Spread over five
different countries -- mainly Turkey, Iran and Iraq,
but also Syria and the former USSR -- the Kurds are one
of the most
controversial nations in History. Their name was not even acknowledged everywhere: until very recently
the word “Kurd” was forbidden in Turkey, where Kurds were
called “Eastern Anatolians”.
Their number is the subject
of endless debate: according to Kurdish authors,
there are about 30 million Kurds, living in the various parts
of Kurdistan: Turkey (15 to
20 millions), Iraq (6 millions),
Iran (8 millions) Syria
(1.5 to 2 millions) and the ex-the USSR (0.5 million), plus two million Kurds living
outside Kurdistan in the diaspora.
For the governments
concerned, these figures are grossly
“inflated”. Due to the lack of census
in these countries, or to the total secrecy
that surrounds them, it is
difficult to affirm that these
figures are correct. The geographical borders of Kurdistan are also contested: in Iraq, the border between
Kurdistan and Arabian Iraq follows
the line of ridges that
separate the plain of Mesopotamia from the mountains
of Kurdistan - but the Kurds have ben
unable to force the government
of Baghdad to recognize it
despite thirty years of war. In Iran, the administrative province of Kurdistan covers only a fraction of the territory
of Kurdistan that includes also the provinces of West Azerbaijan, Bakhtaran and Elam. In Turkey, Kurdistan... does
not exist. But for the Kurds “Greater
Kurdistan” spreads from the Mediterranean to the Persian
Gulf. Nevertheless, with their culture,
their religion, their traditions, the ridges that
separate the plain of Mesopotamia from the mountains
of Kurdistan - but the Kurds have ben
unable to force the government
of Baghdad to recognize it
despite thirty years of war. In Iran, the administrative province of Kurdistan covers only a fraction of the territory
of Kurdistan that includes also the provinces of West Azerbaijan, Bakhtaran and Elam. In Turkey, Kurdistan... does
not exist. But for the Kurds “Greater
Kurdistan” spreads from the Mediterranean to the Persian
Gulf.
A people without
a homeland, the Kurds remained for a long time a people without historians. And the first legends about
the origin of the Kurds
were recounted by Arab, Turkish and Persian writers. For the geographer
Abu Ishak-el-Farsi, who wrote in the tenth
century of our era, “They
are effectively people who inhabit
our area, but they do not belong to the category
of the human species: fragments have been collected
from all over the world and kneaded
in order to create the Kurd.’’
According to a legend quoted by the
Arab historian Masudi, in his “Golden Meadows”, the Kurds are
descended from the children of
King Solomon’s slaves and of ... the Devil! Relegated to distant
mountains, the unfaithful and impious concubines who had been seduced
by Satan gave birth to “children
who married, multiplied, and formed the Kurdish race.’’
According to another legend, the Kurds are the
descendants of the victims of
an extremely cruel tyrant, Zohak, who ruled in Persia
in distant times: victim of two
chancres that “raised their heads
over his shoulders like snakes’’ Zohak suffered from unbearable pains that no
doctor was able to alleviate; until
the day when
Satan, posing as a doctor, told him
that the only way to
relieve his pain was to dress
daily the chancres with the
brain of two adolescents. The vizir in charge of preparing this
abominable remedy then succeeded in sparing each day one
adolescent by mixing a human brain with the brain
of a ram. The adolescents who escaped a horrible death went to
live “on the ridges of the most
desolate and totally uninhabited
mountains... Since they were careful
for a very long time to shun
the company of men and flee
with horror from them and their
cities, they created a special language.’’ From the beginning, the Kurds were
seen by their
neighbours as a people apart -- the myth of the
people of parias, coming from Satan, alternating with the myth
of a people of exiles, victims
of the most
abominable oppression.
The Kurds live now
on a territory inhabited since remotest Antiquity -- it is near Rowanduz,
in Iraq, that the skeleton of the
first Neanderthal man was discovered in the cave of Shanidar -- and historians, archaeologists and linguists have not yet made clear
at what time the word “Kurd’’ appeared
for the first
time. Are the Kurds descended from the Kardukai mentioned
by Xenophon in his Retreat of the Ten Thousand, or from the
Cyrtii who appeared for the
first time in 220 B.C.? Are they
descended from the Medes, as
their present Persian “cousins’’ eagerly claim? Or are they
an autochtonous people tinged by the
waves of invaders who swept
through this crossroads between Asia and
Europe? The debate remains
open.
The history of
the Kurds is better known
after their Islamisation by
caliph Omar ibn el Khattab. An Islamisation which was not achieved easily: the Arab
chronicles narrate at length the Kurdish
revolts which succeeded one another
for three centuries, from the occupation of Takrit, in 637 A.D., until the advent
of the first
historical Kurdish dynasties: the Shaddids reigned from 951 to 1015 in Transcaucasia; the Hassanwayhs ruled from 960 to 1015 over what is
to-day the southern part of Iranian
Kurdistan; and the Marwanids
from 990 to 1096 over the area
surrounding Diyarbakir.
Salah ed Din (1138-1193), founder of the
Ayyubid dynasty, was born of a Kurdish
father; but his empire, which stretched
as far as
Egypt, never bore the features of
a Kurdish state. In the thirteenth century the Mongol
hordes invaded Kurdistan: they reached Shahrizur
in 1247, Diyarbakir in 1252, Kermanshah (Bakhtaran) and Arbil in 1257, Hakkari
and Djezireh in 1259; Kurdistan sank into an abyss of
violence for two centuries and a half. And one had to
wait until the beginning of
the sixteenth century -- with the battle of Tchaldiran
(1514) -- to witness a Kurdish renaissance: taking advantage of the rivalry
that was to set for four
centuries the Ottoman Sultan
against the Shah of Persia, the
Kurds progressively asserted their autonomy as regards
the two central
governments that were wooing them.
It was at that time -- the Golden Age of Kurdish feudalism -- that prince Sharaf
ed Din of Bitlis wrote (in Persian) his Sharafnameh
(1596) -- the first book on Kurdish history. During the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries Kurdistan remained the battlefield of Turco-Persian rivalries, the border between the two empires
moving Eastwards and Westwards according to the ensuing
battles and treaties. The
Treaty of Erzurum (1639) marked
the end of a period of Persian
expansion, and soon after almost all the Kurds were living
under Ottoman suzerainty. One century later,
the Treaty of 1732 sanctioned a new fluctuation of the border, Westwards
this time, under Nader
Shah, who reached the suburbs of
Baghdad. But a new treaty in 1739 reestablished the border of
1639. At the beginning of the nineteenth
century, when there appeared this entirely new
phenomenon in Kurdistan --nationalism
-- the Kurdish society was, for all intents and purposes, no different from the society described
by Prince Sharaf ed Din in 1596. Kurdish lords of more
or less ancient
lineage, living in castles comparable to the feudal castles
of the European Middle-Age,
ruled over a population of Kurdish,
Kurdified and Christian peasants,
with the assistance of sedentary,
semi-nomadic and nomadic warrior tribes . In this mountain country
, with no roads, the universe
and the loyalty of the Kurdish
lords and peasants rarely extended beyond the limits
of their valley. A few chieftains
managed to establish more or less autonomous
principalities, but the words “State” and “Nation” did
not exist at that time in the Kurdish language. In 1975, after obtaining
their autonomy and coming close to
independence, the Kurds of Iraq sank once again into
the abyss of oppression. It was certainly not for lack of courage;
but maybe, partly, for lack of history.
Every national movement thrives
on its past, often a magnified and embellished past: a nation forges itself
around a common history. The words are almost as
important as the events, the
narration is as significant as the bullet.
But the Kurds have no history:
general Barzani’s “peshmergas” knew nothing about amir
Bedir Khan or about shaikh Ubaidallahh, the unfortunate heroes of Kurdish
independence. The Kurdish intellectuals who rallied around general Barzani knew nothing of the
founders of the first Kurdish
clubs of Istanbul. And the researcher who studies the
Kurdish revolts of 1921, 1925, 1930, 1937, feels
like an archaeologist searching
through the scarce remains of a civilisation that became extinct
five thousand years ago. Obviously
the Kurds have some excuses:
century-old repression has systematically destroyed any written
signs of Kurdish history. But the Kurds also have their share
of responsibility: after the 1970 agreement, the Iraqi Kurds
did not seize this extraordinary opportunity to start at long last the huge historical
work that awaited them.
Throughout the
twentieth century, relations between Kurds and their rulers were often
hostile. Local uprisings by Kurdish tribes
continued after World War I, and from
World War II onward various
Kurdish political movements sought to gain self-rule
and independence, especially
at times when the governments with power over them weakened. For their part,
the governments that ruled Kurds
adopted no single policy-when weak they sometimes
offered concessions to Kurds, but the
general trend was toward repression, forced assimilation, and violent reprisal.
The forgotten history.
The Turkish Republic, did not acknowledge the existence of
Kurds (more related to Middle Eastern Jews) as a people distinct
from Turks. In 1924, Kemal Ataturk set the tone for
Turkish policy when he banned Kurdish publications; denying Kurdish identity remained a cornerstone of Turkey's treatment
of Kurds for many decades.
Much like the Balkan states
that sought to force some
of their minorities to accept
the dominant national identity,
Turkey resorted to cultural repression to try to
make Kurds into Turks. Kurds, according to official
parlance, were not Kurds: they were
mountain Turks, and these mountain Turks were not allowed to speak
Kurdish, at least not in public.
Indeed, they could actually be fined for
using Kurdish to trade at markets.(The Kurds: A Contemporary Overview, ed. Philip G. Kreyenbroek and
Stefan Sperl, 1992, pp. 73-74.)
Kurdish armed resistance to the Turkish government occurred in two phases. Kurdish
uprisings followed almost immediately after the founding of
the Turkish Republic. These
rebellions in the 1920s and
1930s were not full-scale nationalist revolutions but
regional uprisings that continued the long
Kurdish tradition of struggle against
central authority. By 1938
Turkey had finally suppressed this first wave of
Kurdish resistance, but it faced a renewed
Kurdish challenge in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1984 the
Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK), one
of the most
radical of all Kurdish parties, began a war in Turkey's east that intensified
into the 1990s. The PKK attacked Turkish installations
and Kurdish guards recruited by the
Turkish government. Both the
PKK and Turkish forces carried
out killings and summary executions. Turkey finally gained the upper
hand in the late 1990s and in 1999 captured the PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan. (Michael M. Gunter, The Kurds
in Turkey: A Political Dilemma, 1990, p. 77. )
Turkey struck against Kurds in the 1920s and 1930s with deportations and the destruction of Kurdish villages. These never amounted to full-scale ethnic
cleansing; that would not have made sense given that Turkish authorities repeatedly insisted that Kurds were
Turks. But Turkish policy verged
on ethnic cleansing in
battle C-zones in eastern
Anatolia. Commenting on a 1927 law
that allowed for deportations of Kurds, British Ambassador Sir
George Clerk noted the irony that "the Kurds who
were the principal agent employed for the
deportation of Armenians, should be in danger of
suffering the same fate as the
Armenians only twelve years later."
Turkish authorities carried
out some of their harshest reprisals in the Dersim, a region of central Anatolia to the north
of Harput, which central governments
had struggled to pacify since
Ottoman times. Some Armenians took advantage of the
weak government hold over Dersim by
escaping there during World War 1. After years of unrest, the
Turkish government resolved
to pacify the Dersim once
and for all. Turkish authorities
renamed the region Tunceli, placed it under a state
of siege in 1936, and carried
out a sweeping assault in
1937 and 1938 that included
bombing, the destruction of villages, and deportations.
(Martin van Bruinessen, "Kurdish
Society, Ethnicity, Nationalism
and Refugee Problems," in Kurds,
ed. Kreyenbroek and Sperl,
p. 60.)
Turkish forces carried
out even more sweeping attacks and deportations during the war against the PKK in the 1980s and 1990s.
The basic Turkish strategy consisted of forcing
out villagers and burning their homes. "They ordered us
to leave our houses," one witness told
Human Rights Watch, "and told us to gather
near the school. They told
us we supported
the PKK, and that they were going
to burn the
village." According to witnesses, Turkish soldiers, forces of the Ministry of the Interior known as Jandarma,
special Jandarma units called the
Ozel Tim, and village guards recruited from local residents
carried out such raids. The
Turkish air force was also involved. According to Human Rights Watch, between
1984 and 1995 more than
2,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed, most by Turkish security forces. Even the Turkish minister of the interior
said in 1995 that some 2,200 Kurdish villages had been
"emptied or evacuated." All told, more than 3,000 villages were emptied
of their inhabitants dur- ing the war. More than a million Kurds were
either forced from their homes
or fled the
war zone, and estimates of the displaced
reached as high as 3 million. Many of these internally
displaced people left for slums
in Turkey's large cities, including Istanbul. (Norwegian Refugee Council/Global IDP Project, Profile of Internal Displacement: Turkey.
"Compilation of the Information As of 5 April
2004 available in the
Global IDP Database of the Norwegian Refugee Council).
Turkey also resorted to political and cultural repression of the Kurds.
The most prominent victims included the Zana family of the
city of Diyarbekir
in southeastern Turkey. Mehdi Zana was a Kurdish political activist who had
been elected mayor of Diyarbekir
in 1977, but three years later he was imprisoned. Released in 1991, Zana was returned
to prison in 1994 and left for exile
in Sweden upon his release
in 1995. His wife, Leyla Zana, only
fifteen years old when she
married Mehdi, went to school and became
a politician herself. She won a seat
in Turkey's parliament in
1991, but her first act as a deputy created
political shockwaves. She wore a headband
with the Kurdish colors: yellow, green, and red, and after taking a loyalty oath in Turkish she added a few
words in Kurdish: she intended to
"struggle so that the Kurdish and Turkish peoples may live together in a democratic framework." Forced from her political party for this
transgression, Zana and other
deputies founded the new Democratic party, but in 1994 the Turkish Parliament lifted parliamentary immunity for Zana and her fellow deputies, claiming they were affiliated
with the PKK. Leyla Zana
and her fellow deputies received fifteen-year prison sentences. (Ertugrul Kurkc;;u, "Leyla Zana: Defiance
Under Fire," Amnesty
Magazine, 2003).
To the south and east
of Turkey, Kurds also repeatedly clashed with their rulers
in Iran and even more so in
Iraq. Iraq, like Turkey, had its
origins as a successor state to the shattered
Ottoman Empire. It would have emerged from
the empire without a large Kurdish minority if Britain, for military and economic reasons, had not insisted on attaching the Ottoman province of Mosul to Mesopotamia. Turkey also claimed Mosul, but in 1925 the
League of Nations accepted the British position, and Iraq, then a
British mandate, received most of the
region. Britain soon entered into negotiations
on granting Iraq independence,
and the end of the British mandate in 1930 left the Kurds
of the Mosul province in Iraq.
Kurds repeatedly staged uprisings in Iraq and in adjacent
regions of Iran. Typically they launched rebellions when central goven}ment authorities appeared weak. Thus there is a long
history of Kurdish uprising during or immediately
after wars. The early uprisings
were regional and tribal, but Kurdish
revolutionary movements became increasingly nationalist during the twentieth century.
Mullah Mustafa Barzani of the
Barzani tribe of northeastern Iraq was the most famous of
all Kurdish revolutionaries.
With his elder brother Sheikh Ahmad, he fought the government
of Iraq in an uprising in
1931 and 1932 that was suppressed
with the help of the
Royal Air Force. In 1945 Barzani declared revolution but retreated under Iraqi pressure
to the town
of Mahabad in northern Iran. Mahabad flourished as a center of Kurdish
nationalism during World
War II after the Soviet
Union took control of northern Iran in 1941. The Republic
of Mahabad declared its independence in January 1946 but soon fell to Iranian
forces, and in 1947 Barzani retreated
to the USSR. He returned to Iraq from exile in 1958 after a revolution that briefly led to
improved relations between the central
government and Iraq's Kurds, but renewed fighting broke out in
1961.(Jonathan C. Randal, .After Such Knowledge, What
Forgiveness? My Encounters with Kurdistan (Boulder, Colo.,
1999), pp. 112-131.)
Kurdish nationalism developed a new intensity after the Baath party
took control of Iraq in 1968. At first the new regime
in Baghdad, uncertain of its power, offered
Kurds in the north elements of self-rule, but the status of
the city of Kirkuk and its oil fields proved
a major problem. Saddam Hussein's regime and Kurdish leaders disputed whether Kirkuk would lie within
the borders of a Kurdish region.
In 1974 Baghdad unilaterally
announced an autonomy measure that maintained
central control over Kirkuk. Barzani refused to accept these
terms and launched his last uprising. He depended on Iran for support, but
Iraq concluded an agreement
with Iran in 1975 and defeated
Barzani. (Human Rights Watch, Iraq's Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds, 1995, pp. 4,19-20).
This was Mullah Mustafa Barzani's
final defeat-he died in
1979 in the United States. But in 1980 Iraq's invasion of Iran weakened the Iraqi military
presence in Kurdish areas and sparked renewed Kurdish revolution by two
competing Kurdish parties, the Kurdistan Democratic
party (KDP) led by Mullah Mustafa's son Massoud Barzani, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party (PUK) led by Jalal Talabani.
The governments of
Iraq and Iran both employed
selected deportations as a tool to
suppress Kurdish uprisings, but in Iraq deportation
gradually developed into ethnic cleansing.
After suppressing Mullah Mustafa Barzani's
final uprising, Iraq embarked
on a campaign to remake the population
of parts of northern Iraq. The government destroyed numerous Kurdish villages and provided incentives to Arabs to
replace Kurds. Sunni Arabs from
the desert south of Mosul, for example, moved
north into Kurdish lands. As one Arab eXplained
of his move
into a Kurdish village in 1975, "We were very happy to go to
the north because we had
no irrigated lands in the south."
Meanwhile tens of thousands of
Kurds were deported south. In 1978 and 1979
Iraq cleared a zone of close to
twenty miles along areas of
its northern border, and destroyed hundreds more Kurdish villages.
All told, Iraq pushed about a quarter of a million nonArabs,
including Kurds, out of their lands.
(Human Rights Watch, Claims in Conflict: Reversing Ethnic Cleansing in Northern
Iraq, August 2004, vol. 16, no. 4 E, pp. 2, 8, 10;
and Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide , 2002, p. 175.)
Between 1987
and 1989 Iraq carried out an even
more violent campaign against the country's
Kurds. In 1987 Saddam placed
his cousin Ali Hassan
al-Majid in charge of retaking control over Iraq's north,
and in April Iraqi forces first used the
weapon that would give al-Majid the name that
made him internationally notorious:
"Chemical Ali." Iraqi forces released chemical weapons over Kurdish villages
in the valley of Balisan. They
also destroyed hundreds of villages. Peter Galbraith, a staff member for
the U.S. Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, saw some
of the destruction
in September 1987. The Iraqi ambassador
to the United States offered to let
Galbraith visit, and Iraqi forces surprisingly allowed Galbraith and an American diplomat
to continue on their way into
the Kurdish region where they
found that most of the
Kurdish towns and villages along the road had
been destroyed.( Human
Rights Watch, Iraq's Crime of
Genocide, pp. 40-47, 49-51; Power, "A Problemfrom Hell," p. 183.)
The war against Iraq's
Kurds culminated in 1989 with the Anfal
Operation in which Iraqi forces burned villages,
launched chemical attacks, and relocated Kurds. This was an ambitious program of ethnic
cleansing. AI-Majid described
his goals in a tape of an April 1988 meeting. "By next summer," he said, "there will be no
more villages remaining that are spread out here and there throughout the region, but only camps." He spoke of prohibiting settlements in large areas ana of mass
evacuations: "No human
beings except on the main roads."
The most infamous Iraqi gas attack of the Anfal
Operation took place on
March 16 at the town of Halabja; many
other towns and villages suffered a similar fate. On the afternoon of
May 3, 1988, Kurds at the village of Goktapa,
for example, heard the sound
of Iraqi jets. Goktapa had
been bombed many times before,
but this time was different. As one
witness recounted, "When the bombing
started, the sound was different from previous times . I saw smoke rising, first white, then
turning to gray . The smoke smelled like a matchstick when you burn it. I passed out.” (Quoted in Human
Rights Watch, Iraq's Crime of
Genocide, pp. 255, 118; Power, "A Problem from Hell," pp. 188-189).
In all, Iraqi forces
killed about 100,000 Kurds during the
Anfal Operation and forced hundreds of thousands
out of their homes. The final Iraqi campaign to remake
the ethnic map of the
country's north followed immediately after the Gulf War of
1991. With the Allied victory, Kurds staged a nationalist revolution and took over virtually all of the Kurdish
areas of northern Iraq.
After reaching a cease-fire,
Saddam Hussein struck back against
the Kurds. The fall of Kirkuk in late March to Iraqi forces
unleashed a wave of flight. More than a million Kurds fled north.
They crossed by the thousands
over mountains to the border
of Turkey. The Turkish government
did not welcome the refugees, though
local Kurds did what they
could to provide food. One
Kurdish baker in southeastern Turkey increased his bread production
more than threefold. "I don't know if it's
enough," he told a reporter. "But everyone from this area
is helping." (New York
Times, April 7, 1991.)
This crisis so soon
after the Allied victory in
the Gulf War gained international attention. Acting on humanitarian grounds, the United States,
Britain, and France created a "safe haven" close to Iraq's
northern border with Turkey
and established a "no-fly
zone" for the Iraqi air
force north of the thirty-sixth
parallel. By October 1991 Iraqi
forces and authorities withdrew from most
Kurdish regions of Iraq's north
with the exception of Kirkuk. The effective division of northern Iraq into Kurdish and Iraqi zones simultaneously advanced Kurdish interests and the Iraqi regime's campaign to Arabize
the north. Kurds gained autonomy,
but the Iraqi government accelerated its campaign to
remake Kirkuk into an Arab city and region.
Iraqi authorities deported 100,000 people from Kirkuk and other communities and encouraged Arabs to move
north to replace them.
Since then, the Kurds,
have been playing their cards
carefully to ensure the advances
they have made since the
1991 Persian Gulf War were not lost in the web of negotiations with the Shia
and Sunnis after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The Kurds opted for
a more gradual approach in securing their autonomy in northern Iraq, realizing
that an aggressive push for
independence in the
post-Saddam Hussein era would
only have invited a messy reprisal from Turkey.
Thus, even though
it was a priority for the Kurdish
delegation to keep Kirkuk under the control of
the Kurdish regional government, the Kurds where willing
to offer the concession of allowing current
oil revenues to filter through
the central government in Baghdad. Displaced Kurds who were
driven out of Kirkuk by Hussein's forces
in his bid to "Arabize" the city are
now returning; the Kurdish leadership
hopes they will constitute a majority in the December 2007 census, so that a proposed referendum in the city will allow
them to keep
Kirkuk part of the Kurdistan Autonomous Region legitimately. And Kurdish leaders do not plan on disbanding
the peshmerga, but will gradually integrate its guerrilla forces
into the state security apparatus.
Washington likely will not endorse the Kurdish
strategy fully. Kurdistan faces
the dilemma of having its
territory spread across four countries -- Iran,
Iraq, Syria and Turkey -- each
of which has a core interest
in repressing its Kurdish minority to dampen any
separatist tendencies. For its part,
the United States has complex relations with each of
these countries, and so cannot
afford to promote the existence of
an independent Kurdistan in the
region.
Washington's main goal in the
negotiations for the formation of
Iraq's full-term government was to bring the Sunnis into
the political fold. This is aimed
at quelling the Sunni nationalist insurgency and bringing pressure to bear
on the Sunni jihadists.
For the Kurds, this
means a considerable number of obstacles
lie in their path to regional autonomy. Earlier, Abdel Aziz
al-Hakim -- who leads the main Iraqi
Shiite political party, the United Iraqi Alliance, as well as the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) -- loosely
supported the Kurds in the idea
of regional federalism during the referendum
negotiations. At that time,
the prospect of securing a Shiite
enclave in the south looked promising.
While
SCIRI, an Iranian creation formed in Tehran in 1982, saw federalism as being in its
interest, Jaafari's Hizb al-Dawah and the movements of
al-Sadr and Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani are much more
centered on a strong central
government. Thanks to the Shiite
failure to achieve a consensus on the notion of
federalism, the Sunnis won a chunk
of the government
in the December 2005 elections. When Sunni participation in the election decreased
their influence, Shiite leaders joined al-Sadr's call for a strong central government. They also openly opposed the Kurdish
preference for a regional federal structure, which essentially provides for an autonomous Kurdish region in the north
that would include all the provinces with sizable Kurdish populations.
Given the complexity
of the negotiations,
the most the Kurds can
hope for at this juncture is
a political framework containing as many
loopholes as possible to allow for
their continued evolution into a sovereign entity. Moreover, for Kurdish
aspirations to be met, the
United States must maintain its
military presence in Iraq to keep regional forces in check. What is becoming increasingly
clear, however, is that Washington's
interests in Iraq do not clearly
align with Kurdish interests.
For updates
click homepage here