KELE BI, Iraq, (Reuters) – A grave, freshly dug and adorned with pebbles, is the modest tribute to one more sacrifice in the long history of struggle for an independent Kurdish state.
Hogir Fathi was looking forward to home leave in his village in autonomous Kurdistan when the 24-year-old, a fighter in the Iraqi region’s peshmerga forces, was killed by a bomb while on the frontline against Islamist militants who last month drove the Iraqi army from most of the north outside the Kurdish zone.
“I am proud my son was martyred,” said his father, Mehdi, himself a peshmerga, who fought the army of Saddam Hussein. “There is no sacrifice too great for an independent Kurdistan.”
A century after the Kurds lost out in the carve-up of the Ottoman empire after World War One, denied a state of their own and left scattered across four others, that dream is suddenly closer as fighting among Iraq’s Arabs – minority Sunnis and the Shi’ites in power – fuels talk of the country being partitioned.
The Kurds of Iraq, who have governed themselves since U.S. air power pinned back the Sunni dictator Saddam after the 1991 Gulf War, have already exploited the chaos to expand their territory by as much as 40 percent, including the oilfields and city of Kirkuk, which they claim as their national capital.
Their president last week called for a referendum on secession. And there is little doubt it would overwhelmingly back independence, as an unofficial plebiscite did in 2005.
But economics and external pressures, from Baghdad but also from rival allies in Turkey, Iran and Washington, may well hold Kurdish leaders back from risking a final break any time soon.
“All the Kurdish people support it, but the leadership must consider whether the time is appropriate or not,” said Kurdistan Vice President Kosrat Rasul Ali, a veteran peshmerga commander.
“If the political climate is not ripe, perhaps we will have to wait years. Otherwise it will be a misadventure,” he added, echoing the caution of several leaders who spoke to Reuters.
As it has for a decade, the threat alone of secession may offer greater benefits to the Kurds in the three-way bargaining with Shi’ites and Sunnis that has defined post-Saddam politics.
TURKISH, IRANIAN INFLUENCES
The five million Iraqi Kurds, who are mostly Sunni Muslim by religion but define themselves by their language and culture, already enjoy wide autonomy, running their own armed forces and, to the annoyance of Baghdad, starting to export their own oil.
Hostility from Turkey, which fought its own Kurdish revolt for decades, may no longer be the obstacle it once was to full independence for Iraqi Kurdistan.
Though wary of the impact that might have on its own Kurdish minority and officially committed the unity of Iraq, Ankara has worked with Iraq’s Kurds to buffer Turkey against the chaos to the south and become a buyer of their oil. Many Kurdish leaders are quietly confident Ankara would not block their sovereignty.
