The Kurds Go Their Own Way

Can freedom flower in Iraqi Kurdistan?

Michael J. Totten from the August/September 2006 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

In January 2005 the Iraqi Kurds held an informal referendum on independence. More than 80 percent turned out to vote, and 98.7 percent of those voted to secede. The Kurds have long dreamed of self-determination; today, when they look south, they see only Islamism, Ba’athism, blood, fire, and mayhem. To them, Baghdad is the capital of a deranged foreign country. The only people I met who thought of Kurdistan as “Iraq” were the foreigners. When a Palestinian-American aid worker warned me about security, he told me, “Never forget that you’re in Iraq.” But the Kurds kept saying, “This isn’t Iraq.”

The Push for Independence

If Middle Easterners had drawn the borders themselves, Iraq wouldn’t even exist. Blame the British for shackling Kurds and Arabs together when they created the post-colonial, post-Ottoman map. The Kurds do. Like the English, they refer to a toilet as “a W.C.”—but they insist that stands for “Winston Churchill.”

Arab Iraqis who want to “keep” Kurdistan should thank the heavens for Talabani, Iraq’s president. He belongs to the 1.3 percent of Iraqi Kurds who at least say they want to remain tied to Baghdad. Meanwhile, Masoud Barzani, president of Kurdistan and chief of the conservative Kurdistan Democratic Party, is playing bad cop. While Talabani is in Baghdad trying to forge a federal Iraq with official Kurdish autonomy, Barzani broods in his mountain palace and openly threatens secession. “Self-determination is the natural right of our people,” he said early last year. “When the right time comes, it will become a reality.”

It’s hard to overstate just how long and how badly the Kurds have wanted out. Barzani’s father, the guerilla leader Moula Mustafa, once told Jim Hoagland of The Washington Post, “We can become your 51st state and provide you with oil.” That was back in 1973.

Indeed, the dream of an independent Kurdistan dates back to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. The League of Nations promised the Kurds a homeland of their own. Instead their homeland was broken into shards and parceled out to Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran. Only in Iran, where the local Kurds call the Persians “cousins,” do they feel much kinship with their nominal countrymen.

Nowhere do Kurds feel more distant from their fellow citizens than in Iraq. They have had their own de facto independent state here for the last 15 years. Most of Kurdistan north of Suleimaniya was protected by the U.S. and U.K. “no fly” zones during the interim between the first and second Gulf Wars. Young Iraqi Kurds have no memory of living under Saddam, no memory of ties to Baghdad, no memory of associating with Arabs, no memory of the oppression, the genocide, or the war. They see no point in creating ties with Baghdad that haven’t existed in living memory—especially when Baghdad is burning.

Sidqi Khan Bradosti, whose family owns the Zozik Trading Company, put it more mildly than anyone else. “We have nothing to do with Baghdad,” he said. “And I don’t want to have anything to do with Baghdad if it can’t be part of a federal rule-of-law democracy.” The comments of English teacher Birzo Abdulkadir were more typical: “We have nothing to do with the rest of Iraq. It was inflicted on us. What do we have to do with Arabism?”

Most Kurds are moderately conservative Sunni Muslims. But their religious tradition is historically more liberal and lenient than many others in the Middle East. “I speak and read Arabic fluently,” Abdulkadir told me. “I have read the Koran in its original language. I know it’s more flexible than most Arab imams admit.”

Kurds have “no friends but the mountains,” or so an old saying goes. It’s hard for Westerners to grasp just how isolated these people feel. That partly explains their fanatical pro-Americanism: A friend, at last!

Their isolation has also produced a you-leave-us-alone-and-we’ll-leave-you-alone mentality. The mayor of Halabja, the city where Saddam used chemical weapons to massacre thousands in one day, wanted to make sure I understood this. “We never terrorized anyone in any country,” he said. “We occupied no one’s land. We defended ourselves with humble military force against a powerful enemy. We consider our nation a protector of human rights.”

The mayor conveniently left out the terror campaign waged by the Marxist-Leninist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey from the 1970s to the 1990s. The PKK was, after all, occasionally supported by some Kurdish groups in Iraq. Even so, several Kurds I spoke to thought the PKK was a strategic and moral disaster. “Abdullah Öcalan was our own Yasser Arafat,” one person told me, referring to the PKK’s former leader. “The difference between us and the Palestinians is that we learn from our mistakes.”

The president of Dohok University, Asmat M. Khalid, whose office is in that city’s old Ba’ath Party headquarters, told me the Kurds intend to build a new country with this idea as its foundation: “We have a different way of thinking here. We believe the key is to be civilized.…We don’t want our new generation to be aggressive. We don’t want them to have to fight. It is not our habit to kill.” The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) does what it can to broadcast this message to Arab Iraqis on its Arabic-language satellite station Il Takhi. Il takhi means brothers. There is no Arabic equivalent of such a channel in Kurdish.

I did sometimes hear Kurds expressing racist comments. Iqbal Ali Muhammad of the Kurdistan Islamic Union, a moderate Islamist organization that is the third largest party in Iraqi Kurdistan, bluntly said, “The Arab, he is wild. He is not a civilized person.”

Funny place, Kurdistan. I have defended Arabs before. But I never expected to do so in front of a Middle Easterner who described himself as an Islamist. Iqbal patiently listened to what I had to say in defense of Arabs generally, if not in defense of Saddam Hussein’s campaign of Black Arabism and genocide. I could tell I didn’t convince him.