Bushra Gabreldar. Originally published in Winter 2018.
Remembering Halabja
The Halabja Massacre is forever burned into the memories of every Kurd old enough to remember it. On March 16, 1988, in the final days of the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein’s war planes dropped chemical weapons onto the city of Halabja in northeastern Iraq. The chemical bombing, officially designated a war crime by the international community, was the culmination of a multi-day assault on the city and a brutal example of the Ba’athist regime’s genocidal “Anfal” campaign against the Kurds. After the initial haze cleared, over 5,000 Kurds were left dead and thousands more have since died from contamination. The massacre reminded the world that innocent Kurds, like the many women and children killed on the day of the bombing, have often suffered at the hands of the major powers in the region, validating the persistent call for an independent Kurdish state.
The Kurdistan Region of Iraq in Context
For the last century, the possibility of a free and independent Kurdish state has loomed large in the Middle East, threatening to disrupt one of the world’s most unstable regions. The Kurds constitute an ethnic minority in Syria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Armenia. Their wide distribution is one of the factors impeding the formation of an independent state. Kurdish history in the region is marked by dislocation and disenfranchisement, starting from the reign of the Ottoman Empire, continuing through the formation of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in the early 1990s and into the present.
Powerful Kurdish nationalist movements gained momentum in the decades following the Treaty of Lausanne, an agreement drafted by former colonial powers in 1923 that effectively eliminated their possibility of achieving Kurdish statehood peacefully. In Iraq, two political parties rose to prominence, namely the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). For much of their history, the dynamic between the KDP and PUK was marked by competition and often violence. Even after the United States and its allies secured a no-fly zone over Iraqi Kurdistan and Iraq conceded greater powers of autonomy to the region in 1994, the two factions spent four years in a heated civil war that only ended as a result of the US-negotiated Washington Agreement.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the KDP and PUK ceased their hostilities to focus on overseeing the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), a self-governing entity with its own constitution and powers of autonomy. In the years following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the KRI has matured, resembling an independent state more than a semi-autonomous region. In the past three years, the territory controlled by the Peshmerga, the armed wing of the KRG, has grown southward and westward because of Iraqi failures in securing the region from armed insurgencies. The Peshmerga forces have found some success in tackling these domestic security challenges, as the Iraqi Kurds have not been able to contend with state and state-sponsored actors—a formidable challenge to their goal of secession.
Turkey
An even greater obstacle to a free and independent Kurdish state is a larger and more distant foe: Turkey. Turkey has a large Kurdish minority, making up an estimated 15 to 20 percent of the population, with their own long and bloody struggle for independence. The most powerful Kurdish movement in Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), began as a student-led Marxist movement in 1978. Since its inception, the PKK has waged a guerilla war against a Turkish government unwilling to concede any rights to the Kurds. In the process, the PKK has been labelled a terrorist organization by Turkey, the European Union and the United States. Throughout the insurgency, over 40,000 have been killed and thousands more injured or displaced. Turkey’s Kurdish minority today lives under a government that actively undermines its quest for self-determination, suppressing the very notion of an independent or even semi-autonomous Kurdish entity.
The War on ISIL
The realities on the ground in Iraq and Syria further complicate the question of Kurdish independence. The Syrian Civil War and the rise of ISIL have put American foreign policymakers in a political quagmire. The most effective non-state actors battling the scourge of ISIL, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), is an umbrella coalition composed primarily of Syrian Kurds, remnants of the Free Syrian Army, and various Arab and Turkmen militia groups. These Syrian Kurds, known as the YPG or People’s Protection Units, are closely linked to the PKK in Turkey and their increasing importance has renewed a wave of Kurdish unrest across the region. With the Syrian regime’s early withdrawal from the country’s northern region at the onset of the civil war, the YPG became the de facto administrators of the area. This, in turn, led to the declaration of a self-governing democratic region in northern Syria, administered by the Kurds. A mass exodus of PKK insurgents from Turkey to Syria followed. The Turkish government facilitated this movement with more lax border controls and the easing of anti-PKK crackdowns in the country’s predominantly Kurdish southeast, viewing this as an opportunity for its primary enemy to wear itself out.
As the world watched ISIL sweep across the Syrian and Iraqi desert, the YPG fighters were one of the few groups who could stand in their way. The clashes between YPG soldiers and ISIL insurgents reached a fever pitch in the northern Syrian town of Kobani in September 2014, where the US-led Coalition coordinated artillery strikes with the YPG militia which drove out the ISIL insurgents. Just over the border in Turkey, a new crackdown attempted to reseal the porous border between the countries, but by then the dynamic on the ground had fundamentally changed.
After the success of the Battle for Kobani, the YPG solidified themselves as the Coalition’s best local fighting force and the best hope for defeating ISIL. This success and the ensuing alliance between them and the Coalition has left Turkey alienated. Turkey’s primary enemies, ISIL and the PKK-linked YPG are locked in combat, which means helping one entity counts as an act of aggression towards the other. However, Turkey’s recent behavior, including the shelling of YPG positions in northern Syria and Iraq, has suggested that it is willing to concede gains to ISIL in exchange for the weakening of Kurdish militia. By undermining the war effort against ISIL, Turkey is straining its relationship with the United States, as the two states cannot seem to reconcile their interests in the region. The United States and other Coalition members are intervening to prevent ISIL from carrying out attacks in the West. Turkey’s position is far more nuanced, as the many years spent fighting the Kurds have destabilized the country’s southeast. Thus, its greatest fear seems to be that an emboldened independence movement anywhere in the region could spill over into Turkey.
The Referendum and the Standoff in Kirkuk
On September 25, 2017, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq held a referendum on the region’s future. The result was unsurprisingly conclusive: an overwhelming 92 percent of voters cast their ballots in favor of independence. What followed was a series of events that will undoubtedly haunt a Kurdish push for secession for years to come. The ensuing chaos in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk devolved into a standoff between the Iraqi Army and the Peshmerga, threatening to throw the war-torn country back into another conflict. The Peshmerga forces had taken control of the city after the Iraqi army’s defeat at the hands of ISIL three years prior to the referendum. Though the conflict ended in a ceasefire and the referendum results will likely not be honored, the incident is a perfect microcosm of the larger dynamic between the Kurds and their neighbors in the region.
The vote was carried out without a legal mandate, angering the Iraqi government in Baghdad and compounding years of KRI encroachment on Federal Iraqi lands. Turkey and Iran condemned the move but stopped short of further commentary to avoid aggravating their own Kurdish minorities. With ISIL putting up its last stand, it seems that the forces that should be working to eliminate this common enemy are in disarray. Now, more than ever, guns are aimed across borders in a corner of the world all too familiar with the destruction of war.
