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"Watch out for Kurdistan," I tell everyone I know.
It may take a few years, but Iraq will be cut up
into two, possibly three, countries – and the Kurds
will be the first to go.
Already, northern Iraq is hardly one with the rest
of the country. In the provisional capital of Arbil,
the red, green, and white Kurdish flag is
everywhere; the Iraqi flag is nowhere to be seen.
Signs on buildings proclaim: "Kurdistan Health
Ministry" and "Kurdistan Education Ministry." The
streets are patrolled – not by American soldiers in
Humvees and tanks – but by Kurdish peshmerga
guerillas with AK-47s. If they see someone who even
looks Arab, they stop him as a suspected terrorist.
Iraqi Kurds are hardly happy with this arrangement,
though. Whatever the result of negotiations over
Iraq's new government, Kurds are poised to push hard
for independence.
A day after the election, organizers from
Kurdistan's two major political parties were already
touring refugee camps in oil-rich Kirkuk, with a
petition asking Kurds whether they support ethnic
federalism in Iraq or Kurdish independence. Within
days, 1.9 million Kurds – almost half of all Kurdish
adults in Iraq – had signed up for independence.
At the same time, the leader of the Kurdistan
Democratic Party, Masoud Barzani, told reporters in
his mountain fortress: "An independent Kurdish state
will be formed, but I do not know the exact time."
Central to the Kurds' drive for independence is the
multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk, with an estimated 8.5
billion barrels of oil under its soil (at the
current prices, about $450 billion). During the
1980s, Saddam killed and displaced tens of thousands
of the city's Kurds and replaced them with Arabs
loyal to his regime. Now, Kurds control the city.
In 2003, when the U.S. military invaded Iraq,
Kurdish peshmerga fought alongside U.S. soldiers and
kicked the Iraqi army out of Kirkuk. Today, the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) is the most
powerful force in the city. Its peshmerga make up
the bulk of the police force and control most of the
hiring decisions in the local government and at the
country's Northern Oil company.
The Kurds' position was strengthened by January's
election. With Arab political parties boycotting the
polls, Kurds easily won control of the local
government. That local government is currently
mobilizing a referendum on whether the city should
be part of Iraqi Kurdistan – with 100,000 Kurdish
refugees allowed to vote.
It's all part of a move toward an independent state.
"First, it will go to referendum," explains Dr. Azad
Aslan, a political scientist at Arbil's Salahudin
University. "Then we will control the oil, which
provides an engine for the Kurdish economy. Then we
will declare independence."
Like most Kurds, Dr. Aslan isn't afraid of a civil
war that might erupt over Kurdish plans for
secession, and he doesn't think that neighboring
Turkey, Syria, and Iran – all of which oppose
Kurdish statehood – will be able to intervene. "If
the United States weren't here, maybe one would have
doubts [about Turkish, Syrian, or Iranian
intervention], but now the United States is the real
power here in Iraq as a whole. If you apply
pressure, you are going at the United States."
Kurds feel the United States will support them,
because they continue to support the U.S. military
presence in Iraq. As pressure grows for American
soldiers to leave the center and south, they figure,
the Bush administration will be forced to support an
independent Kurdistan as the price of keeping U.S.
troops, peacefully, in the north.
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