Γιατί οι ΗΠΑ δεν υποστηρίζουν την Κουρδική Ανεξαρτησία;
These reasons were on display this week as Iraqi forces took control of Kirkuk, the disputed oil-rich city that Kurds see as their Jerusalem. Kurdish fighters had controlled the city since 2014, when Iraqi forces fled the area in the face of an ISIS onslaught. What made the situation even more precarious was last month’s referendum, in which an overwhelming number of Kurds voted for an independent homeland in what is now Iraqi Kurdistan. The referendum was also conducted in three areas with significant Kurdish populations, including Kirkuk, that are deemed disputed areas by the 2005 Iraqi constitution. That document was approved in most of Iraq by wide margins, but in Iraqi Kurdistan more than 98 percent of voters endorsed it.The aftermath of this vote and the seizure of Kirkuk is playing out in a predictable fashion—finger-pointing among the Kurds, an attempt at neutrality by the United States, decisive action by Iran, and a flexing of muscles by the Iraqi state—but it also raises two questions: Why wasn’t the U.S. able to persuade one of its most reliable allies in the region to postpone the referendum? And why doesn’t Washington support Kurdish independence outright?
“There is no ambiguity on what the U.S. position was on this issue. The United States has been telling the Kurds and telling [Kurdish President] Masoud [Barzani], and telling Masrour [Barzani, his heir apparent] since last spring not to proceed with this because this would be not good for Kurdistan, not good for Iraq, and would play into the hands of the hardliners and the hands of the Iranians,” said Stuart Jones, the former ambassador to Iraq, now at the Cohen Group. “And I think that’s what we’re seeing.”
Barzani’s call for a referendum has been called a miscalculation, but the Kurdish leader has long maintained that as long as Iraqi Kurds are part of the state of Iraq, they will not get a square deal. Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, the KRG’s representative in Washington, told me that the best U.S. offer to postpone the referendum came far too late for the vote to be delayed. “We didn’t have confidence that Baghdad would have stood by it anyway,” she said. Abdul Rahman said Kurds are consistently told it’s not a good time for independence. “From our perspective, it’s always a bad time,” she said. “If you’re looking for a moment when Iraq is stable and you have somebody reasonable to negotiate with, that’s never been the case in Iraq.”
“So, we expected opposition. We thought that would be the pattern,” she said. “Where we were surprised is the hostility to the referendum, the disrespect, the attempt to belittle the referendum.”
Indeed, the KRG is slightly bigger than the U.S. state of Maryland and about the size of Switzerland. But what it does have in area and population it lacks in the factors that make a stable state. Jones, who was U.S. ambassador from 2014 to 2016, argued those reasons are why the U.S. doesn’t support an independent Kurdish state at the moment.
Regional reaction may, in part, be the reason why the Iraqi government acted in the manner it did. As I wrote earlier this week, now that ISIS is all but defeated, the region’s dormant conflicts are resurfacing. Iran, Syria, and Turkey have significant Kurdish minorities and Tehran and Ankara, especially, fear that an independent Kurdish state would embolden Kurdish separatist forces in their own countries. Turkey, which traditionally has been close to the Barzani family, and Iran, which enjoys influence with the rival Talabani family (the two families have dominated Kurdish politics for decades), stepped in. Turkey called the referendum a “big mistake” and threatened to stop buying oil from the Kurds. Iran was more direct. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Quds force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was in Iraqi Kurdistan last weekend, meeting with the Talabani-allied Patriotic Union of Kurdistan to mediate a resolution to the standoff. It appears to have worked. PUK fighters withdrew from Kirkuk this week, handing the city over to Iraqi government forces.
If there is one thing that is clear from the crisis in Iraq it is that 14 years after the U.S.-led invasion that ousted Saddam, Iran maintains a significant influence in the country—not only with the central government in Baghdad, which is dominated by its fellow Shia Muslims, but with the Kurds. This will especially be a factor as the U.S. continues to attempt to counter Iran, first by the Trump administration’s decision to send the nuclear deal back to Congress and then by imposing terrorism-related sanctions on the IRGC, the same group in which Soleimani is a senior commander.
“We certainly can counter Iran’s influence, but we can’t negate it,” Jones told me. “Iran had influences in these places before and will continue to have influence. It has an 800-kilometer border with Iraq, including with the PUK-controlled portion of the KRG in northern Iraq. Conditions in Iraq are vital to Iranian national security. There’s no way that Iran is not going to be a player.”
Ryan Crocker, who was U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2007 to 2009, said the U.S. has weakened its position by appearing to take Baghdad’s side in the dispute with the Kurds. “I do not think we should have taken a position one way or the other on a Kurdish state in northern Iraq: It’s for the Kurds and Iraqis to work out,” he said. “But by injecting ourselves on one side of this … [the] concern is that we will no longer be seen as an honest broker as we move ahead.”
Let us imagine that Iraqi Kurdistan declared independence, and Iran, Syria, Turkey, and Iraq didn’t fight it but just closed their borders. How could we live? Let us say, we’ve got our oil—how could we export it? And you can be sure that if Kurdistan declares independence Iran will attack, Turkey will attack, Syria will attack—and Iraq will not accept it. We cannot resist all these countries.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/us-kurdish-independence/543540/