Mick Hartley

Bernard-Henri Lévy in Tablet:

Why should American Jews care about and support the independence of Kurdistan?

Because Iraqi Kurdistan is one of the very rare areas of the Middle East where Jews and Judaism are viewed positively.

Because on the day that Kurdistan will be independent, the country will foster cordial relations with Israel, or in any case, normal ones.

Because, as shown in a scene of my film Peshmerga, I do not know another Muslim country where the memory and birthplace of a future Israeli Defense Minister are held in such high regard and with pride.

Because there we find a Ministry of Religious Affairs where there is a department especially dedicated to religious freedom for Jews – And when we ask, with wonder and amazement, “why a department just for the Jews when there are no Jews left in Kurdistan?”, the response is “because we await them, we await and will welcome all those Jewish compatriots who wish to return.”

Because I do not know another country with a Muslim majority where Yom HaShoah is celebrated with devotion and respect each year.

And finally, because the Kurdish fighters, at the price of many lives, have been our only real shield against ISIS.

The Kurds have enjoyed a period of positive publicity over the past few years, being the only group willing to take on ISIS. Now that battle is almost over, in Iraq at least, the concern is that they'll lose their Western support, and be expected to live with a hardline Shia government in Baghdad. So this may be their last best chance, before they return to history's back pages.

For a more detailed analysis of why the Kurdish leadership have chosen this moment to call the referendum, and what may happen given the almost inevitable yes vote, see Gareth Stansfield's paper here:

Since the mid-twentieth century, few issues have managed to unify Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria as the Kurdish question – or, more pointedly, how to prevent a Kurdish answer to that question. This has seen them aligned strategically to prevent an independent Kurdistan from emerging, even while they would each use the others’ Kurds to undermine their regional rivals for tactical advantage, as Iran did to Iraq very effectively in the war of 1980–88.

Western states, on the other hand, have enjoyed close working relationships with Kurdish parties, and especially those in Iraq, when it was in their interests to have them, such as in the 1990s when they lived in isolated opposition to Saddam Hussein’s regime. However, Western support has always been conditional: in no way should such support be viewed as a precursor for support for an independent Kurdish state. Should a secessionist programme lead to the withdrawal of Western support and protection, the Kurds would be left to the mercy of regimes not known for their historical leniency. But now the Kurds seem willing to call the bluff of Western powers and to test the limits of their conditional support.

So what has changed? On the Kurdish side, a great deal. Even up until the fall of Mosul to IS in June 2014, Massoud Barzani’s threat of secession remained very much part of an episodic outing of a warning, coloured by increasing frustration, which he had engaged in with Iraqi leaders since the fall of Saddam. But the conditions which obliged the Kurds to remain committed to the post-2003 Iraq project began to weaken from 2010. The continued marginalisation and targeting of Sunnis and their leaders by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s government was compounded by the failure of Western powers to fully recognise the electoral victory of the largely Sunni-supported Iraqiyya political bloc in the 2010 elections. Maliki’s subsequent survival then saw the further suppression of the Arab Sunni political voice, and witnessed a rise in tension between Erbil and Baghdad over the level of sovereignty to be exercised by the KRG, and the extent of the Kurdistan Region itself. Western disengagement from 2011 then set the scene for a rapid unravelling of the progress made to date as there was no longer a powerful, external actor that could assist in maintaining the political balances necessary to keep Iraq’s politicians from the three main groups working together constructively. Politically, Iraq was broken, with sectarianism being the defining feature of the political landscape. Economically, the Maliki government cut the 17% constitutional share of oil revenues allocated to the KRI, costing the KRG nearly $1 billion a month. It also forced their hand to attempt to build an economy that could exist without the input, influence or control of Baghdad, which led the KRG to further increase its oil production and exports through Turkey. Territorially, Iraq was also fragmented, with the Kurds living in increasingly autonomous isolation from the rest of the country. Furthermore, Iraqi security forces were weaker than realised, a shortcoming that was exposed by IS in summer 2014.

Counterintuitively perhaps, the three years from summer 2014 was a halcyon period for the Kurds in diplomatic and security-related terms, if not economically. The Kurdish concern must now be whether this period has ended. After surviving an IS assault on Kurdish lines in August 2014, the Kurds found themselves to be natural allies of Western powers, which quickly had become obsessed with the notion of defeating the Islamists, but had no appetite to deploy ground forces themselves. The Kurds, therefore, were conveniently placed local allies to be trained and equipped to take the fight to IS, with Western support from the air, special forces units and intelligence organisations. Indeed, the importance of the KRI as a counterterrorism and intelligence hub for Western partners should not be underestimated. The ties that bind Western intelligence and its KRI sister agencies appear to be strong and, as the threat posed by insurgent jihadi groups that will emerge from the fires of IS’s demise will remain for many years to come, so the importance of the KRI as a counterterrorism and intelligence hub remain.

However, the Kurdish leadership seems to have realised that the period covered by the existence of IS between 2014 and 2017 was something of an anomaly, when their interests were, for perhaps the first time, aligned with those of Western powers. This alignment allowed them to develop initiatives in ways that would have been impossible before IS’s appearance. The Kurds took control of vast areas of northern Iraq they claimed as historically Kurdish, but that did not lie within Erbil’s authority. These ‘disputed territories’ were simply taken by Kurdish peshmerga forces, presenting the government of Iraq with a Kurdish fait accompli. This act of military necessity then negated the need, from the Kurdish leaders’ perspective, to continue to push for the implementation of Article 140 of the Constitution of Iraq – the article that would have formally resolved the question of authority in these territories. The Kurds would also export oil not only from their ‘own’ fields, as defined by the Constitution of Iraq, but also from the oil cluster of Kirkuk, including the massive Bai Hassan field and those in Jambur, Avana and Baba Gurgur – all of which were established before 2003. These would, according to Article 109 of the Constitution of Iraq, remain under the jurisdiction of the government of Iraq. As the Kurds needed revenue to support not only their heightened war effort, but also to provide for a vastly swollen community of internally displaced people that had fled the IS advance, the Iraqi government not only stopped attempting to block KRG oil exports, but even came to an agreement with them, particularly over the sharing of revenue from the Kirkuk oil fields, setting a precedent that may prove difficult to ignore in future negotiations.

However, with the defeat of IS in Mosul, the Kurds became concerned that their utility as conveniently placed Western proxies would diminish. No longer would Western powers be willing to ignore the fact that Erbil acts in ways that threaten the territorial integrity of Iraq. Pressure is also likely to mount on the KRG to not only relinquish control of key disputed territories back to the government of Iraq, but also to return Kirkuk to Iraqi sovereignty, along with its oil wealth. At the same time, the Kurdish leaders will be strongly encouraged to re-engage with their Iraqi counterparts – Shias and Sunnis – in a political game that they increasingly see no benefit in playing. The view from Erbil, rightly or wrongly, is that the institutions of the government of Iraq are now totally dominated by Shia parties, with hard-line Shia militias heightening their influence among them, and that the Kurds would struggle in vain to achieve success in such an environment…..

Read on (pdf document).