Kurdistan is in trouble after the referendum



When we arrived in Kirkuk on April 10, 2003, following the collapse of the regime's forces and the control of the Kurdish Peshmerga, chaos and looting swept through the city. The Peshmerga did not impose their control until a few hours before our arrival and they said that they were here to fill the void left by the exit of the former Iraqi army and restore order, although they did nothing to deter the looters.

The Kurds kept repeating to the Americans their promises that they were not planning to take over Kirkuk, and that their stay there was temporary. "We expect to withdraw some of our men within 45 minutes," a senior Kurdish official told me as he stood amid the rubble of the governor's office.

Fourteen years have passed and the Kurds remain today in control of Kirkuk, which is the capital of oil for northern Iraq with its population of Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen, as well as many areas surrounding them. The leaders of the US-led coalition during the invasion of Iraq feared that the Kurds' capture of the city would provoke the Turks and push them into Iraqi territory because they had already said they would not condone such a thing. However, none of this happened, and the Iraqi Kurdistan remained like the eye of the typhoon.

Journalists reporting on Kirkuk have always described it as a "powder keg" because of its ethnic and sectarian makeup along with its oil wealth, which many parties are competing for control over. This perception stuck to the Kurdistan of Iraq until it began to suggest that the explosion inevitably inevitable but no one knows when. There has been speculation that a Turkish occupation or a war between the Peshmerga and central government forces in Iraq could be due to a dispute over those territories, but they have all proved either false or hasty.

The referendum on the independence of the Kurdish-controlled areas on September 25 is the latest event described as threatening the stability of Iraq and parts of the Middle East, so such a referendum in a small area has been met with such a widespread worldwide denunciation of so many International powers including the United States, Britain, Germany and France. A statement to the White House confirmed that the referendum would distract efforts aimed at defeating "urging" and consolidating stability in the liberated areas. The holding of the referendum in disputed areas will be particularly provocative and destabilizing.

Important regional powers such as Turkey and Iran have called for the referendum to be canceled and threatened to retaliate if it does not happen. In Baghdad, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi condemned the operation and the Supreme Court in Iraq declared the referendum "unconstitutional." Despite this, the Kurds in their referendum.

What is strange about this referendum is that it is not binding, that is, it does not force the president of the region Massoud Barzani to take any realistic action on the ground towards self-determination. But Barzani, through his insistence on going ahead with the process, thinks he has already put the issue of Kurdish independence on the agenda.

To say the least, Barzani was able to win the support of the Kurds with dishonest slogans after challenging all threats and calls for postponement or cancellation. However, the referendum process also reported distracting attention from the corruption of the Kurdistan Regional Government and the inability of its performance and the terrible situation witnessed by its economy. On the other hand, Barzani on November 1 set a date for holding the presidential and parliamentary elections in the region, and thus the KDP expects to benefit from any positive result achieved by the referendum process which took place 35 days ago.

The political scene in northern Iraq is changing in other directions too. The "Da'ash" is retreating in defeat. Last Thursday, the Iraqi army launched an attack on one of the most important areas controlled by al-Qaeda, the city of Hawija to the west of Kirkuk. As always, calculating the balance of political and military forces is difficult in Iraq because of the large number of players and the inability to extrapolate how they might deal with each other. For example, how will Abadi behave towards the way the KRG treated him? The forces of Abbadi have just won a historic victory over the "chorus" when the city of Mosul regained after the siege and battles of Dama for nine months, and will not be prepared to lose this honor, which won him in the face of a challenge with Barzani.

The Kurdish leadership has another reason to count after the referendum, that is, the Kurdistan Regional Government will lose a lot. The demands of the Kurds for the right to self-determination cannot be compared to what the Algerians demanded of him or the Vietnamese after World War II, because the provincial government currently enjoys a high degree of independence from many aspects, the real obstacle to independence and self-determination in sharks.

The United States and its allies will no longer need the Kurds as much as they need them now, after they eliminate a "hasty," and the Iraqi central government will also become stronger, not weaker. Therefore, the safest way for the Kurds is to reach a confederation agreement with Baghdad to share power, although neither side has shown its readiness for this solution so far.

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