ARBIL, Iraq, (Reuters) – The president of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region asked its parliament yesterday to plan a referendum on Kurdish independence, signalling his impatience with Baghdad, which is fighting to repel Sunni insurgents and struggling to form a new government.
The move came despite U.S. pressure for Kurds to stand with Baghdad as Iraq faces an onslaught by Sunni Muslim militants, led by an al Qaeda offshoot, which has seized large parts of the north and west and is threatening to march on the capital.
Iraq’s 5 million Kurds, who have governed themselves in relative peace since the 1990s, have expanded their territory by as much as 40 percent in recent weeks as the sectarian insurgency has threatened to split the country. Kurdish President Massoud Barzani asked lawmakers to form a committee to organise a referendum on independence and pick a date for the vote.
“The time has come for us to determine our own fate and we must not wait for others to determine it for us,” Barzani said in a closed session of the Kurdish parliament that was later broadcast on television.
“For that reason, I consider it necessary … to create an independent electoral commission as a first step and, second, to make preparations for a referendum.”
Barzani’s call came days after Kurds and Sunnis walked out of the newly elected Iraqi parliament’s first session in Baghdad, complaining that the majority Shi’ites had failed to nominate a prime minister.
Many Kurds have long wanted to declare independence and now sense a golden opportunity, with Baghdad weak and Sunni armed groups in control of northern cities such as Mosul and Tikrit. Top U.S. defence officials, who have deployed advisers to the region to assess the state of the Iraqi military, said the security forces were able to defend Baghdad but would have difficulty going on the offensive to recapture lost territory, mainly because of logistical weaknesses.
“If you’re asking me will the Iraqis at some point be able to go back on the offensive to recapture the part of Iraq that they’ve lost, I think that’s a really broad campaign quality question,” General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon. “Probably not by themselves.”
Dempsey said “the future is pretty bleak” for Iraqis unless they can bridge the sectarian differences within their government.
The absence of an inclusive government, he said, was a factor in the security forces’ failure to stand up to ISIL.
“They didn’t collapse in the face of a fight. They collapsed in the face of a future that didn’t hold out any hope for them,” Dempsey said.
Unless the Iraqi government bridges internal sectarian differences and “gets the message out that it really does intend to allow participation by all groups, everything we’re talking about (doing to help) makes no difference,” he said.
