the northwestern part of northern Iraq. The area is still unofficially referred to as Bahdinan. With the hilltop city of Amadiya as its capital, Bahdinan lasted as a semi-independent emirate into the 1830s. The term Bahdinan comes from the eponymous Baha al-Din family, which originated from Shamdinan (now Turkicized as Semdinli) to the north in what is presently the Turkish province of Hakkari.