The Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in the world who do not have a state of their own.
There are approximately 30 million Kurds in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey.
They have now become very important actors, not only in Iraq, but also in the Syrian civil
war and in Turkey.
The Kurdish people are separate, they are linguistically different, culturally different
from the dominant group in each one of these countries, which are Arab, Turkish, and Persian.
The Kurdish people are mostly Muslims, they are moderate, they are secular, they are pro-Western.
If you ask every Kurd, they have this dream of having a greater Kurdistan.
And yet, because they were divided at the end of the First World War when the Ottoman Empire
collapsed and the borders were drawn at the time by both colonial powers and by the Turks,
and because they were a minority in each of these countries they never succeeded
in getting their own state.
However, the Kurds never accepted the conditions that the international community or history
put them and always rebelled.
But because they rebelled over the years they were always a threat to the stability of all these countries.
The Kurdish question is for the Kurds, this long-term quest to establish their own independence
from the countries around them.
They, to date, have not succeeded in doing this because of the geopolitics of the region.
In none of these countries, when you look at the history, Kurdish cultural or political
identity was recognized.
Brutal means of suppression and oppression were deployed to forcibly assimilate the Kurds.
Conditions on the ground are changing everywhere.
The Iraqi Kurds have achieved a great deal of autonomy in Iraq and it is autonomy that
is recognized internationally, it is recognized by Baghdad.
In Syria, we now see that the Syrian Kurds have succeeded in fighting off the Islamic State,
that has taken over large chunks of territory both in Syria and Iraq.
And the PKK, the Turkish-Kurdish insurgent group, has proven to be actually quite capable
of fighting essentially what is the second-largest army in NATO, the Turkish army.
And the Turks have not been able to defeat the PKK, even though they have sometimes hit
them very, very hard.
The issue of the Kurds, and the Iraqi Kurds in
particular, has become a very serious consideration for US foreign policy because they played
a really prominent role in helping to create the post-Saddam Iraq.
And now, we see that the Kurds have been a partner in trans-national issues, particularly
in the fight against the Islamic State.
The Kurds of Northern Iraq have been essentially autonomous from Baghdad from the time the
first Gulf War ended in 1991, and the United States and allies sought to protect the three
provinces that make up the Kurdistan Regional Government, and has provided an opportunity
for the Kurds to develop their own society.
Since the fall of Saddam Hussein at the hands of American forces, there has been this effort
to create a unified federal Iraq, but giving the Kurds a special status as a region within Iraq.
It is difficult for us to keep waiting for an uncertain future,
waiting in vain for implementation of the constitution and our rights.
That's why Kurds have no choice but to think of another path, toward self-determination.
The Islamic State, has erased the modern Middle East borders in a way that no other state
or non-state actor or force has been able to do so since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
And for the first time, because of ISIS the central government in Syria and Iraq, primarily,
are very, very weak to prevent the Kurds from achieving what they want.
When the Syrians started the uprising against president Bashar al-Assad's regime, Assad
turned a blind eye to the Kurds, so the Kurds exploited that opportunity.
They declared self rule in northern Syria.
When the Islamic State swept through Syria, the Syrian Kurds put up a resistance, which
essentially got the Americans bombing the ISIS positions.
In Turkey the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which is a terrorist organization, had been fighting
against the Turkish state since the mid 1980s seeking their own independent state or at
least autonomy from the Turkish state.
Despite this history, tenuous negotiations began in 2013, but the war between the Turkish
state and the PKK came roaring back in the summer of 2015.
The mostly Kurdish southeast bore the brunt of the conflict while Turkey’s major cities
suffered a wave of terrorist attacks—some attribute to the PKK.
Reports indicate that thousands of people were killed in the renewed violence.
There are dilemmas for all of the Kurds as a result of what's happening.
The major policy dilemma is related to the Iraqi Kurds.
Do they stay or do they go?
Clearly the population very much wants independence.
The fear in Ankara, the fear from the Syrian leadership, the fear from the Iranian leadership,
is that an independent Kurdistan would result in Kurds in these other countries seeking
to emulate that.
What's complicating for U.S. strategic and political interest is there's a very delicate
balance here both with Baghdad and with Ankara.
The Turks are still opposed to the idea of an independent Kurdish state.
However, they have come to be key economic partners for the Kurds, and that has made
things easier for the United States and Europe, and others, in dealing with the Kurds as legitimate
and important political actors.
And in Baghdad, particularly because of this tenuous sharing of political power and sharing
of resources that Baghdad and the Kurds have never really been able to resolve definitively,
it's been difficult for the United States to support the Kurds in the robust fashion
that the Kurds feel they deserve.
ISIS has required the United States to get more deeply involved with the Kurds because
the peshmerga are essentially the ground forces in the fight against the Islamic State.
You obviously have the fragmentation of Syria.
You have the fragmentation of Iraq going on.
Ultimately, Washington may be confronted with a situation where it would be in the interests
of the United States to be more supportive of at least Iraqi Kurdish independence.
The Kurds are closer.
They're not close, but they're closer to becoming independent, as the situation around them
deteriorates.