The Slippery Slope Towards Kurdish Autonomy

Several events in the past few weeks suggest that momentum is building inside Iraqi Kurdistan for some kind of collision course over its status as an autonomous region inside Iraq.

Late last month the Turkish and Iraqi governments agreed on a series of measures to crack down on the activities of the Kurdish Workers Party (or PKK) the militant Kurdish group that is waging a small-scale cvil war inside Turkey and which maintains training camps in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. But the Turkish military is still unhappy with the agreement because it does not allow for "hot pursuit" -- permission for the Turkish military to follow PKK fighters who cross the border into Iraq.

The "hot pursuit" issue is a red herring, however. The PKK bases in northern Iraq are deep in the mountains a long way from the Turkish border; and the attacks against Turkish military and civilians by the PKK are taking place well inside Turkey. (Recent Turkish military action in northern Iraq has mostly involved indiscriminate attacks on border villages that have nothing to do with the PKK.) What has gotten the Turkey military so mad is that the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, Massoud Barzani, was able to force the Baghdad government to drop the 'hot pursuit" issue. A sign, they fume, that Iraqi Kurds are moving towards independence, the very idea of which offends them, after more than twenty years spent fighting with Kurds in Turkey.

In other words, the Turks want the Iraqi government to pass measures that would help destabilize one of the few stable parts of the country, and then they complain when Iraqi Kurds break with Baghdad over the issue. It's almost as if the Turkish military wants to force a rupture between Iraq's Kurds and Arabs, so the Turkish army can swoop in and save the day. Or not. Just as there is no military solution to the PKK (as I've written before here) conflict in Iraq would be just as devastating for the Turks as it would be for Iraqi Kurds, replacing one of the most important trade relationships in the neighborhood with an un-winable mountain war.

A similar dynamic is taking place between the Kurdish and the Arab leadership in Baghdad, who complained last month when the Kurdish government signed its first oil contract with an American drilling company. The agreement was illegal, said Baghdad, since natural resources still fall under the control of the central government. But the reason that Kurdistan made the unilateral agreement is that Iraqi's parliament still hasn't passed the oil revenue-sharing legislation that would allow Kurds to make their own oil deals subject to Baghdad's review. The Kurds probably went ahead with the contract because they are running out of money. When I was last in Kurdistan in June, you could feel the air escaping the Kurdish economic bubble, and I met several contractors who complained that the Kurdish government wasn't paying its bills.

Finally, Kurdistan is getting caught in the middle of the US and Iranian face-off for regional supremacy. Iran shut its border with Iraqi Kurdistan last week when the US detained an Iranian official suspected of being in the Revolutionary Guards in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah. The Kurdish leadership once had good relations with Iran -- having hidden there while refugees from Saddam Hussein's genocidal campaign against the Kurds in the 1980's -- and complained loudly this spring when Americans detained two Iranian officials in the Kurdish capital of Irbil (as they have again now) to little effect. The first two Iranians are still in American hands.

As relations with neighbors and allies fall apart all around them, it's no wonder that Kurds want to start calling their own shots. Kurdish politicians, alone among Iraq's leaders, hailed a recent vote in the US Senate calling for the division of Iraq along ethnic and religious lines. Though that may eventually lead to Kurdish independence, Kurds can't be blamed for breaking up Iraq. There are too many others botching the job.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut