Posted on 08/12/2005 9:38:02 AM PDT by minus_273
Fly into Arbil, the regional capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, and you feel that you have arrived in another country. It is the Kurdish, not the Iraqi, flag that flutters from Arbil International Airport, Kurdistan's new, glass-fronted "gateway" to the world, which saw its first flights from Dubai, Beirut and Amman arrive last month.
The airport was built on a former military base once used by Saddam Hussein's regime to bomb the Kurds of Halabja.
Now it brings in investors. Businessmen, scared away from other parts of Iraq, are coming to Kurdistan instead, and helping its economy to take off.
"Before all we saw was war, and planes bombing our cities and villages," says the airport manager, Kameran Murad, who fought against the regime in the late 1980s.
"Now the aircraft are our link with the outside world. Everything is changing."
Economic success
Take the town of Suleimaniya. Its skyline is dotted with cranes. Everywhere you look bulldozers are at work.
We can go where we like when we like, which is not possible in Baghdad or elsewhere in Iraq.
Wolfgang Kohler
"Things are booming. The price of land is ridiculous. It's just going up and up and up," says businessman Bettin Saleh, who has two shops in a new mall.
"People have money, people are spending it, they feel it's safe to spend - and build for the future."
And there's no shortage of labour, as Arab Iraqis head north to join the Kurdish workforce.
"I'm here because it's dangerous where I'm from and there are no jobs," says Aziz Abed Ali, from Baghdad. "Here it is safe and there is work."
Unique stability
The Kurds have ruled themselves in northern Iraq since the aftermath of the Gulf war of 1991, when a "safe haven" was created to protect them from Saddam Hussein.
Rival Kurdish groups fought one another in 1996, but the current stability in Kurdistan now stands in stark contrast to other parts of the country.
In the lobby of the Sheraton hotel in Arbil - the smartest hotel in the entire country - there are plans on display for a grand project called "Dreamland," epitomising the hope and confidence of Kurdistan.
Western businessmen hover around the internet centre.
Kurdish Alliance came second in 2005's landmark poll KDP and PUK formed backbone of grouping Alliance won 25% of the vote
2005: Hungry to vote in Iraqi Kurdistan "Here we are free - we can do our jobs," says Wolfgang Kohler, who is part of a German delegation selling farm implements in Kurdistan. "We can go where we like when we like, which is not possible in Baghdad or elsewhere in Iraq."
Every Friday, Kurdish families head out to enjoy the rugged natural beauty of Kurdistan, to picnic by its rivers and waterfalls. The biggest threat to them is landmines - a legacy of a past they are trying to forget.
'We are Kurds'
For the future, the greatest hope of many Kurds is, eventually, to secede from Iraq.
"I feel Kurdish more than Iraqi," says Azad Nouri Abdullah, a pharmacist from Suleimaniya. "In my heart I want my own country - for the Kurds."
And that is not just the dream of an older generation, bitter at how imperial Britain drew boundaries in the Middle East.
"We are Kurds," says nine-year old Sardar Mohammed Ali, swimming with a group of friends in the serenity of Lake Dokan, near Suleimaniya. "We should have our own country like everyone else."
For one thing, they expose the utter idiocy of this stupid nation-building exercise in a place (Iraq) that doesn't even meet the most rudimentary definition of a "nation."
its funny how many arabs thinks its a great injustice that palestians dont have their own homeland yet these same arabs think kurds shouldnt have their own country. sounds kinda hypocritical to me.
its not just arabs, iranians and turks also think the same.
Didn't you know that it's okay for Arabs to oppress other groups? /sarcasm
But as time goes on the economic center of Iraq will move north and ultimately with the move will come greater political power. That power will be resisted and it will be up to the United States to make sure that the rest of Iraq, Turkey and the region knows that we will defend the Kurds. I believe we will. Even a stupid Dem Administration (yes, unfortunately there will be another one or two of them in your lifetime) couldn't be stupid enough to let the Kurds lose a civil war. This of course assumes that Jimmy Carter won't run for President again nor will anyone else like him. Probably wishful thinking.
If anyone deserves their own homeland, it's the Kurds. An independent Kurdistan formed from Kurdish majority areas in northern Iraq would probably be a US ally for the foreseeable future. Denying the Kurds a homeland to keep Iraqi Sunnis and Shias happy is madness - there's nothing sacred or even sensible about Iraq's current borders.
well the problem is that Turkey, Iran and Syria also have hige kurdish poipulations (the greater kurdistan area) and they fear their Kurds will rise up and demand rights/autonomy too. In all likelyhood, an Iraqi Kurdistan would be another Irael, an ally ie with enemies on all sides and a state of perpetual war.
So what's your solution, invade, overthrow Saddam and leave?? That's a recipe for creating an even bigger mess, total anarchy, chaos and even civil war not to mention leaving a huge vacuum that Al Qaeda would have moved into and filled just like they did in post war Afghanistan with the Taliban when the Soviets left.
Might I remind you that Germany, Japan, Italy and Korea are examples of nation building in the wake of wars, all successful?? Not all "nation building" ends up like Somalia. And in the end Iraq will be another on the list of nation's successfully liberated and then rebuilt. Far from "exposing the idiocy" of "this stupid nation-building exercise," Iraqi Kurdistan could well be the springboard from which stability and economic prosperity moves into the rest of Iraq. Surely word of what calm and peace has done for the Kurds will spread to the rest of Iraq and cause even more people, even the Sunnis, to lose patience with the terrorists and to actively work against them. The Kurds will likely be a positive influence on the rest of the country in helping people see that by working to build Iraq rather than passively watching it torn apart will work to everyone's good.
Just be patient and see.
Might I remind you that Germany, Japan, Italy and Korea are examples of nation building in the wake of wars, all successful?
Your comment is very misleading, because it doesn't accurately characterize what went on in those countries and what is going on in Iraq today. Germany, Japan, Italy, and Korea were all viable sovereign states before those wars, so the U.S. was not involved in "nation-building" after the wars were over. Rebuilding a nation's devastated infrastructure is not the same thing as building a nation from the ground up out of a disparate group of people and cultures that don't have some kind of common identity that would characterize them as a "nation."
Iraq has never been a viable sovereign nation before, which is precisely why it could only function as a totalitarian state under a brutal dictator. Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds never had enough in common to form the basis of a viable nation. They were cobbled together into this thing we now call "Iraq" out of the remnants of the British Empire.
Just read the article if you need any evidence of this. These people consider themselves Kurds, not Iraqis.
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