2 The Kurdistan Region of Iraq: background
The
Kurds and Kurdistan
10. Kurds have been living in northern Iraq since
ancient times, as they have been in the neighbouring, mainly mountainous
parts of Iran, Syria and Turkey that together comprise Kurdistan,
a territory with no formal boundaries or official status, sometimes
described as the largest stateless nation in the world.[2]
Kurds might thus be described as one of the indigenous peoples
of Iraq. They have preserved their language and distinctive culture
over the centuries, despite the spread of Islam (which most Kurds
ultimately adopted), and, with it, the gradual penetration of
Arabic language and culture over most of historic Mesopotamia,
and despite, or perhaps because of, a history of marginalisation,
living largely as a subject people at the mountainous fringes
of more powerful empires: Turkish, Arab or Persian. More recently,
Kurds endured the discriminatory ideology of religious or ethnic
chauvinism that took hold in all four countries of Kurdistan during
the 20th century, in response to which Kurdish political
nationalism—the fight for cultural rights, for more control
over local resources, for autonomy or even independence- increasingly
flourished. State authorities' attitude to Kurdish nationalism
has veered from official indifference, to denial of civil rights,
to violent persecution. The latter was the course ultimately taken
in Baathist Iraq.[3]
Kurds in Iraq
11. Within Iraq, Kurds make up around one fifth of
the overall population: some 6 million Iraqis are thought to identify
as Kurdish, making them one of the three most significant components
(alongside Sunni and Shia Arabs) of the mosaic of communities
that, since 1921, have made up the Iraqi state.[4]
Iraqi Kurdistan, or South (Bushiri) Kurdistan as some Kurds
call it, comprises the north-east and extreme north of the country,
next to the borders with Turkey and Iran. Most Iraqi Kurds are
Sunni, some are Shia, and a minority follow indigenous Kurdish
religions such as Yezidism. Non-Kurdish minorities living in Iraqi
Kurdistan include the Assyrians, a Christian community with roots
in northern Iraq just as deep as those of the Kurds, and the Turcomans,
a mainly Muslim community (both Shia and Sunni) descended from
a nomadic people culturally related to the Turks. Kurds, Turcomans,
Assyrians and Arabs mingle on Iraqi Kurdistan's southern border
with the rest of Iraq.
12. Modern Iraq, rising from the ashes of the Ottoman
Empire in 1921, was conceived as an Arab Kingdom, with only limited
recognition of its part-Kurdish character.[5]
A Kurdish separatist movement in the early days of the Kingdom
was crushed. Efforts by Kurdish leaders over succeeding decades
to negotiate more self-government or civil rights generally failed,
or else Baghdad was seen as having failed to honour the agreement;
and where politics failed, the Kurds at times resorted to guerrilla
tactics through their militias, the Peshmerga ("They
who face death"). At times, they were backed by foreign powers,
principally the US and Iran, largely for pragmatic, short-term
reasons rather than out of principled support for Kurdish rights.
13. Matters came to a tragic head in the late 1980s,
following a project by Saddam Hussein to forcibly "Arabise"
parts of northern Iraq, and towards the end of a bloody and bitter
war between Iran and Iraq, during which some Iraqi Kurdish factions
had received support from Tehran. In 1987, Saddam commenced the
Anfal,[6] a systematic
campaign to terrorise the Kurdish population and exterminate Kurdish
resistance to his rule. By the time it ended in 1988, many thousands
had been killed (including in chemical attacks), with many districts
of rural Kurdistan cleared of their original populations and deliberately
reduced to ruins.
The formation of the Kurdistan
Region
14. To the despair of Iraq's Kurds, international
reaction to the Anfal was muted, but Saddam's move to crush
another Kurdish uprising two years later took place in a changed
political landscape. The Iran-Iraq and Cold Wars were over and
Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 had turned Iraq into a pariah
state. That the uprising followed an exhortation from President
Bush, at the end of the first Gulf War, for Iraqis to rise up
against the regime also placed moral pressure on the US and its
allies to come to the Kurds' aid. Citing UN Security Council authority,
the US, UK and France imposed and jointly policed a no-fly zone
in northern Iraq.[7] Saddam's
reaction was to withdraw all government services from the zone,[8]
north of the so-called "Green Line", and to impose a
blockade, in the expectation that resistance would soon collapse.
The resistance would instead outlast the regime. Iraqi Kurdistan's
two dominant forces, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of Massoud
Barzani and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) of Jalal Talabani
buried their differences to organise elections for a new "Kurdistan
Regional Government" (KRG) and to make plans for enduring
the blockade and providing basic public services. For the next
12 years, the region survived, despite food, energy and electricity
shortages, and even a collapse in relations between the PUK and
KDP in the mid-90s that led to civil war and to parallel governments
in the Region's two main cities.
15. By 2003, the Kurdistan Region was reunited and
at peace, and beginning to edge into modest prosperity. The Peshmerga
played a key role in the Iraq war of that year, fighting alongside
coalition forces to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Kurds seized on
the new opportunities that initially arose in the democratic era.
The PUK and KDP jointly bargained for the installation of a Kurd,
Jalal Talabani, as the new democracy's first President: a matter
of symbolic importance in a country governed for years under the
quasi-racist ideology of Arab Baathism. More significantly, they
secured formal recognition for the Kurdistan Region as a federal
region of Iraq under a new Iraqi constitution approved by state-wide
referendum in 2005.
The Kurdistan Region today
16. The Kurdistan Region comprises the greater part
of Iraq's three northernmost governorates: Dohuk, Erbil and Sulaymaniyah,[9]
plus small parts of three neighbouring governorates to the south.
Politically, it is a multi-party democracy, headed by an elected
President, Massoud Barzani, long-term leader of the Kurdistan
Democratic Party, and a Prime Minister, Nechirvan Barzani (nephew
of the President, and also of the KDP), heading a cabinet drawn
from the 111-member Kurdistan National Assembly, elected via a
party list system.
17. The Kurdistan Region is mainly mountainous, and
well watered by the standards of the Middle East, but falls away
to the dry Mesopotamian plain in the south. It is here that the
capital and largest city, Erbil (in Kurdish: Hewler) is situated,
and here that the Peshmerga are now tasked with defending a largely
flat and naturally defenceless frontier against ISIL. The population
is around 6 million, including well over 1 million recently-arrived
refugees and internally displaced people. South of the Green Line
are the disputed territories: districts that are majority Kurdish
or which the KRG considers to be historically Kurdish. Following
the events of last summer, the Peshmerga now holds most of this
area.
2 There are no formal statistics on the population
of Kurdistan but most sources indicate a figure in the region
of 25-30 million. This would include non-Kurds living in Kurdistan
but not the sizeable Kurdish diaspora. Back
3
Baathism is a political philosophy of socialist Arab nationalism
that was the official ideology of Iraq during the Saddam era and
remains that of Syria today. In both countries, Baathism has in
practice led to authoritarian governance that (amongst other things)
has tended to deny full cultural and civil rights to citizens
expressing a non-Arab identity, seeing this as a threat to national
cohesion. Back
4
Shia Arabs, living mainly in southern Iraq, make up around 55-60%
of the population. Sunni Arabs, living mainly in the centre-west,
comprise around 20% of the population (about the same as the Kurds).
Minority communities, including Turcomans and Assyrians, make
up the remainder. These figures are widely-accepted estimates,
based partly on election results. Official data on ethnicity is
not collected in Iraq. Back
5
See also Q123 [Peter Galbraith] Back
6
Literally "the spoils of war", taken from the title
of a sura (chapter) in the Koran concerning a victory by
the early Muslims over a numerically stronger band of warriors Back
7
This was on the basis of UN Security Council Resolution 688 to
prevent internal repression by the Iraqi regime, although the
Resolution does not expressly authorise a no-fly zone Back
8
The zone, which covered Iraq north of the 36th parallel
in fact excluded some of the most populous parts of Iraqi Kurdistan,
to the south and east, including the second city of Sulaymaniyah,
but initial sorties into these areas by regime forces were repelled
and Saddam thereafter made no serious effort to bring them back
under control. However, Saddam retained control over some mixed
or Kurdish-majority areas further to the south, including the
city of Kirkuk. Back
9
In March 2014, the KRG proclaimed Halabja as a fourth province
of the Kurdistan Region, mainly comprising territory formerly
part of Sulaymaniyah province Back
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