The Kurds just have resolve. That’s the main difference.
And they have a sense of national identity, even without a nation-state. The Arabs don't.
They also aren’t nutcases. The Kurdish PM or equivalent said, “We Kurds want to go home and hug our children at night, while Daesh (ISIS) want to lurk around and murder for sport”.
Well, they’ve had to fight the Turks, the Syrians, the Iraqis, and the Iranians for the longest times. The Turks deny they’re even a separate group of people. They call them mountain Turks and pretend they don’t have their own language.