Posted on 10/24/2012 1:33:03 PM PDT by neverdem
The mood in Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Dohuk - the three largest cities in Iraqi Kurdistan - is newly buoyant these days, and with good reason. Iraq's Kurds, who occupy the semiautonomous region run by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), have much to celebrate.
They enjoy relative peace and stability compared with the rest of the country, boast a moderately open society, and, over the past year, have received a whopping vote of confidence in their nascent economy from some of the world's largest oil companies, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Total and Gazprom, all of which have signed exploration contracts with the KRG. Not only is Iraqi Kurdistan undergoing an unprecedented building boom, but its people are now articulating a once-unthinkable notion: that the day they will break free from the rest of Iraq is nigh.
As the Kurds press forward, they are growing increasingly estranged from the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki; personal relations...
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The question is how far Turkish leaders will go -- whether they will be prepared to abandon their Plan A, reinforcing a unified Iraq, or Plan B, linking up with entities estranged from Baghdad, such as the Kurds and the largely Sunni provinces in northern Iraq, at the risk of breaking up Iraq. Already, the rhetoric in Ankara has changed. Officials no longer refer to Iraq's unity as a sine qua non; now, it is a "preference." And Erdogan is said to have promised Barzani that Turkish forces will protect the Kurdish region in the event of a military assault from Baghdad. Even if the unannounced visit that Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu made to the contested city of Kirkuk in August wasn't meant to signal support for the Kurds' territorial claims in Iraq, Baghdad's furious reaction showed that it was received that way...
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearworld.com ...
one of the major mistakes of the British, was allowing the dying Ottoman empire together with their own actions to carve up the Kuridsh land between the modern Middle East states, whose artificial borders were drawn in many cases by Britain and France.
Iraqi Kurdistan was the only entity that said “thank you” to the United States for an opportunity at freedom.
http://www.freerepublic.com/%5Ehttp://www.theotheriraq.com/
Turkey will never allow for the formation of an autonomous Kurdistan. It would give other Kurds in the region (Syria, Turkey, and Iran) the idea that they could rise and form a separate nation. Also, there is too much hate in Turkey for the Kurds.
Thanks for the link.
Most of the tension in the ME is a direct result of arbitrary political boundaries that don’t account for the on-the-ground realities. Why should tribes be forced to live together. This applies to Africa and other post-colonial countries.
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