Despite Western concerns, the absence of a professional Peshmerga and a relative unity among bellicose factions of the Kurds in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey may eventually derail all the peace missions in the region as the Kurds are an indispensable partner in the long-held conflict against the ISIS. But then how long the Kurds will wait for their homelandIJ
The Kurds are known to be the largest nation without a nation-State till date. Arguably, the Kurds are a nation in need of a State, they are a crucial ally in the fight against the dreaded ISIS. But some of its factions are registered as terrorists in Turkey, Syria and Iraq. A nation in the making is today scattered around four countries — Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. And, sadly, all are fighting their own battles for an independent home without having a common political platform. The Kurds are not a strictly monolithic group. Neither have they enjoyed a coherent linguistic or political identity, though many scholars often describe them as so. The nervousness reflected in the Kurds across the region is understandable. As the past record shows, the declaration of independence in 1922 and 1946 by the Kurds were crudely crushed by the bigger powers. Many international observers feel that this time it may be worse and Kurds will remain divided forever.
The issue of unifying the Kurdish military forces has been on the agenda of their top leadership since they acquired de facto autonomy from then Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 1991. After launching separate guerrilla wars against the Iraqi Army in the 1970s and 1980s, the two main political parties of the Kurds — the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) — came to an agreement in 1992 that their respective Peshmerga (Kurdish militia which means “one who confronts death”) should be kept under one single command.
Henceforth, they had largely agreed to create the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs for looking after the affairs of the army units. Unfortunately with the outbreak of the bloody civil war among the Kurds in 1994, it stalled the process of integration of the Peshmerga. After long years of conflict, both the KDP and the PUK signed a peace agreement for unifying their Peshmerga units in 1998. Eighteen years on, the unification of Peshmerga is elusive; and they have remained as political armies fighting for achieving short-term goals. Realising the futility of the divided armies, the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs was reconstituted as a joint body in 2010. But many still feel that the renewed body will even find it too difficult to bring the much required unity in warring Peshmerga factions. When Western nations rushed to offer military aid to Iraqi Kurds on the face of the mounting ISIS attacks in June 2014, they in fact failed to develop a strategy for dealing with a non-State actor.
Ironically, lending military support to the Kurdish Peshmerga was counter-effective to the American vision of keeping Iraq a united nation. Further, this military aid bolstered all the Iraqi centrifugal forces, instead of building a unified force against the ISIS. Delivered this way, the risk of prolonging the ISIS-led war is certain and in the process, the Peshmerga unity will remain a dream. Today Kurdish partners are becoming more dependent on both Turkey and Iran after the arrival of the ISIS. The popular belief that the coalition aid to the Peshmerga will either intensify the fight against the ISIS or at least will contain the same so that the Western forces can oversee it from a safe distance. Kurdish leaders also propagate the view that once their armies receive advanced weapons, the battle against the ISIS will come to a close. But the evolving politics of Kurdish politics makes rather an ambiguous turn: the rival political parties, the KDP and the PUK had moved away from a strategic framework agreement which was supposed to bring peace after a bitter fight between their respective political armies. Today the reasons for their failure to come up with a unified front is wide open: the patriarchs of both these parties, Masoud Barzani (KDP) and Jalal Talabani (PUK), do not enjoy much support among their followers and this waning influence may likely to unleash an intra-elite power struggle within the rank and file of the parties.
The demand for an independent Kurdistan is at a fragile stage. The current iteration of the war on terror, particularly aiming the ISIS menace, is not bringing any new hope to the Kurdish people, but surely it is igniting the old and brand new internecine tensions, largely undermining what they had achieved in the past. As the Kurdish political leaders are constantly failing to build up a single chain of military command, it is gradually paving the way for external powers involvement in their domestic affairs. Notably, Iran is expanding its influence over the Kurdish faction led by Talabani and this has become more overt after the US withdrawal from Iraq and the outbreak of the civil war in Syria. At best, it can be said that the emergence of the ISIS, a Sunni Islamic fundamentalist force mainly in Iraq and Syria, has accelerated the involvement of Iran in the affairs of Iraq.
On the other hand, the KDP has historically found its ally in Turkey. In fact, Iran’s relationship with the Iraqi PUK and the Syrian People’s Defence Force (YPG) of the Kurds have broadly allowed to facilitate a cross-border cooperation between the two groups of fighters and their leaders, complicating the already deteriorating tensions across the region. It also allowed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to control and coordinate the actions of various Shia militias in Iraq, which finally is leading to the fast disintegration of the Iraqi military. Arguably, the Iranian intelligence, military and politicians are now influencing the Iraqi statecraft much more vigorously than before. Hence an Iranian agenda is deeply embedded in Iraqi military, civilian militias, and especially in the PUK-controlled Peshmergas. This may pose a serious threat to the growth of Kurdistan and may even be quite impossible to reverse in the post-ISIS era.
Barzani and Talabani are facing a huge financial crisis today. As long as the revenues kept rolling, no one quibbled. But the current Iraqi Government has cut funding that it used to transfer to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), some $10 billion annually. With the falling oil prices in the global market, Barzani is facing an acute crisis and it may exacerbate the succession battle in his party. Barzani the autocrat is no longer in control of his people and a deep divide is growing between his cronies and the other leaders in the party. At the same time, the finances of Talabani too are in a shambles, but his party has adopted a more pragmatic approach to Baghdad than the Barzani’s.
In the meantime, the Kurdish fight for identity has become more complex with the coming of the Rojova Revolution, an attempt to construct an autonomous rule for Kurds in Syria. Rojova refers to west and hence it advocates the establishment of a Western Kurdistan in Syria. Since the Syrian conflict intensified with the demand for removal of President Bashar-al Assad, the Kurdish movement led by the PYD (Democratic Union Party) has taken control of the major parts of the Kurdish region in the country. This opens up a different challenge for a would-be struggling nation which is already failing to unify the warring factions. In the meantime, the rivalry between Turkey and Iran is on the rise and both the States are not in favour of the establishment of a Kurdish State. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Turkey is a left-wing anti-nationalist platform for the Kurds which is gaining considerable support in respective pockets. But the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has been waging war against Turkey and it is a terrorist organisation. So Turkey in no way aspires to see the unification of the Kurdish forces across the region as it would mean creating a separate land for them.
The contemporary Kurdish narrative of victimisation brings to light a different saga of them. These people spread out in four countries across West Asia still believe that one day they will have their independent homeland. However, the staid and often oversimplified historiography of the Kurds have at times created confusion over the identity, polity and their very demand for an independent land stretching some of the controversial borders marked especially by the historic Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916. It is but unlikely that the day for an “independent Kurdistan” is nearing, rather recording their fractured past replete with varied demands of warring factions may either complicate or push for an indefinite period the “dawn of their nationhood”. Despite Western concerns for now or later, the absence of a professional Peshmerga and a relative unity among various factions of the Kurds in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey may eventually derail all the peace missions in the region as the Kurds are an indispensable partner in the long-held conflict. But then how long the Kurds will wait for their homelandIJ
(The writer is a Senior Editor, The Pioneer)