United States President Barack Obama’s hosting the head of the Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), Masoud Barzani, at the White House in Washington is a significant development not only for Iraqi Kurds but for all Kurds.
The U.S., by hosting Barzani as the equivalent of a head of state, has highlighted its special interest in the Kurds. This interest is not new. It is an intimateness that began to become clear especially after the Cold War.
A Kurdish intellectual, now a part of the KRG, who was once a peshmarga wandering the mountains, told me a while back:
“We were continuously debating among ourselves during the Cold War whether the Palestinians or the Kurds would be first to have an independent state in the Middle East.”
The fact that the Kurds live separated into four countries, Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, used to be described as “the strategic misfortune of the Kurds.” It was put forth that if a serious independent Kurdish statehood movement ever emerged in one of those areas, in the final analysis, it would be choked by the four states. That period can be said to have ended with the Cold War.
With the Iraqi Kurds’ de facto statehood after the Gulf (1991) and Iraq (2003) wars toppled Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, and with the emergence of the KRG under the auspices of the U.S. and Europe, the possibility of new scenarios emerged.
The topic of a federation in Iraq was once upon a time within the red lines of Turkey. It was also Ankara’s longtime policy to ignore Barzani and Talabani. These are history now. Turkey, over time and also with forward movement of life, has reached the correct decision and accepted the fact of the KRG in Iraq. But one question about Iraqi Kurds still exists in Ankara: What if the Kurds declare an independent state and make the de facto situation official, what would Turkey do then?
Masoud Barzani told the Al Sharqiya channel in Baghdad, “The fact that Kurds have been persecuted cannot be overlooked. We are also a nation, like the others. We are no less [a nation] than the Persian, Arab or Turkish nations. How many countries has the Arab nation been separated into? Kurdistan is also separated into many nations and a Kurdish state has never been allowed.”
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