Webinar: Kurdistan Between Iran’s Hammer and Iraq’s Anvil – July 20, 2022
It is fairly clear what’s happening in Iraq. While the West faces huge issues in Ukraine, Iran is using its muscle to try to control Iraq and encourage the US to withdraw its garrison of 2,500 troops. It regularly turns gas and electricity on and off just as temperatures sore, power breaks down, and misery increases. Iran and its proxy and militias also want to intimidate and divide Kurdistan. I remember once visiting the Iranian consulate in Erbil, the pistachios were excellent, but the dialogue was full of tripe, Diplo-speak about our Kurdish brothers and sisters. It’s very clear that Iran does not want the Kurdistan region to flourish, and what we’re seeing now is a pinter movement essentially that combines warfare and lawfare.
We’ve seen the missile attacks on oil facilities and very near the US consulate that’s been built in Erbil, the biggest of any country in the world and a source of great satisfaction and safety, one hopes. We’ve also seen a so-called federal Supreme Court splatter into life with a judgment that basically threatens to emasculate the autonomy of the Kurdistan region. I say so-called because, despite its grand name, the Court has not been established according to the Constitution. At the heart of the compass, and I draw on Michael Knights and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which recently produced a very good paper on this. It’s a question of trust, just a generation after the Iraqi army carried out genocide in the eighties against the Kurds. Now, in theory, the Iraqi Constitution in 2005 protects Kurdistan, Iraq. But we know that before and after the liberation of Iraq in 2003, sheer parties only reluctantly accepted federalism. In their hearts, they prefer a centralized model and are often chauvinistic and condescended towards the Kurds. The promise to settle the status of Kirkuk is now 15 years past its deadline. The Kurds are a moderate force at the vortex of the violent middle east.
In the end, they are using brute force, and I’ve also been to Koya where I saw the missiles against the Iranian-Kurdish parties and the after-effects of the missile attacks. They’re trying to squeeze and subordinate the Kurdistan region and, indeed, their own Kurdistan region. I agree with Vladimir as well though the economic reform is vital. Matthew you’re in Amedi, which is just one of the most beautiful places in the Kurdistan region. There’s so much going for tourism, and so much going for also a film industry, which would generate a lot of money and also enable Kurds, if there were a proper film industry there, to tell their own stories. This is a long-run thing, but you need for the Kurds to be able to tell their stories to a world that dips in and out of their history but isn’t always as engaged as it should be. This is not an easy thing to do. These issues flip in and out of public consciousness, and it requires a concerted effort to put those sorts of issues on the map in countries which have got all sorts of other problems. I mean, I speak for the UK; we’re in the middle of a change in leadership, we’ve just had 40 plus degrees for the first time in London… and so to get these issues into the public domain and to get persistent and consistent sort of engagement is the hardest thing to do, but it has to be done. Although, in the end, a reform in the Kurdistan region is the best way is the best advertisement for solidarity that there can be.
This is a very vibrant [oil] sector, and 500,000 barrels of oil a day cannot be sniffed at when there’s a desire in the West to reduce its reliance on Russia and Iran for oil and gas. So that should provide something of an incentive, a bigger incentive than we’ve had before for more concerted, diplomatic interventions by the US and other countries to make a reality of what is essentially the mantra of those countries that is along the lines of the need for a thriving Kurdistan region within a multicultural Iraq. In the end, this is easier said than done. The Kurds’ problem, as they so often said to me when visiting parliamentary delegations, is we don’t get to choose our neighbors, but we do get to choose our friends. But the problem is that the friends, the US, the UK, and others, have an awful lot of things on their plate and are projecting power into political circles that really aren’t that interested or have their own reasons. Although you can argue that the Kurds need to increase their position in Baghdad and pay more attention and be more unified and so on, what is wrong with the fact that it is popular for parties, whether it’s Malachy or Abadi to use the Kurds as a whipping boy as they have over so many years, I mean, that’s the dysfunction of Iraq.