The Once and Future Kurdistan

"We are providing training to essentially an independent military force that may or may not be used in other ways down the road besides fighting ISIL."
"There's already a lot of tension there with the situation in Kirkuk. It's a delicate situation."
Lt.-Col. Chris Kilford [retired] Canadian military attache in Turkey

"If the people of Kurdistan are waiting for someone else to present the right of self-determination as a gift, independence will never be obtained."
"That right exists and the people of Kurdistan must demand it and put it into motion."
"The same way that Scotland, Catalonia, and Quebec and other places have the right to express their opinions about their destiny, Kurdistan, too, has the right, and it's non-negotiable."
Kurdish Pesident Massoud Barzani, Kurdistan, Iraq 

"If you're interacting with those forces, I think you're obliged to know what they're doing. You have an obligation to ensure that violations of human rights and humanitarian law aren't occurring."
Donatella Rovera, senor adviser, Amnesty International

Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty    Iraqi Christian forces march during their graduation ceremony in the northwestern town of Fishkhabur, near the borders with Syria and Turkey, on March 12, 2015

 

The Western allies dedicated to removing the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant from the Middle East, notably Iraq and Syria, have discovered that all the training in the past by the United States in attempts to bring the Iraqi military up to loyal, disciplined and effective standards has been wasted; in instance after instance when faced with the prospect of meeting the ISIL jihadi forces in combat, the Iraqi military has simply melted away in fear.

The proven alternative was to transfer training to the only effective fighting force prepared to challenge ISIL, the Kurds in northern Iraq, whose resilience, purposefulness and determined resourcefulness made them the ideal local partners whose own battlefield successes against ISIL, merited Western investment and time in training and equipment.

This represented conflicted decision-making on the part of the West; the knowledge was there that Kurds living in Syria, Iran, Iraq and Turkey represented the largest ethnic group in the world living in their ancestral geography without a country of their own. And it is well enough recognized that apart from deserving their own sovereign geography, Kurds are actively engaged in carving out a geography of their very own, disputed and denied by all those countries within whose borders they exist.

AP Photo/Jens Meyer    Kurdish peshmerga fighters practice with an anti-tank gun as German soldiers look on, in Hammelburg, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 2, 2014

 

So, arming and training them, while required in view of the current agenda to contain and destroy the ambitions of the ISIL jihadists, also means that what they will have achieved on the current shared battlefield to disempower and destroy if possible Islamic State's ambitious advances, will be used at some future date to prosecute their own entitlements of national aspiration. There is one undeniable fact; the Kurds are recognized as reliable allies in that war.

Air support, training, equipment and cash has flowed to the Kurds on that basis. While the Iraqi army retreated in haste from ISIL forces in 2014, the Kurds from northern Iraq moved forward to challenge ISIL and in the process took possession of the Kirkuk oil fields, giving them control of 40 percent of the country's oil, and with it a flow of cash from oil sales.

They have consolidated borders for their homeland by taking territory from ISIL. They have given protective haven to fleeing Yazidis and Christians targeted by ISIL.

Iraqi authorities are well versed in the Kurdish bid for independence and they are resisting it just as Turkey has done but without directly mounting attacks against the Kurds given their dependence on Iraqi Kurds as the sole indigenous sustaining force meeting the challenge of conflict with ISIL.

Which didn't stop Iraqi officials from stopping a military aircraft from Canada carrying supplies and weapons to the Kurds without authorization from Iraq. And nor were the Kurds invited to a high-level meeting in Paris to plan strategy against ISIL.

While the Government of Turkey has been attacking Turkey's Kurds, bombing PKK strongholds in Turkey and in Syria, it has established cooperative relations with Iraq's Kurdish Regional Government and conducting attacks against YPG Kurdish units in Syria which it accuses of links with Turkey's Kurdistan Workers' Party; its armed wing considered a terrorist organization fighting Turkey for independence.

AFP PHOTO / SAFIN HAMED   Iraqi autonomous Kurdish region's peshmerga forces and fighters from the Yazidi minority, a local Kurdish-speaking community which the Islamic State (IS) group had brutally targeted in the area, hold a Kurdish flag while entering the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, in the Nineveh Province, on November 13, 2015

Kurdish forces in Syria have been accused of forcing out Arab civilians from their villages, and demolishing their homes. Kurdish officials explain these were civilians who supported the Islamic State, the expulsions carried out for "security reasons". Amnesty International has reported that in northern Iraq similar situations are occurring where Arab homes have been destroyed, their owners forced to flee their villages.

The Kurdish Peshmerga forces, it was explained, along with Yazidi militias and Syrian Kurds as well as those from Turkey were simply returning the treatment they had been afforded in the past. And given that past,  the Kurds have no wish to permit Arabs to return to areas governed by the Kurds. When Sinjar was retaken from Islamic State with support from coalition fighter jets, it was the Kurdish flag that was hoisted over the city.

If and when eventually the combined forces fighting against Islamic State succeed in their mission to rid the geography of the Islamist Sunni terrorists wedded to their vision of a pure Islamist state spreading to incorporate the entire geography, there is the spectre of fighting breaking out between Iraqi factions and the Kurds, and that's when the training and the provisions the Kurds were exposed to will come to their aid in claiming their heritage and historical entitlement to sovereignty.

A member of Canada's special forces oversees Kurdish troops firing a mortar during training in northern Iraq. Canada is looking to expand its special forces presence in Iraq.  (Photo: Canadian special forces)