The
mood in Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Dohuk – the three largest cities in
Iraqi Kurdistan – is newly buoyant these days, and with good reason. Iraq‘s Kurds, who occupy the semiautonomous region run by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), have much to celebrate.They enjoy relative peace and stability compared with the rest of the
country, boast a moderately open society, and, over the past year, have
received a whopping vote of confidence in their nascent economy from
some of the world’s largest oil companies, including ExxonMobil,
Chevron, Total and Gazprom, all of which have signed exploration
contracts with the KRG. Not only is Iraqi Kurdistan undergoing an
unprecedented building boom, but its people are now articulating a
once-unthinkable notion: that the day they will break free from the rest
of Iraq is nigh.

As the Kurds press forward, they are growing increasingly estranged
from the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki; personal
relations between Maliki and the Kurdish regional president,
MassoudBarzani, have reached an all-time low, keeping them from
resolving critical disputes over power, territory, and resources. This
past June, Barzani and other opponents of Maliki tried to oust the prime
minister through a vote of no confidence, and although they failed to
do so, their ambition remains very much alive.

The Kurds are victims of history, geography and, on the occasions
they overreach, their own ambitions. For almost a century, they have
struggled to free themselves from central control and to overcome their
landlocked location. Today, a rapidly changing region is presenting them
with new allies and fresh opportunities. Yet there is good reason to
believe that the Kurds will have to defer their quest for statehood once
again, at most trading Baghdad’s suffocating embrace for a more
amenable dependence on Turkey.

Although Ankara has long supported Iraq’s territorial unity as a
barrier against Iranian influence and as a check against secessionist
impulses among its own Kurdish population, the government of Turkish
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has recently begun to shift
strategies. Since 2008, it has forged a close economic bond with the KRG
by opening its border and encouraging Turkish investments in the
Kurdish region, and its relations with Baghdad have deteriorated due to
Maliki’s authoritarian turn and the growing perception in Ankara that
Maliki is serving as a proxy for Iran.

The question is how far Turkish leaders will go — whether they will
be prepared to abandon their Plan A, reinforcing a unified Iraq, for
Plan B, linking up with entities estranged from Baghdad, such as the
Kurds and the largely Sunni provinces in northern Iraq, at the risk of
breaking up Iraq. Already, the rhetoric in Ankara has changed. Officials
no longer refer to Iraq’s unity as a sine qua non; now, it is a
“preference.” And Erdogan is said to have promised Barzani that Turkish
forces will protect the Kurdish region in the event of a military
assault from Baghdad. Even if the unannounced visit that Turkish Foreign
Minister Ahmet Davutoglu made to the contested city of Kirkuk in August
wasn’t meant to signal support for the Kurds’ territorial claims in
Iraq, Baghdad’s furious reaction showed that it was received that way.

Maliki has announced plans to establish a new military headquarters
in Kirkuk, and there are other unsettling signs of the city’s growing
militarization. Barzani, for his part, is offering Turkey powerful
incentives to turn away from Baghdad: a regular flow of more than one
million barrels of oil a day through a set of direct pipelines now under
construction, a stable Sunni Kurdish buffer on Turkey’s southeastern
border against Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government and the KRG’s help
in blocking Kurdish rebels from expanding into Kurdish areas of Syria.

For Turkey, however, the risks of throwing its support behind Iraq’s
Kurds would be enormous. A disintegrating Iraq would strengthen Iran’s
quest for regional dominance, and an independent Iraqi Kurdistan would
further empower Turkey’s own Kurdish minority. Turkish leaders face a
serious dilemma. They cannot predict the outcome of the crisis in Syria
or to what extent Kurds throughout the four countries they inhabit will
be empowered by it. Yet Turkey urgently needs access to Iraq’s energy
resources, and as long as its relations with Baghdad remain in the
doldrums, Ankara appears ready to buy oil directly from the Kurds
without a green light from the Maliki government.

Such a move would help the Kurdish region gain more autonomy from
Baghdad and give it leverage over Ankara. It will not, however, produce a
state. In the end, the Kurds will remain stuck in Iraq, but more and
more on their own terms. Given their troubled history, this is serious
progress, and it offers a foundation on which to build something even
better.