Last week British members of parliament visited a Christian suburb of Mosul where Iraqi officers told us of the unprecedented unity between the Iraqi and Kurdish armies which once fought each other but are now closing on the common enemy of the Islamic State. That Islamic State will be defeated militarily is certain but the new question is whether Kurdistan and Iraq can forge a new political order that frees the Kurds and also eradicates the roots of the jihadist menace.
The respected commentator Michael Knights of the Washington Kurdish Institute identifies ‘a promising momentum between Baghdad and the Kurds over a transfer of sovereign powers to Kurdistan’ and ‘that something truly novel is occurring: a genuine conversation between the Kurds and Baghdad on the separation of sovereign powers, aiming at co-equal status.’
The Kurdistan regional government’s prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani told British MPs last week that he was ‘cautiously optimistic’ about such change but there now seems to be a decent chance that the Kurds and the Iraqis can reach an amicable divorce that could actually boost their economic and political relations and overcome the reticence of status quo powers to unravelling borders.
At a speech in Bashiqa, freshly liberated from the IS, Kurdistan’s president Barzani revealed that Iraq and America have agreed that the Peshmerga will remain in lands taken from IS. These account for 90 per cent of Kurdish lands in dispute with Baghdad and Barzani insisted that ‘the defence lines before the Mosul operation are non-negotiable.’ He also emphasised that ‘independence is a natural right of our people and we will not give up on it under any circumstances or pressure,’ but that ‘must be done through dialogue.
This potential step-change in relations between Iraqis and Kurds flows from their tightening the noose on Mosul but also responds to the reality that the IS capture of Mosul and a third of the country underlined that Iraq had become a fiction. Any attempt to reinstate Iraq as a centralised state will sustain and exacerbate tensions between its suspicious peoples. A seasoned aid worker told me last week that ‘you can save Iraq or you can save the Iraqis, but you cannot do both.’
Being part of a centralised Iraq, controlled first by Sunnis and then Shias, has never worked for the Kurds, who suffered demonisation, then genocide and were denied their rights even after they voluntarily rejoined Iraq in 2003. Over the last ten years, I have seen the Kurds making a good fist of the federalism agreed after what they call the liberation of Iraq. They never actually received their full budget entitlements but their share of the then higher Iraqi income from oil was sufficient to generate a dynamic economy.
That came crashing to a halt when Baghdad entirely cut all budget transfers to Kurdistan just before IS captured Mosul and was then worsened by the calamitous drop in oil prices and the cost of the war which came perilously close to the Kurdish capital of Erbil in 2014. A huge exodus of displaced people escaping IS also caused a one-third increase in the population of Kurdistan and slashed public services and resources.
This economic tsunami also exposed a dysfunctional rentier state that allows many thousands of civil servants to draw pay for nonexistent or largely unproductive jobs and squeezes out an enterprise culture, a larger private sector and diversifying the economy to exploit their agricultural and tourist potential. That had itself been exacerbated by Saddam Hussein’s systematic destruction of the once blooming bread basket and thousands of villages in Kurdistan’s fertile and well-irrigated plains.
There are two imperatives for renegotiating political relations in the current Iraq space. The first is seeking to overcome the deep alienation and violent marginalisation of Sunnis who came to see IS as a better bet than Baghdad. The second is that the Kurds cannot easily reform their economic and political system without sovereign rights to borrow money. Independence would also curb excuses for avoiding changes needed to deepen democracy and create a sustainable economy that does not rely on energy or patronage.
Trying to keep unhappy peoples together in Iraq has failed. Supporting them in negotiating new arrangements is better. The West should resist the temptation, so often carried out before with disastrous consequences, to relax or retreat when the IS death cult is driven out of Mosul. The Kurds are an open and dynamic people who could make their new country work to the benefit of the wider Middle East, if they seize chances they have sacrificed so much blood for, and if we maintain our engagement.
———————————
Gary Kent is the director of the all-party parliamentary group on the Kurdistan Region and accompanied MPs on his 25th visit to the Kurdistan Region in ten years. He writes in a personal capacity. @garykent
———————————
With Peshmerga General Talabani in Khazer camp
APPG delegation at Lake Dukan: Gary Kent, Tracy Brabin MP, Rosie Winterton MP, Graham Jones MP, Jack Lopresti MP and author Jonathan Foreman
In Bartella in Mosul with Iraqi army