By Mansour Bonakdarian

With the approach of the second anniversary of U.S.-led invasion of Iraq (March 20), the outcome of the Iraqi “national” election of January 30 has altered the dynamics of internal Iraqi politics and the Bush administration’s vision of post-Saddam Iraq. The overall turnout for the election was around 58 percent of eligible voters, with at best miniscule participation in the predominantly Sunni Arab regions of the country. The heterogeneous Iraqi insurgency groups have continued their attacks, with some groups increasingly targeting Shi’i Arabs who represent around 60 percent of Iraq’s population and were the major victors in the election. While a substantial segment of the Iraqi population also regards the election as a success, the long-term consequences of the election for U.S. objectives and various Iraqi groups backing the election remain uncertain.

With 8.5 million votes cast, the clerically-backed Shi’i United Iraqi Alliance/United Iraqi Coalition, enjoying the support of the most senior Iraqi Shi’i religious authority, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, secured 48 percent of the votes cast, capturing 140 of the 275 seats in the national assembly. The predominantly Kurdish bloc in the north (the Kurdish Alliance List/United Kurdistan Coalition) won 75 seats in, and the unelected interim prime minister Ayad Allawi’s chiefly-secular Iraqi List coalition garnered 40 seats. The election in Iraq undoubtedly marks a new chapter in Iraq’s internal politics and the U.S. occupation. At the same time, the election poses numerous fresh predicaments for the Bush administration, notwithstanding the administration’s repeated “freedom is on the march” mantra.

Among the many potential post-Iraqi election difficulties now facing the United States and Iraqis at large, and which can plunge Iraq into more widespread and deadly armed conflicts and directly or indirectly involve Iraq’s neighboring countries is the “Kurdish Question.” As a group, the Kurds, a non-Arab (predominantly Sunni Muslim) ethnic group who constitute around 20 percent of Iraq’s population (over 5 million) and are heavily concentrated in the north of the country, were Saddam Hussein’s principal ethnic victims. After the first Gulf War and Saddam’s bloody suppression of the Kurdish insurgency in the north when the promised American assistance to the Kurds failed to materialize, the Kurds eventually succeeded in establishing their own autonomous provincial control in parts of northern Iraq with U.S.-backing in 1992. The major Kurdish armed political factions (The Kurdistan Democratic Party/KDP and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan/PUK) also welcomed and assisted the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and were among the most eager enthusiasts of the January election. However, continued future Kurdish cooperation with the United States-led occupation force in Iraq is by no means guaranteed.

The history of relations between Kurdish political groups and various U.S. administrations since the 1970s is fraught with numerous instances of what the Kurds consider “betrayals.” The post-1992 “cooperation” between the two sides has simply been necessitated by “pragmatic” convergence of otherwise disparate American and Kurdish objectives and policy calculations, rather than by any underlying shared vision of long-term U.S. goals in the region or of Kurdish political ambitions. The “collective” Iraqi Kurdish memory of American acts of duplicity in the past include the 1972 encouragement and material support by the Nixon administration and the Shah of Iran for an uprising against the Iraqi regime by the KDP. It was only in 1975 after the sudden halt to United States-Iranian support of the insurgency and Iran’s rearguard assistance to the Iraqi regime in attacking the Kurds once Tehran obtained its desired territorial concessions from Baghdad, which had been the underlying United States-Iranian motive in exerting military pressure on Baghdad through Iraqi Kurds, that the Kurds realized they had been manipulated by outside powers. Left to their own device, the Kurds not only had lost the chance for attaining conditional autonomous control of their provinces as previously promised by the government in Baghdad, but faced a brutal slaughter. In the face of criticisms for denying humanitarian assistance to the Kurds (armed groups and civilians alike) who were fleeing the wrath of the Baghdad regime, Kissinger would state: “Covert action should not be mistaken for missionary work.” Other examples of U.S. betrayal include such events as Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurdish town of Helebja in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq War, with the Iraqi government not only using American-supplied weapons and chemicals but also relying on U.S. military intelligence. What made the United States role in this massacre even more nefarious was its public denials of Baghdad’s responsibility for the slaughter at the time. This was followed by Washington’s silent reaction to Saddam’s “Anfal Campaign,” during which 4,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed and nearly 180,000 Kurdish civilians “disappeared.” The list goes on and on.

The two most important and immediate goals of the Kurdish alliance (despite the KDP’s and PUK’s own history of internecine factional rivalries and violence) are the status and ethnic composition of the northern city of Kirkuk and the creation of a federated Iraq. This latter objective, seen as a first step towards the creation of a future “independent” Kurdistan-an aspiration shared by 95 percent of the Kurds participating in a separate referendum on the status of Kurdistan during the Iraqi election-should not necessarily pose an impediment to the Kurdish alliance’s cooperation with either the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) or the Iraqi List (IL) in the national assembly or in drafting the constitution. The IL, given its smaller share of the votes in the election and its desire to prevent the implementation of religious laws and edicts by the UIA will need to work with the Kurdish alliance. In the meantime, the UIA is not necessarily opposed to a federated system that will enable the Shi’i majority to reap the benefits of oil revenues in the south as the Kurds enjoy a larger share of oil profits in the north (an area which is believed to hold 40 percent of Iraq’s oil reserves). Moreover, given that the election has created an opportunity for the Shi’i Arab majority and the Sunni Kurdish minority to finally have a voice in Iraqi national politics, neither side is likely to promote open political division that can harm their chances of augmenting their leverage in Iraqi politics. Furthermore, the UIA and the IL can jointly block any expansive autonomous control by the Kurdish alliance in the north, particularly as the Bush administration has ruled out the creation of a separate Kurdistan. The U.S. stance has been in reaction to both domestic Iraqi Arab opposition to a separate Kurdish state and Turkey’s concerns. Turkey, which has the largest Kurdish population in the Middle East, has faced its own Kurdish separatist insurgency movement since the 1980s in the form of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK). Because of this, Turkey fears that the creation of an independent Kurdistan south of its border will serve as further incentive to its own Kurdish population’s separatist ambitions and recently demanded and received reassurances from the United States of Washington’s opposition to Kurdish separatism. The Iraqi Kurdish leadership, aware of the alienating effect of separatist ambitions on other Iraqi groups represented in the national assembly, and fearful of Turkey’s military intervention in Iraqi Kurdistan (where more than 4,000 PKK fighters fleeing the Turkish military are currently based), has acknowledged that independence will have to be postponed.

Rather, it is the topic of Kirkuk that poses the more immediate threat of spinning out of control and inciting ethnic and regional civil strife. Although, in some ways the spread of civil turmoil in Iraq can aid the objective of prolonged U.S.military presence in Iraq (for providing “security”), it can also trigger a spiraling armed conflict which may bring about the deployment of thousands of armed fighters belonging to various Shi’i and Sunni Arab factions along with the 50,000 to 60,000 Kurdish fighters and outside intervention, particularly by Turkey. Kirkuk, a city in the oil-rich region located outside the existing autonomous Kurdish provinces in the north, has been declared by the Kurdish alliance as the capital of a future federated Kurdish region. While the Kurds claim Kirkuk was a predominantly Kurdish city before Saddam Hussein’s forced expulsion of thousands of Kurds, and Kurdish armed groups since the United States-led invasion of Iraq have been “reclaiming” former Kurdish homes from the ethnic Arab and Turcomen populations of the city, the Arab population claim a right to remain in the city, while Turcomens maintain the city is and was predominantly Turcomen and Turkey has pledged to defend the rights of Iraqi Turcomens in the name of pan-Turkic solidarity.

In effect, not all is well in post-election Iraq. While various existing insurgency movements continue to plague the American occupation and kill and maim other Iraqis and foreign military personnel, there remain other serious potential threats of widespread civil strife in Iraq that need to be resolved if additional ethnic and regional conflicts are to be avoided.