By Sarah KocherCopy Chief
Dreams of a Kurdish state have been teased and let down time and time again since the downfall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Comprising the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East, the Kurds have struggled to achieve their dream of uniting under an autonomous and internationally recognized state. They were just one of many ethnic groups forced to live in new countries with arbitrary borders created by Western powers post-WWI.
In efforts of becoming a state, the Kurds formed various groups to fight for recognition within the countries they were forced to reside in – Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. These factions fought within themselves and with these states in the long battle for independence.
Although the Kurds did not have a state, the Iraqi government amended its constitution to read “the Iraqi people is made up of two nationalities: the Arab nationality and the Kurdish nationality,” in attempts to ease tensions in March 1970. This however, was not the end-all-be-all. Fighting continued for decades and in 2005, northern Iraq became home to Kurdistan – an autonomous region within the country.
Since 2005, Kurdistan formed its own government, its own economy and the peshmerga, Kurdish fighters, have evolved into a quasi-military that has fought alongside the Iraqi Army in the fight against ISIS in recent years. The rise of ISIS has caused Kurdistan and Iraq to join forces in defending their borders, although the latter still considers Kurdistan merely an Iraqi state.
The Kurdish people, however, made a monumental move Monday, Sept. 25, and voted for independence from Iraq. The overwhelming “yes” vote was not a vote on pure independence – meaning it was a “yes” to initiate negotiations with Baghdad and start the final chapter in Kurdistan’s journey to independence.
Monday’s vote sent shockwaves through the region and the world; Iraq has threatened military action against the region, but aside from mere threats, Baghdad has its hands tied since it recognized Kurdistan as an autonomous region in 2005.
Prior to Monday’s victory, the United States pressured Kurdistan to call off the vote – fearing a rise in ethnic violence in the area. To this I say, too late. The United States has no room to talk due to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, where after the expulsion of Iraqi security forces, the country was left in a power vacuum. Ethnic militias filled this vacuum because the Iraqi people had no one left to defend them.
Fast forward to present day and the United States is still in Iraq, however now we are fighting the Islamic State. In this fight, we have allied ourselves with both the Iraqi Army and the peshmerga.
After Monday’s vote for independence, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders made a highly uneducated statement: “We hope for a unified Iraq to annihilate ISIS, and certainly a unified Iraq to push back on Iran.”
A “unified Iraq?” Is that a joke? Iraq has never been an ethnically united country, even pre-2003. Granted that before 2003, ethnicity was not as hard-lined as it was post-invasion, but there was never one Iraqi people, never one nationality.
As mentioned above, the U.S. has been fighting ISIS alongside both Iraqi and Kurdish forces, providing them with weapons and training. What part of that strategy tells an administration that Iraq is a united country? One country tends to not have two different armies.
The Trump administration’s incompetency in Middle Eastern affairs is frightening. Fighting a war with two separate entities is completely acceptable and is, in fact, a powerful strategy. What is not acceptable is being utterly blind to internal Middle Eastern affairs and not recognizing that at the end of the day, Kurdistan and Iraq are separate countries.
I would say the Trump administration must open its eyes to these affairs in order to effectively defeat ISIS and attempt to bring peace to the Middle East. However, when a president is as utterly incompetent about internal affairs, how can I have hope he will educate himself on foreign affairs?
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