The US has long-standing ties with the Kurds, which date back to the 1970s during the Kurdish rebellions against the Iraqi central government. Following the uprising in Iraqi Kurdistan in March 1991 and the creation of the over the Kurdistan region of Iraq, relations between the Kurds and the US have improved significantly. This relation with the regime change in Iraq in 2023 has further enhanced as the Kurdish fighters play a key role in helping the US open a new frontline in northern Iraq to topple the Saddam regime.ĚýĚý

Similarly, during the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2014, the US decisively supported the Kurdish figures in Iraq and Syria. The Kurds, with help from the US, played a key role in defeating ISIS in both countries. Hence, this historical partnership has laid the groundwork for Washington to publicly discuss the possibility of using Iranian Kurdish fighters as ground forces in a conflict against the current Iranian regime. 

Trump has sent mixed messages in this regard. On March 5, he argued that he would forces if they decided to launch a military offensive against Iran, describing the idea as positive. When asked whether the US would provide air support for the operation, he declined to give a clear answer, saying he could not discuss that.Ěý

However, on March 7, Trump having Kurdish fighters join the war against Iran. In this regard, he said, “I don’t want the Kurds going in. I don’t want to see the Kurds get hurt, get killed. I told them I don’t want them. The war is complicated enough.”Ěý

There is no clear answer whether the US will finally topple the regime or, at this specific stage, end this war. Hence, the key question is: Why has the Kurdish factor in Iran suddenly become an important topic in the US and Israel’s war against Iran?

In reality, there are many explanations for this. One possibility is that Israel and the US could move toward overthrowing the Iranian regime in Tehran. However, this has not yet been officially and clearly announced by the US. Moreover, Kurdish fighters could be viewed as an effective instrument in this context. In particular, the US and Israel seek to make western Kurdistan a platform for inciting and encouraging a general uprising in the rest of Iran.

Another possibility is that the US might have wanted to use Kurdish forces as a tool to pressure the current Iranian authorities and push them to make greater concessions to Trump’s demands. As he recently said, the aim of the war is “” of the Iranian authorities.Ěý

Fear of abandonment: Kurdish demands for guarantees in any alliances against Iran

The Iranian Kurdish opposition parties are willing to seize the opportunity and ally with the US and Israel against Iran to achieve their historic ambition, manifested in establishing a federal or autonomous region in western Kurdistan. However, they have serious concerns about moving forward with such a policy without concrete guarantees of protection. In particular, the US doesn’t have a clear strategy, and it explicitly argues that the endgame is not regime change in Iran, but the destruction of Iranian military capacities. 

Furthermore, while the US has supported the Kurds at different times, it has also abandoned them on several occasions, leaving them to face existential threats. For example, following the Kurdistan in September 2017, the Trump administration allowed Iraqi federal troops and Iranian-backed Hashd al-Shaabi militias — with direct support of Iran — to attack the Kurdish Peshmerga forces in Kirkuk and disputed areas. As a result, the Kurds lost roughly 40% of the territory that Peshmerga had held.ĚýAt that time, Trump said the US would not take a side.

In January 2026, even though the Kurds were key partners of the US in the war against ISIS in Syria, they were abandoned once again. The Trump administration allowed the former commander of Al Qaida al-Sharia, with his Damascus-led army, to attack the Kurdish forces and take the territory under the control of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). As a result, on January 20, , US Special Envoy for Syria, declared that the Kurdish-led SDF’s role as the primary anti-ISIS force had “.”

This background indicates that Kurdish concerns are genuine, as they fear the possibility that the US could once again abandon them. Therefore, before taking further steps, they seek guarantees and assurances from the US. The key demands of the Iranian Kurds are a guarantee that they will not be abandoned in the face of an Iranian threat, in both cases, whether the Iranian regime collapses or remains in place.

This is a very important point, in particular, if the regime survives, it may again crush the Kurds and could even against them as it has done after 1979. Hence, in this case, establishing a no-fly zone in Eastern Kurdistan is crucial to ensure that the Kurdish people are protected. Further, the Kurds seek to convert their military achievements into political gains. Therefore, the US should back the Kurds by guaranteeing support both if the current regime collapses and in advancing their demands for some sort of autonomy.ĚýĚý

Between Iranian threats and proxy attacks: Kurdistan faces rising security risks

In fact, any cooperation between the US and Iranian Kurdish groups against the regime in Iran would have serious implications for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). It is clear that the KRG has sought to reassure Tehran that it would not pose a threat. However, increasing conflict with the US is pushing the Iranian regime to pursue a more aggressive policy in the KRG. In particular, Iran and its proxy militias in Iraq have frequently threatened and targeted the Kurdistan region.

Since the 2020 of Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian military officer who served in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran has essentially turned the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) into a battlefield, sending a message to the US, Israel and its allies. Following the of the young Kurdish-Iranian woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, and the outbreak of demonstrations across Iran in September 2023, the country has intensified its attacks against the KRI. As a result, the IRGCĚýĚýthe Kurdish-Iranian opposition groups.Ěý

Iran blames the Iranian Kurds for instigating and sustaining the protests in Iran. Even the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, , hasĚýĚýan unprecedented ground military operation against Iraqi Kurdistan if Baghdad does not disarm Iranian Kurdish opposition groups on Iraqi soil. Following the 12 days of with Israel in June 2025, Iranian proxies in Iraq hit oil fields and infrastructure in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. These strikes targeted oil facilities, airports and some military locations.

With the start of the new military operation by the US and Israel against Iran beginning February 28, once again, the KRI turned into a battlefield, and Iran and its proxies are intensively targeting infrastructure in the Kurdistan region. These attacks intensified following reports that Trump spoke with Iraqi Kurdish leaders by phone, urging them to support the Iranian Kurdish opposition. 

In a statement, the KRG strongly reports suggesting the Kurdistan Region is taking part in a plan to arm and send Kurdish opposition parties into Iranian territory. Furthermore, the KRG emphasized that it would not be part of the current conflict, which could expand across the region.ĚýIt reiterated the Kurdistan Region’s stance of avoiding further conflict amid the current regional turmoil.

Hence, it can be argued that if the US pushes Iranian Kurdish opposition groups to participate in a war against Iran, the KRG could face serious and even existential risks, even if it rejects or refuses to support such a policy. 

The Iranian authorities are clearly sending a very serious warning and threatening the KRI in case Iranian Kurdish fighters are involved in the war. On March 6, Iran’s Defense Council released a statement that so far, Iran has only focused on US and Israeli bases in the region, as well as opposition political parties operating within the Kurdistan region.Ěý

It added that:

“Should their continued presence and plotting be permitted, or should these groups or [Zionist] regime elements enter the borders of the Islamic Republic through the Region, all facilities of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq … will be targeted on a massive scale.”

Further, the Spokesperson of the Khatam Al-Anbiya, Lieutenant Colonel Ebrahim Zolfaghari, issued a to the Kurdistan region, stating that any attempt by the Kurdistan region to deploy hostile forces in the Iranian border strip will be met with severe action by the Iranian armed forces.Ěý

Hence, in the case of involving the Iranian opposition Kurds in this war, the most dangerous scenario for the KRG would be if the political system in Iran remains in place and does not collapse, and if the US and Israel halt their attacks. There’s no doubt the KRG would face a serious threat, and Iran would do everything to undermine the KRG’s position. 

One of the key instruments that Iran could use, besides directly attacking the Kurdistan region, is using its militia proxies in Iraq and even the Iraqi government led by the Shia parties against the KRG. In particular, since the eruptions of the current war, the Shia militias have intensified their attacks against the Kurdistan region. According to Rudaw News, since the beginning of the war, more than 638 drones and missiles have the Kurdistan Region.Ěý

Therefore, in any scenario where the US pushes Iranian Kurdish fighters to participate in a war against Iran, it should provide clear assurances and guarantees not only to the Iranian Kurdish groups but also to the Kurdistan Region, which could face serious security consequences from such involvement.

[ edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Corruption has deteriorated the region, and it is not an aberration in the Kurdish political order; it is deeply embedded in its structures. At the same time, economic fragility, political fragmentation and social disillusionment are converging to produce a crisis. Put simply, the system that once promised refuge and self-determination for the Kurds has become a vector of stagnation and grievance.

The political economy of corruption and power

At the heart of Kurdistan’s systemic malaise is the capture of the political system by a tribal power and entrenched elites. The two dominant parties — the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) — have long monopolized power. While corruption levels in the KRI may be somewhat lower than in the rest of Iraq, they remain significant and structurally , and have been worsening in recent years.Ěý

This is largely due to the political entrenchment of party patronage networks and weak bureaucratic oversight mechanisms. Nepotism, clientelism and opaque revenue allocation have become the norm, not the exception.

Scholarly analyses further underline the role of as a legitimizing ideology for entrenched patronage. What began as liberation rhetoric has often been repurposed and instrumentalized to justify the concentration of state resources and to insulate powerful elites from accountability. The effect? A political culture where opposition voices are portrayed as threats to Kurdish unity and rendered as enemies, rather than essential actors in democratic governance.

This dynamic is not merely theoretical. In August 2025, armed clashes erupted in after the arrest of an opposition figure associated with internal PUK dissent, revealing how factionalized power struggles spill directly into violence and civil unrest. Security forces deployed tanks and drones in urban areas, and dozens were arrested amid allegations of destabilization — underscoring how political authority is increasingly enforced through security rather than consensus.

Economic stress and public frustration

Kurdistan’s economy, long reliant on oil exports and federal transfers from the central government of Baghdad, has been under severe stress. Disputes with Iraq’s central government over budgetary allocations and revenue sharing have periodically led to salary freezes for public employees in 2025 — aggravating already precarious livelihoods for teachers, civil servants and healthcare workers. This dispute is not just a technical fiscal issue; it has become a flashpoint of political resentment and constitutional contention.

Beyond salaries, basic services continue to deteriorate. Reports from media outlets widespread power cuts, water shortages and weakened public services across the region, heightening public frustration with a government that seems unable or unwilling to deliver essential infrastructure and social support.

The current situation in the Kurdistan Region increasingly mirrors the post-1990s era in Iraq, when international sanctions crippled the economy, public services collapsed and widespread poverty became an inescapable reality.

These economic pressures accentuate the perception of a kleptocratic order, where public wealth is siphoned through patronage networks and strategic contracts, while everyday citizens with economic insecurity. Such conditions stoke social disillusionment and feed narratives of hopelessness that resonate across households and communities.

Civic space, media and human rights

Corruption not only destroys economics and politics, but it also corrodes civic space, the general rhetoric and media freedom. Independent journalism in the KRI has long struggled under political pressure and, more recently, cuts in support have further hampered investigative reporting. As one outlet documented, investigations into sensitive issues like human organ trafficking are often self-censored out of fear of political backlash.

International human rights reporting also highlights a worsening environment for in both federal Iraq and the Kurdish region. Restrictions on peaceful assembly, allegations of arbitrary detention and the use of force against protesters have been documented over the past several years.

This suppression of dissent may yield short-term control, but it furthers the alienation of broad segments of society, especially the youth, civil society activists and independent journalists who see little space to advocate for reform without risking repression.

Social fractures and the weight of public discontent

The combination of corruption, economic decline and political repression is driving a broader social crisis in the KRI. Widespread inactivity and hopelessness among young people, rooted in high unemployment and lack of economic opportunity, fuels both frustration and a sense that the promise of Kurdistan’s autonomy has been hollowed out.

In numerous online videos, Kurdish citizens have voiced growing frustration with the regional authorities, openly calling for their salaries to be paid directly by Baghdad and expressing disillusionment with the KRI’s self-governance.

Public protests have a history in the region: the in Sulaymaniyah were driven by corruption, unemployment, and service failures, and were met with violent crackdowns. Meanwhile, across Iraq, in 2025 have resurfaced around salary delays, electricity shortages and poor economic conditions, of which the Kurdish region is a microcosm.

When the state consistently fails to provide basic needs or meaningful participation in governance, people inevitably turn to various forms of expression. This polarization is dangerous in a region already marked by sectarian and ethnic complexity.

The breaking point: when governance fails its people

If current trends persist, the Kurdistan Region faces a deepening convergence of political, economic and social crises. Internal fragmentation among ruling elites and between the government and civil society threatens to reignite violent rivalries, as seen in the Sulaymaniyah clashes. Economic stagnation, opaque fiscal management and inconsistent coordination with Baghdad continue to erode living standards, pushing many, especially young professionals, toward emigration.

Equally alarming is the steady erosion of public legitimacy. A governance model that privileges partisan interests over public welfare undermines the very foundations of the Kurdish social contract. Unless the ruling class embraces transparency, power-sharing and reform, the region risks sliding from fragile stability into systemic decay, betraying the promise that once defined the Kurdish aspiration for self-rule.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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This is the verbatim language employed by the judges of the Iranian Supreme Court (Branch 4) in a case involving the alleged rape of a 7-year-old child by a 71-year-old man in Mariwan, Kurdistan, Iran, in October 2019. In accordance with criminal procedure law, investigations into such sensitive matters are generally conducted confidentially, thereby hindering public access to relevant information. Through serendipitous circumstances, I secured access to the court documents pertaining to this case during my field research in the Kurdistan region of Iran. The following paragraphs offer a critical analysis of the Supreme Court’s decision to acquit the accused of rape in this case.

This tragic incident unfolded on a fateful day when concerned citizens reported a suspected case of child sexual abuse to the local authorities in Mariwan. Acting swiftly, the prosecutor ordered the arrest of the alleged perpetrator. During the investigation, the accused admitted to taking the child with the intent of committing a sexual act, although he claimed that penetration did not occur. Throughout the proceedings, the accused’s statements were contradictory and inconsistent, at times denying any wrongdoing and attributing the incident to accidental contact. Despite the accused’s confession and the existence of visual evidence, the “First Class Criminal Court” of Kurdistan Province acquitted him of rape, convicting him only for an indecent act. This decision sparked outrage and protests from human rights activists and the child’s lawyer. The young victim, who had tragically lost both parents, was living under the care of her elderly grandfather, who was struggling financially. The accused, a neighbor, was aware of the child’s vulnerable situation and exploited it by enticing her with treats on the day of the incident.

Appeal to the Supreme Court

The victim’s lawyer appealed the Kurdistan Criminal Court’s decision to the Supreme Court. Despite presenting a comprehensive defense that provided compelling evidence supporting the allegations of rape, the Supreme Court ultimately rejected the appeal. Similar to the lower court, the Supreme Court characterized the accused’s actions as an indecent act rather than rape. The court’s rationale was primarily based on the absence of complete penetration, as evidenced by the intact hymen, despite the presence of minor injuries to the labia. This precedent reflects a prevailing trend in Iranian criminal law that often fails to recognize acts of sexual violence that do not involve complete penetration as rape. Notably, the Supreme Court completely disregarded the unique vulnerabilities and fundamental legal protections afforded to minor victims, failing to consider the broader context of the case and the potential long-term consequences for the child.

Generally, in , which is primarily based on Islamic jurisprudence, rape is not explicitly criminalized. Instead, the penal code focuses on the crime of łúľ±˛ÔÄĺ, defined in as sexual intercourse between unmarried individuals that is not accidental. According to this definition, penetration is a key element of łúľ±˛ÔÄĺ, implying that acts of sexual violence that do not involve complete penetration may not be considered rape. Furthermore, the article narrowly defines penetration as occurring when the penis of a man, up to the point of circumcision, enters the vagina or anus of a woman.Ěý

In this case, the accused explicitly described the details of his sexual acts with the victim, including multiple instances of rubbing his [sexual organ] against the victim’s body [vagina]. Despite this clear confession and the supporting evidence from the victim’s lawyer, the Supreme Court failed to classify these acts as rape. According to the accused’s statement and the lawyer’s account, the accused repeatedly engaged in this behavior, causing the child to experience severe fear and distress. However, the courts did not consider the severity of these acts to constitute rape.

Iran’s international o

This narrow definition of rape excludes a broad range of sexual offenses from the category of rape, particularly those involving children.

Despite being a to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (), Iran has failed to adequately fulfill its obligations to protect children and adolescents from sexual violence. Articles 19 and 34 of the UNCRC mandate that states take measures to protect children from all forms of violence, including sexual violence, and to explicitly commit to protecting children from sexual exploitation and abuse.

Despite these international obligations and widespread from human rights advocates and children’s rights organizations, Iranian law remains insufficient in providing adequate protection for children’s rights against sexual violence.

Notably, even recent reforms in Iran have to introduce specific legal measures for the protection of children in cases of rape. The ongoing prevalence of and against children in Iran is a testament to the enduring cultural taboos and societal stigma that continue to endanger victims and perpetuate impunity.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorialĚýpolicy.

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The Kurds have a historical connection to Palestine that dates back to the time of , the great Muslim Kurdish leader revered for his role in defeating the Crusaders in the Holy Land. To expand and protect the vast which he founded, Salah ad-Din placed many Kurdish settlers in Palestine, Egypt and Syria. The descendants of those Kurdish settlers continue to live in Palestine today, but they have largely into Arab culture, abandoning their Kurdish roots and language.

Similarly, Jews have lived in Kurdistan for centuries, dating back to the 12th century by some accounts. However, most migrated to Israel with the establishment of the Jewish state and the law, which gave all Jews the legal right to immigrate to Israel. Today, there are between 200,000 to 300,000 in Israel who continue to celebrate their Kurdish roots but have adopted the Hebrew language.

Religious identity and Kurdish supporters of Hamas

While the Kurds have a historical connection with the two nations, they are not monolithic in their views on the Israel–Palestine conflict. This has become more evident since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza.

Recently, pictures of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh have circulated in Kurdish social media. This attention to Haniyeh has alarmed many Kurds, including myself, about the growing number of Kurds who seem to support Hamas. They are expressing solidarity with Hamas due largely to the fact that Kurds and Palestinians share a common Muslim identity. Furthermore, Kurds see their own struggle mirrored in the Palestinian experience.

Yet the Kurdish and Palestinian situation is different. Kurds are a diverse people. Not all Kurds are Muslim. Some belong to ancient religious communities like the and the , who have faced by Muslims seeking religious homogenization.

Islamist Kurdish factions that support Hamas, including some political in the autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq, add another layer of complexity to the matter. Many of these groups have Haniyeh as a martyr and resistance fighter despite Hamas’s use of terrorist tactics like suicide bombings and its for leaders like Saddam Hussein, who Kurds or their alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran that continues to imprison and execute Kurdish teachers and activists; and assassinate Kurdish leaders. Furthermore, I have searched both in English and Kurdish and found no evidence that these Islamist Kurds expressed any sorrow over the unjust killings of Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023. These Islamists do not care about the fact that Human Rights Watch Hamas’s actions war because to them Jewish lives do not matter. 

Support for Hamas among these more religiously radical Kurds reveals a key tension in Kurdish society. Despite a century of Kurdish nationalism, many Kurds still seem to prioritize their religious identity over their ethnic one. The Kurdish political class has yet to win the hearts and minds of more religious Kurds. For instance, , the current leader of the Islamic Justice Group, and members of his party were reported to have refused to stand up for the Kurdish national due mainly to a line in the anthem that reads, “Our faith and religion are our homeland.”

These Islamists often with regional powers like or Turkey despite both countries engaging in a silent cultural genocide against Kurds that is decades long. Clearly, they still put their identity first. This prioritization of religion over ethnic or national identity informs their support for Islamic powers like Iran and Turkey or organizations like Hamas.

Being muslim does not mean that one has to sacrifice his own nation like many of these islamists do. Many prominent historical Kurdish leaders like Sheikh Ubeidullah of , Sheikh Mehmoud , Sheik Said of and were quite religious yet struggled and even gave their lives for the Kurdish nation’s struggle for liberation. 

The Islamist Kurdish agenda and its implications 

These Islamist Kurds are not merely supporting Hamas because they feel for the oppressed Palestinians. They seek what all Islamist groups seek: a strict Islamic state. This is clear if one examines the history of these groups in Kurdish regions. In Turkish-occupied Kurdistan, a radical armed Kurdish Islamist group known as the Kurdish emerged around the same time as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the 1980s.

This Islamist organization launched a conflict against the PKK and anyone who disagreed with their extremist views. They carried out kidnappings, and mass murders. There are now concerns that this terror group has reformed into the Islamist party known as the , which won 4 seats in the Turkish parliament in the 2023 election.

Similarly, in the Kurdistan region in Iraq, long before the Islamic State, secular Kurdish parties like the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) faced severe security challenges in dealing with radical Islamist groups like the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (IMK). The IMK later morphed into and many other Islamist groups. These groups sought to establish a strict Wahhabist Islamic state. Before PUK forces drove them out, they even sharia law in some villages. These were similar to the laws favored by al-Qaeda and Taliban, who incidentally many of the founders of Ansar al-Islam. They fought in alongside both these organizations.

So, support for Hamas by Islamist groups is not just mere support of fellow oppressed people or co-religionists. This support is part of a broader Islamist agenda that spans the Middle East region and poses a serious threat to local, regional and international security.

Kurdish neutrality and geopolitical realities

It is important to note that Islamists do not represent all Kurds. The Kurdish position on the Israel-Palestine conflict is quite varied. Major political across greater Kurdistan take a neutral position on the Israel-Palestine conflict. They are not completely immune to the strong anti-Israel sentiment in the region. Yet Kurds can sympathize with embattled Israel’s geopolitical position. They recognize that their primary adversaries are Muslim-majority states like Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq. These states, not Israel, have historically and continue to oppress Kurds and Kurdish lands.

It was Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, not an Israeli leader, who used Islamic scripture to justify the , which killed some Kurds. He killed more using chemical weapons in the city of Halabja. It is that has jailed, killed and tried to erase Kurdish culture and identity for a century. The mere utterance of the words “” or “Kurdistan” can land you in Turkish jail for a long time, if not forever. Turkey, not Israel, massacres Kurds and calls them “mountain Turks.”

Muslim states like Iran have been handing heavy prison and even death sentences to teachers, activists and protesters advocating Kurdish rights. This bloody crackdown on Kurdish civil society in Iran has been unceasing since the establishment of The Islamic Republic of ’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a to kill Kurds advocating for their rights. Recently, Kurdish girls like were murdered or  imprisoned for how they dressed, what they thought or who they were. Thousands were seized during the Jin, Jiyan, Azadi movement that spread all over Iran and capitals across the world. Even now, are tortured or executed in Evin Prison for teaching the Kurdish language.

It was Syria, not Israel, that 120,000 Kurds of their citizenship and made them foreigners in their own land. These Kurds are now stateless. However, since the Syrian civil war, the Kurds under the PYD and its military forces like the YPG have established their own regional self-administration with the cooperation of local tribes and dealt a major defeat of ISIS. Despite the countless lives given in the war against ISIS, the Turkish has decided to carry out operations that are ongoing against the Kurds in Syria to ethnically cleanse them out of their regions and settle Turkish-backed Islamists and Syrian refugees currently residing in Turkish camps. The gruesome and reports of war crimes and human rights abuses carried out by Turkish forces and Turkish backed Islamist forces reveal that Turkey’s efforts to create a safe zone in North Syria are motivated largely by its animosity towards the Kurds inhabiting the region.Ěý

It is quite shocking then that these very states that committed and continue to commit crimes against Kurds tell them that “we are in Islam.” These states that occupy Kurdish lands are carrying out a genocide or erasure of Kurdish identity and culture that is killing thousands of people gradually and silently without any real opposition by regional and international powers.Ěý

The double standard: Kurdish cause vs. Palestinian cause

Why is it then that these states speak out so vocally against oppression or aggression against Palestinians yet continue to occupy and oppress Kurds in their own backyard? If Palestinians have the right to statehood, so too do Kurds. Yet, the blatant hypocrisy and of these states shows the insincerity of their policy and stance on Palestine. 

These states are not interested at all in what is just but what will further their national and ideological interests only. It is not being Muslim that these states care about; if they did, then surely they would not occupy and oppress Kurds who are vastly Muslim. It is not standing against occupation and oppression that they care about, as they claim in the case of Palestine, for if they did care about such matters, they would not inflict the same injustices on the Kurdish people. 

There is thus a clear double standard, particularly if one examines how Kurdish self-determination is treated relative to how Palestinian self-determination is treated. Look at the regional reactions to the 2017 Kurdistan held in Iraqi Kurdistan. Some 139 out of 193 UN member states have Palestinian statehood since the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) declared the nationhood of Palestine in 1988. The Kurds received vocal support for their 2017 referendum from Israel alone. Even UN Secretary-General António Guterres called Kurdistan’s move for independence “.”

The majority of Muslim states, including the State of Palestine, to Kurdish independence. Yet these same states vocally support Palestinian statehood. PLO Secretary General Saeb Erekat Kurdish independence “a poisoned sword against the Arabs.” Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei the vote an act of betrayal and accused the US of seeking to create a new Israel in the region by supporting Kurdish independence — even though the US had opposed the referendum.

Many Kurds are tired of being victims of the geopolitics of the region. Countries like Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria typically view both and Kurdish nationalism as projects of Western . This is despite the fact that it was the European imperialist Sykes-Picot Plan that unjustly Kurdistan and allocated it to these states. These states often label Kurdistan a , illustrating that an extreme anti-Kurdism, similar to their anti-Jewish/Israeli sentiments, animates their outlook.

Kurds, perhaps more than most, empathize with the struggles of Palestinians and Jews. However, their own history has shown them how superficial much of the support from Muslim states for Palestine can be. This awareness allows Kurds to see through hollow and hypocritical rhetoric, making them less inclined to instinctively side with Palestine or Israel. As a result, many Kurds hold more nuanced and balanced views on the issue.

All in all, the Kurdish experience provides a unique lens through which to view the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Kurdish struggle for identity, national sovereignty and justice mirrors that of both Jews and Palestinians. Yet they understand that an international community that applies its moral principles selectively will never end the cycle of violence and oppression in the Middle East.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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As we got closer, things became clearer. I could make out the map of Kurdistan — my home nation — on the protestor’s banners. Kurds are an ethnic group spread across neighboring in Armenia, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. Although Kurdistan has never achieved independence as a state, its borders are widely recognizable.

Via the Central Intelligence Agency.

The protest was precisely in front of the United Nations Office, whose picturesque, flag-adorned lawn was quiet aside from the few dozen protestors. The protestors accused Turkey of plotting genocide against Kurds — a claim that is .

Kurds have faced a century of . In the 1930s, the young Turkish Republic brutally put down rebellions in Kurdish areas, tens of thousands of civilians. More recently, Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime carried out a in Iraq’s Kurdish-populated north. Today, the regime of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan continues to carry out against Kurds in Syria while their political rights at home. It is hard not to feel the desperation of a people that, even here in the world capital of diplomacy, seems to go unheard.

Who is Abdullah Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô?

Flags featuring Kurdistan’s borders and posters of former Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô festooned the protest in Geneva. The protestors chanted slogans calling for Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô’s release. The 75-year-old man has spent the last 25 years of his life in a Turkish prison.

Many Kurds adore Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô. They affectionately refer to him as Apo (“Uncle”). Born in 1949 to a Turkish Kurd family, once attempted to enlist in the Turkish army. As a young man, he dropped out of Ankara University after being jailed for distributing leftist leaflets. Although he has never attained a college degree, Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô enjoys a reputation as a man of intelligence and education — at least according to my dad.

Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô took his university exposure to Marxism to heart, and he has remained a lifelong leftist. After his university experience, Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô became an advocate for Kurdish independence. In 1977, he and two comrades published a , “The National Road to the Kurdish Revolution,” which laid the foundation for the PKK’s philosophy. Kurdish liberation was to be attained by any means necessary, including violence.

Two years later, Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô and his comrades from Turkey to Syria. There, they began recruiting local ethnic Kurds and training them as guerrillas. These fighters became the core of the PKK. Five years later, the PKK started its armed campaign, fighting Turkish forces and assuming control of a small in southeastern Turkey. The PKK insists that it only targets Turkish military and has never admitted to attacks against civilians.

Turkey, the US, the EU and much of the international community declared Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô and the PKK . Many Kurds, however, view him as a revolutionary.

Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô’s reign as PKK leader lasted 15 years before his imprisonment in 1999. Turkey has him of kidnapping Western tourists, killing civilians and even targeting his own people who dared to challenge him during this time. Ask one of his supporters, however — including my dad — and you will hear a story of Turkish intelligence fabricating narratives and creating setups.

Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô went on to successively to Lebanon, Russia, Greece and several other countries to avoid capture by Turkish authorities. All the while, he remained in charge of the PKK. In 1999, Kenya Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô and extradited him to Turkey. A Turkish court sentenced him to for treason.

Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô did not get a fair trial

After the arrest, Kurds all over the world at Kenyan embassies, as well as Turkish, Greek and American ones, to no avail.

In 2004, Turkey — hoping to join the EU — the death penalty. Thus, Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

In 2005, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô’s trial unfair. The court pointed out that Turkey Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô’s lawyers — including both Turkish and Dutch citizens — from seeing their client. The court recommended a retrial, which Turkey refused.

Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô attempted to bargain his freedom by negotiating a ceasefire between the PKK and the Turkish government. Not only was the attempt unsuccessful, but the ceasefire also failed to stick. The PKK the first ceasefire in 2004. Another ceasefire started in and ended in 2011 and a third started in and ended in . All the while, Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô has to advocate for a negotiated agreement for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey along lines similar to in northern Iraq.

This brings us to July 17. A quarter century after his arrest, Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô’s supporters are still protesting for him. A few dozen independent Kurds in bright yellow vests have to stand in front of the UN building in Switzerland and plead a case that the ECHR has already ruled on. Turkey still will not listen.

As I sat on the bus back to my hotel, I read about Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô and asked my dad questions about him, I hear two different perspectives: one from world powers (the US, the EU) and the other from a Kurdish man who insisted the plight of the Kurds should have been in the Red Cross and Red Crescent museum.

The logical side of me struggles with the inconsistency. If Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô is a terrorist, why didn’t Turkey simply convict him in a fair trial? If Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô is a hero, why does he have such a checkered story?

I decided that, at the very least, Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô deserves a new trial. Turkey’s refusal does not prove Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô innocent, but it speaks volumes on the country’s position in Kurdistan. Why are they afraid of making their case in court?

Further, when with the US and the EU finally put pressure on NATO- and Council of Europe-member Turkey to stop hiding behind “terrorism” as an excuse and end its persecution of an ethnic minority? Has the West ever been shy about prodding the Middle East before?

Yet the Kurdish diaspora seems condemned to speak out alone. This protest in Geneva has been recurring since January 2021. All the while, Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô remains isolated on Mralı Island, a prison similar to Alcatraz, in the Sea of Marmara. Turkey emptied the prison island for Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô, keeping him alone for ten years from 1999 to . Since then, with no visits from family or lawyers, Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô’s only company is a few other convicts. Even now, the old man is just a few hours a week of face time with fellow human beings.

As far as we can foresee, the Kurdish diaspora will have to keep protesting.

[ edited this piece.]

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Turkey frequently stages cross-border strikes on targets in the Kurdistan Region and other nearby areas, including and . It justifies these attacks as necessary to combat the PKK, but they regularly result in harm to civilians. Community Peacemaker Teams (CPT), an international human rights group that has a robust mission in the Kurdistan Region, an estimated 129 civilians have been killed and another 180 wounded in Turkish cross-border attacks since 2015. Last year was the deadliest during that period. Between 18 and 20 civilians were killed, including six children, and 57 to 58 civilians were injured in 2022, to CPT.

The recent attacks

On August 6, the Turkish military conducted an airstrike on the village of Chnartu, just south of Aghjalar in the Sulaymaniyah Governorate. The airstrike reportedly one person of disputed affiliation. Ankara had targeted the area in May 2022, killing five people. Later that day, a killed a 24-year-old civilian and wounded another. They were traveling in a car in the Duhok Governorate’s Chamanke district. They were visiting a family farmhouse, according to relatives. The area is just a few miles away from Gara Mountain, parts of which are held by the PKK and are regularly by Turkish forces.

Then, on August 9, an airstrike hit a car traveling on the Erbil–Sulaymaniyah road just northwest of the resort town of Dukan. Two civilians were initially as wounded and one of them later . Footage of the spread quickly on social media. This is an extremely important road: in the six years since Kirkuk became part of federal Iraq, the route has carried the majority of civilian traffic between Erbil and Sulaymaniyah, the Kurdistan Region’s two largest cities and has handled the bulk of commercial traffic between the zones controlled by the KDP and the PUK, respectively.

Two days later, three civilians, including a 17-year-old girl, were killed in an airstrike on their car on a busy road near Nalparez in the Sulaymaniyah Governorate’s Penjwen district. Again, of a burning car was all over Kurdish social media. As with Dukan, the attack took place on a major road full of civilian and commercial traffic. The two-lane thoroughfare connects Sulaymaniyah with the border point, one of three major crossings between the Kurdistan Region and Iran.

The Kurdistan Counterterrorism Service, which is affiliated with the KDP and closely linked with Kurdistan Region Prime Minister Masrour Barzani, posted a message on Facebook that those killed were PKK fighters, but this was quickly proved to be false. In reality, the were Arabs originally from Mosul who were living in Duhok Governorate. One was an employee of Asiacell, a major telecommunications company. He was driving his neighbor and her daughter to the border in order to meet another daughter who is currently studying in Iran.

It’s crickets from the politicians

In response to the latest barrage and the civilian deaths, the KDP, the PUK and Iraqi officials in Baghdad were conspicuously silent. The KDP, headquartered in Erbil, has close economic, political and security ties with Turkey and therefore rarely criticizes Turkish cross-border attacks. Instead, it frequently that the presence of the PKK in the Kurdistan Region is responsible for harm to civilians or issues statements that support Ankara’s narrative, as the Counterterrorism Service did following the Penjwen airstrike. The KDP and the PKK have a hostile relationship and have engaged in sporadic as recently as 2021.

The PUK, based in Sulaymaniyah, is more willing to Turkey and has a relatively neutral relationship with the PKK in which both tend to avoid interfering in each other’s affairs. However, the party maintains with Syrian Kurdish groups that Ankara views as one and the same as the main branch of the PKK. In recent months, Ankara has the PUK to engage in a public crackdown on the PKK in its zone of control, including by its airspace to flights going to and from Sulaymaniyah International Airport until at least January 2024. The airstrikes in Sulaymaniyah in recent weeks are likely a way to increase this pressure on the PUK to act.

Iraqi federal officials have also not condemned the attacks. In general, they tend not to comment on Kurdish casualties, but the fact that they have not spoken out against the deaths of the Arabs in Penjwen is notable. It stands in stark contrast to the outrage following the deaths of nine Arab tourists who were killed in at Parkhe, a village resort in the Duhok Governorate, in July 2022. Some within the Shia Coordination Framework, which forms the core of Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani’s government, are actively to Turkish violations of Iraqi sovereignty.

The collective silence is likely related to a two-day by Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan that began this Wednesday and took him to Baghdad and Erbil. There is widespread speculation that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will also visit in the near future, depending on the success of his foreign minister’s visit. Before taking up his current post on June 3, was the head of Turkey’s intelligence service and was heavily involved in the conflict with the PKK.

Fidan’s visit comes at a delicate time for Iraq–Turkey relations and talks are expected to cover an extensive agenda that includes oil, water, security and trade. In many ways, Ankara has staked out a maximalist stance on these issues in order to elicit concessions from Baghdad; the recent airstrikes are likely part of that strategy. The Kirkuk–Ceyhan pipeline, which until March carried the Kurdistan Region’s oil exports, is currently following an arbitration ruling that favored Iraq. Turkey wants Iraq to drop a second case in return for the resumption of exports. Iraq is dealing with caused by Turkish upstream damming and has been largely unsuccessful at convincing its neighbor to release sufficient water supplies. The future of the recently Iraq Development Road, a $17 billion road and rail project, hinges on a Turkish outlet at the northern end. Indeed, these are big stakes.

While it is unsurprising that Iraqi and Kurdish officials do not want to upset Ankara ahead of these talks, it is also reprehensible. That civilians can be killed with such impunity and hardly a murmur of official outrage shows the weakness of Iraqi and Kurdish leaders who hide behind realpolitik while their people are killed from above.

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Optimists see hopeful signs that the Middle East may be exiting from a dark tunnel of violence, civil war, sectarian strife and debilitating regional rivalries. The Islamic State (IS) is on the cusp of territorial defeat in Syria and Iraq, Saudi Arabia may be groping for an exit from its devastating military intervention in Yemen, and Gulf states are embarking on economic and social reform aimed at preparing for the end of oil. Haltingly, countries in the Gulf may be forced to find a face-saving solution to the Qatar crisis, and there may even be an effort to dial down tension between the Riyadh and Tehran. , the Islamist faction that controls Gaza, has also said it is willing to negotiate with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas about joint rule of the strip and move toward long overdue elections.

At first glance, these are reasons for optimism. But don’t hold your breath. Optimists base their hopes on shifting sands and tentative suggestions that protagonists may be looking for ways out of the malaise. Yet none of the indicators involve actions that would tackle root causes of the Middle East’s multiple conflicts and problems. In fact, some of the solutions being tossed around amount to little more than window dressing, while others set the stage for a next phase of conflict and strife.

Talks between the feuding Palestinian factions have repeatedly failed. It is not even clear if Hamas would put pen to paper, as any deal would mean putting its armed wing under Abbas’ control — a key demand of the Palestinian president that the Islamists have so far rejected. It also remains to be seen how Israel would respond. Together with the United States, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the Israelis see Hamas as a terrorist organization.

KURDISH INDEPENDENCE REFERENDUM

Beyond Palestine, the contours of future conflict are already discernible. If Myanmar’s Rohingya are the 21st-century’s rallying cry of the Muslim world, the Kurds could be one of its major fault lines. Disputes over territory, power and resources between and among Sunnis, Shias and Kurds that fueled the rise of IS in Iraq are resurfacing with its demise. In a twist of irony, aĚýĚýin April showed that Sunnis were for the first time more positive about Iraq’s future than the country’s majority Shias.

Ěýin the north destroyed in the fight against the Islamic State is key to maintaining a semblance of Iraqi unity. With no signs of massive reconstruction gaining momentum, old wounds that have driven insurgencies for more than a decade could reignite IS in new forms. “All the writing is on the wall thatĚýthere will be another ISIS,” said the former Iraqi foreign minister and Kurdish politician, Hoshyar Zebari, referring to the group by another of its acronyms.

The initial flash in the pan threatens to be the fact that Iraqi Kurds are certain to vote for independence in a unilateral referendum scheduled for September 25. If the independence issue did not provide enough explosives in and of itself, the Kurds’ insistence on including in the referendum the ethnically mixed, oil-rich city of Kirkuk and adjacent areas have further fueled the fire. The referendum and the dispute over Kirkuk reopen the question of what Iraqi Kurdistan’s borders are even if the Kurds opt not to act immediately on a vote for independence and to remain part of an Iraqi federation for the time being.

The issue could blow a further hole intoĚý. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has denounced the referendum. His efforts to persuade the Iraqi parliament to fire the Kirkuk governor, Najmaldin Karim, for backing the poll, as well as calls for parliament to withdraw confidence in Iraqi President Fuad Masum and sack ministers and other senior officials ofĚýKurdish descent could push the Kurds over the edge.

Iraqi military officials and Iranian-backed Shia militias that are aligned with the army have vowed to prevent the referendum from being held in Kirkuk. “Kirkuk belongs to Iraq. We would by no means give up on Kirkuk even if this were to cause major bloodshed,” saidĚý, an Iran-backed Iraqi Shia militia. A possible fight may not be contained to Kirkuk. Kurdish and Iraqi government forces are vying for control of areas from which IS has been driven out, which stretch westward along the length of northern Iraq. Abadi has warned that he wouldĚýĚýif the referendum, which he described as unconstitutional, provoked violence.

Add to that the ganging up on the Kurds by Iran, Turkey and the US. Washington backs the Iraqi government even if it was the one that put Kurdistan on course toward independence, when it allowed the autonomous enclave to emerge under a protective no-fly zone that kept the forces of Saddam Hussein at bay. Breaking with the US and its Arab allies,ĚýĚýhas endorsed Kurdish independence.

Hakan Fidan, the Turkish intelligence chief, and Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Iranian Al Quds Force, have warned the Kurds on visits to Iraqi Kurdistan to back away from the referendum. Iran has threatened to close its borders with the region. Describing the referendum as “a matter of national security,”ĚýĚýsaid that “no one should have doubt that we will take all the necessary steps in this matter.” Turkey fears that Kurdish independence would spur secessionist aspirations among its own Kurds, who account for up to 20% of its population, and that an independent Kurdistan would harbor Turkish Kurdish insurgents already operating in the region.

Abadi has alluded to possibleĚýĚýto prevent the emergence of an independent Kurdistan by suggesting that the referendum would be “a public invitation to the countries in the region to violate Iraqi borders … The Turks are very angry about it because they have a large Kurdish population inside Turkey and they feel that their national security is threatened because it is a huge problem for them. And, of course, the Iranians are on the same line,” the Iraqi prime minister said.

The Kurdish quest for some form of self-rule is likely to manifest itself in Syria too. The US backsĚýĚýin its fight against IS. The militia that prides itself on its female fighters is among the forces besieging the IS capital of Raqqa.

The Kurds are hoping that an end to the war in Syria will leave them with an Iraq-style autonomous region on the Turkish border — an aspiration that Turkey, like in Iraq, vehemently opposes. As the target of strikes by the Turkish air force, the Kurds hope to benefit from the force’s shortage of pilots following mass purges in the wake of last year’s failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In August, the air force ordered allĚýĚýto report for service.

The Kurds may provide the first flashpoint for another round of volatility and violence, but they are not the only ones. Nor are sectarian and other ethnic divisions that are likely to wrack Iraq and Syria, once the current round of fighting subsides.

LOOKING AT THE GULF

Eager to find a face-saving exit from its ill-fated invasion of Yemen that has pushed the country to the edge of the abyss, Saudi Arabia will have to cope with a populous country on its border, many of whose citizens harbor deep-seated anger at the devastation and human suffering caused by the Saudis that will take years to reverse.

Similarly, the rift between Qatar and an alliance led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE is likely to leave deep-seated scars that will hamper integration among the six states that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the Middle East’s only functioning regional bloc prior to the crisis. A failure in talks between Qatar and its detractors, mediated by US President Donald Trump — even before they got started — suggest that a resolution to the diplomatic standoff is nowhere in sight.

Coping with the fallout of the crisis and the Yemen War simply adds to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s woes as he prepares to, at some point, succeed his ailing father, King Salman. Prince Mohammed, who is popular among the country’s youth in expectation of economic and social change, has had to backtrack on some of his promised changes.ĚýĚýas they head for the exit rather than explore new opportunities.

In addition, Prince Mohammed has signaled concern about opposition to his proposed reforms within the royal family, determination to avoid political change and a willingness to rule with an iron fist.ĚýĚýin recent weeks, while dissenting members of the Saud family have been put under house arrest.

The optimistic view may be that the Middle East is six years into an era of political, economic and social change. If historic yardsticks are applicable, that amounts to one-third of a process of transition that can take up to quarter of a century to work itself out. There is little reason to believe that the next third will be any less volatile or violent.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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“The 9th grade math’s exam sheets have been ,” a friend of one of these authors wroteĚýoverĚýFacebook. “Have you got any information about the leak out of the 12th grade exam?” said another friend a couple of hours later. Later that night, a younger brother of one of the authors knocked on the door and rushed to the laptop to find the answers on social media.

Since the establishment of the first Kurdish parliament in 1992, sector has not been systematized. The leaking of exam sheets at schools and corruption at universities have now become a phenomenon crippling not only the education sector, but also sending the message that no matter how hard a student might work and prepare for an exam, there are still people who can get away with cheating. A PhD candidate sent these authors this as an indication of the negative hegemony of political parties in higher education. The names of sons and daughters of elite politicians can be tracked easily. It is believed that they are accepted for PhD study through nepotism and clout.

The education system under the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)ĚýfacesĚýnumerousĚý. First and foremost, thereĚýis the large number of people who have fake and bogus awards like MAs, PhDs and professorial titles. Such academically incompetent but loyal political party members hold high official ranks from ministries to university chancellors, deans of colleges, general managers, administrators, supervisors and school headmasters. As a result of this, education has no role in Kurdistan.

Public Discontent

Public discontent is growing, both from teachers, university lecturers and students who are not political party members and a number of those employers who have not receivedĚýbenefits from their parties. University lecturers from Sulaimani, Halabja, Charmo and Garmyan and many other university and school teachers that they will boycott this school year.

In response to their demands, the minister of education has postponed this academic year from September 10 to September 27. Despite this, teachers in Kurdistan organized a on September 27.

What was disturbing the night before the demonstration was the arrest of an activist named Hemin Abdul Khaliq. He was detained in Erbil, allegedly by Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) forces. He was punished for having posted a comment critical of the ruling parties. Even though Hemin was a Peshmerga (Kurdish armed forces) and a member of the opposition , the soldiers whoĚýarrested him have in a manner that symbolizes Kurdish tradition of insult, humiliation and physical rape. Many people have changed their social media profile pictures to show support to Hemin and his demands.

Dominant political parties such as the KDP that if any demonstrations become violent and people attack the partyĚýoffices, there will beĚýa strong response. This is a direct message—that the parties in power do not want to meet the legal demands of teachers and they intimidate teachers to accept the status quo.

The minister of education has further postponed the school year to October 1. Teachers, especially in Sulaimani province, have refused to attend classes unless their salaries are paid in full and on time. Since February 2014, salaries have been intermittently delayed, sometimes up to . Worse, apart from the Peshmerga and the interior ministries’ salaries, the KRG has reduced civil servant salaries to less than half. Hundreds of teachers are now working as vendors, tea-servers, barbers, bakers and selling cigarettes on the street.

A recent story of a teacher and his family’s death in a has taken social mediaĚýby storm. In a Facebook message revealed by his friend who lent him some money, he says: “I feel ashamed. The government has not given me my salary to return your money. I feel ashamed and I don’t have the courage to meet you.”

Academic Culture

The problem is not just related to the in the KRG, which is itself the result of poor human resources, lack of professionalism and an academic culture that prioritizes the award itself as a means to an end rather than create a culture of critical thinking. It is not clear what the purpose of education and the role of educators are.

The future for students is unclear and unemployment is rapidly increasing. Graduates are hopeless and students are uncertain as to what will happen to them when they graduate. Thousands of graduates, especially from humanities departments, have not been employed since 2010 with thousands more graduating every year.

No accurate data could be found about the unemployment rate in the Kurdistan region. Institutions that collect statistics are functioning under the control of party politicians, and whatever they publish is unreliable. But discontent is increasing rapidly.

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The lack of infrastructure has not been solved. According to the Ministry of Education, 2,000 schools need reconstruction and 2Ěýmillion books must be republished for the 2016-17 school year. It is expected that neither the books nor the reconstruction will be ready in time due to growing concerns over political leadership disputes that have caused a financial crisis.

Likewise, at the University of Sulaimani alone, 120 lecturers have asked for official leave from the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research and requested a transfer from public to private universities. A further 50 university lecturers from Hawler have made the same as well as university lecturers from Duhok city, according to NRT. In addition to delays in salaries, teachers now receive less than of their basic income. A teacher with 12 years’ experience receives around $300 a month, while a contractual teacher’s salary is less than $200.

The Cookie Cutter

When the Baathist regime fell in 2003 and the state of Iraq was on the verge of collapse, the international community saw the Kurdistan region as the beacon of democracy and prosperity. There were demands everywhere to export Kurdish democracy to the rest of Iraq. But those praising the Kurdish system did not have access to what was happening behind the scenes.

is still divided into two zones. The KDP controls Hawler and Duhok, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) controls Sulaimani and Halabja. No practical step has been taken to join the two zones created as a result of a civil war in the 1990s.

Moreover, rather than separating politics from education, photos of Saddam Hussein were removed and replaced with those of the leaders of the KDP and PUK. Political indoctrination in the KRG has continued unabated. This is detrimental and corrosive to democracy, critical thinking and a better vision for the future.

All universities in Kurdistan belong to or divided along rival political lines. They each have opened and sponsored universities of their own to maintain a far stricter political control over much of discussion, debate and discourse.

Another problem is that just like under the Baathist regime, education in the KRG is used for indoctrination. It teaches students to be part of the party system instead of creating civil citizenship. It creates obedient and loyal members of political parties. That is where the cake is. All universities in Kurdistan are the same. They have almost everything in common: neither critical thinking nor new scientific discovery. They all replicate subjects that are taught elsewhere. There are no outstanding faculties.

Competent and young academics who are educated in the West are not given an opportunity to lead and practice what they have learned because the high-ranking positions are already given to party members. If a person does not have connections, theirĚýtalent, skills, knowledge and education are useless. This is one of the main reasons why education in Kurdistan is ineffective and does not change society for the better.

It is because of these reasons that Kurdistan needs to have a less politicized education system, more professional academics and a curriculum that encourages free and critical thinking, academic debate, scientific research and a that does not privilege members of dominant political parties and discriminate against those who are independent academics and have no political affiliations.

All universities in Kurdistan belong to or are divided along rival political lines. They have each opened and sponsored universities of their own to maintain far stricter political control over discussion, debate and discourse. There are now so many private and public universities and they have become a joke. Kurdistan is oversaturated in a way that quantity is often preferred over quality.

Education in Kurdistan is overshadowed by political rivalry, media propaganda, fake patriotism,Ěý and party affiliation. The supervisors, for example, who are mostly appointed by political parties, centralize administrative guidelines and technical regulations. They evaluate teacher performance based on their patronage.

Out of 100 points to evaluate a teacher’s performance, school principals are allowed to evaluate 25%, while the remaining 75% is in the hands of the supervisors who only visit schools and observe teachers twice a year. As soon as the supervisor realizes that a teacher is affiliated with his or her own party, the supervisor pardons the teacher’s indifference and incapability, promoting a culture of corruption and nepotism.

The world is characterized by scientific competition, military confrontation, defying policies and hegemony of technology. In order to raise international awareness, advance human dignity and bring about justice, education is the first step. If Kurdistan wants to be respected like other advanced nations, it must first address such basic issues regarding curriculum and neutrality instead of spreading propaganda and misinformation.

Without proper education, it is impossible to forge a liberal and cultured society. Without a healthy education system, it is inevitable that exam questions will continue to be leaked and criminals will continue to break the law and get away with it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Education is the most effective means of bringing about responsible people who believe in the values of cultural diversity and coexistence. Military conflicts and religious violence in the Middle East will only be solved if the next generation is educated from the outset.

Everyday people have lost hope in politicians to bring stability, peace and prosperity to countries like , where sectarianism is on the rise and people often lose their loved ones, their homes and their jobs. Security issues and economic uncertainty dominate the headlines, causing a forceful disregard to education.

The existing Iraqi and system needs reform if peace, trust and integration are to be restored.

In this guest edition of , Aras Ahmed Mhamad talks to Maysa Jihad Alwan, a PhD candidate at the University of Essex, United Kingdom, about the challenges facing the Iraqi and Kurdish education system.

Aras Ahmed Mhamad: Do you think the current education system in Iraq and the Kurdistan region has the ability to combat unemployment, ensure equal access to jobs, secure unity among members of society, and provide the knowledge and skills to embrace diversity and oppose inequality?

Maysa Jihad Alwan: The current education system in the Federal Republic of Iraq is not influential concerning the aspects that you have mentioned. There is no direct relation between the education system and unemployment.

Every year we have a good number of graduates from universities and technical institutes, and a number of them get employed according to the needs of the governmental institutions or the private sector. Their employment does not necessarily depend on the quality of education that they have received. Employment sometimes can be obtained only when you know the right people. Education in Iraq, under the current political situation, cannot secure unity among members of society.

People seem to follow different political ideologies which have representations in the parliament, but unfortunately, the inner conflicts between those parties affected people negatively, and the result is the loss of unity and a real sense of belonging to this land. The education system is weak in its confrontation with all those crises brought about by the current Iraqi government.

I am sure that any education system must arm its subjects with knowledge and skills, but how far [is] that knowledge and those skills effective? This depends on the political and economic situation in which they work. Embracing diversity and the opposition of inequality come after you prepare a generation willing to have this frame of mind—namely respecting opposition and regarding it as a motivation for change and development.

Mhamad: What is the right age to introduce sex education at school?

Jihad Alwan: The sex education subject is a sensitive issue for our society, but it is an important one. In advanced countries, they start to teach sex and relationships [SR] at an early age of 5. Certainly, this subject is being taught in a gradual way according to the ranges of the students’ ages up to the upper grades of high school. In our society we need to start SR education, but it needs monitoring and much awareness from the teachers as well as from parents.

According to my opinion, it should start from intermediate school when the child is of 11 years old due to the conservative nature of our society. Probably after some years from now, we need to teach it at an earlier age as societies keep changing and people’s mentality becomes ready to accept this issue as a fact of life. Topics of homosexuality, bisexuality and transgender are not tolerated in our society so we need a gradual approach to them, but we should not deny them as not existing.

Mhamad: Do you think it makes sense to teach primary school children religious books in first grade and force them to memorize certain passages and verses? How would you comment on the moral and intellectual aspects of this trend?

Jihad Alwan: The subject of the Islamic religion should be taught in schools, but I encourage the embracement of other religions within this subject. The emphasis should not be on the philosophical argument on the supreme being or the afterlife and its rewards and damnation, but rather it should be on the moral side of the religion told through stories about the prophets that teach about God as mercy and love, and also on how nations can grow by their morals, and connect that with actual examples from life.

I do not encourage teaching directly from the Quran or the Bible. Memorization of verses from [the] Quran is useless. It does not teach morality and human rights, which are the essential topics of every religion. It makes students memorize without understanding, and also causes resentment of the subject in general.

Mhamad: How can the politicization of the education sector negatively affect the process of educating citizens on the basis of citizenship and principles of democracy, and not party loyalty?

Jihad Alwan: It is obvious that political parties have influence on the employment and the assignment of administrative posts to certain members in the education sector. [This] kind of attitude results in the absence of the honorable competition spirit among staff members and nurtures grudges and hatred, which might affect the education process negatively. Any work environment should be healthy. Members should not feel that their rights were taken by others. Otherwise, they will lose the sense of commitment and loyalty to the bodies they are working for.

We lack resources and access to big electronic libraries, and there is a chasm in the knowledge between the Middle East and the rest of the world.

The enrolment of students in higher education institutions also happen according to nepotism and special admission. This can result in the sense of inequality and injustice among students. Moreover, the huge number of admitted students every year leads to extra hours of teaching and, hence, less research hours which are more important for the development of the educational institution as a whole.

Mhamad: The fact that party leaders and the majority of government officials send their children to private schools and universities abroad tells us a lot about their failure to build a developed education system inside Iraq and in the Kurdish region. How would you comment on that in terms of trust in governmental schools, hospitals and banks?

Jihad Alwan: Our education system, under this difficult political situation, is not trustworthy for us. We lost our faith in each other as people who are able to produce knowledge and work faithfully and, hence, if we have money to send our children abroad for study, we would not hesitate to do that.

We lack resources and access to big electronic libraries, and there is a chasm in the knowledge between the Middle East and the rest of the world. The teacher does not feel secure on the financial level, and the recent financial crisis is evidence that the government has failed to provide a stable economic condition for the citizen to work and be productive.

Mhamad: Do you think Kurdish education since 1992 and Iraqi education since 2004 have been able to create homegrown theories and ideas, and individuals who perform their responsibility and demand their rights according to the rules of law?

Jihad Alwan: On the theoretical level, we have a number of researchers who provide us with good visions concerning the education system, but the implementation of those theories did not find a peaceful and stable environment to grow and thrive. The quality insurance project in the Kurdistan region is successful so far as it encourages teachers to improve their performance and fill the gaps in their information, and I think in the long term, it will give good results. But again the political stability is important for such projects to develop.

On the country level, the Ministry of Planning and Development published a report in 2013, stating that 26% of Iraqi youth, 15 years and younger, are illiterate. This rate is sad especially when we know that UNESCO had considered the education in Iraq as the best in the Middle East prior to 1991, when the rate of enrolment in schools reached 100%.

During the blockade years, the education system suffered from a severe lack of resources, and many teachers migrated to other countries. After the fall of Saddam’s [Hussein] regime, the rehabilitation of schools started, but it was interrupted throughout the years of civil war and political unrest that the country [has faced]. After all, what is the use of a book if I don’t have a lamp to help me read it?

Mhamad: What are the main reasons behind a student’s weakness? Is it a problem with the system and methods of teaching or the individual teachers?

Jihad Alwan: I think we as teachers should be aware of the different types of learners. There are learners who depend on their listening ability, others on their visual sense, and others have to move and talk in order to learn. We need the lesson to be diverse in its means, and the teacher should change and mend his approach always in order to satisfy most of the learners’ needs.

There are other issues that might contribute to the weak performance of the learner, which might be personal or familial. In this case, the education institution should attempt to help through the student advice office and psychological support.

Mhamad: Memorization is widespread in Iraqi and Kurdish education. A huge emphasis is given to the right answer and, usually, students are passive receivers. Arguments, participation and interpretation are limited and sometimes absent. How would you comment on that?

Jihad Alwan: That is true. We still depend on the teacher to provide knowledge for the student, while the student’s role in producing knowledge is very limited or may be absent. We still have the idea that the student is nobody to add his/her opinion to the world of knowledge. That is why we encourage the one path given by the teacher.

It is important that the student knows the major theories in his domain, but on the practical level, he/she should use those theories to have his/her own vision and opinion or even arrive at new results. We need to show the students the way of how to produce, and when they produce we need to trust them after examining their arguments.

Mhamad: Is formal classroom learning and a premeditated curriculum enough to prepare students for the market and to fill the gap between the demands of society and university?

Jihad Alwan: The classroom environment and the curriculum are playing a role in the preparation of the students for the market after graduation, but other skills should be obtained throughout the years of education. They should be educated on how they [can] sell their abilities and, hence, get good job offers after graduation.

We need to provide opportunities for job contracts for students while they are still doing their undergraduate work. Encouraging volunteer work on campus is also important and gives students another chance to practice new skills before they indulge with the business world off campus.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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The is a contentious flashpoint for China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines and Thailand, all of whom lay claim over the waters. If international waters could be sovereign, China would be culpable of belligerent occupation. When the International Court of Justice tried to summon China to court to resolve disputes over ownership of territorial islands, Beijing declined. Hence, the problem with international law is it is not mandatory, but voluntary.

Kurdistan, boasting aĚý, is a nation that flourishes despite lacking unanimous international recognition. A cursory study reveals a robust capital, a cohesive linguistic and cultural identity, and the means by which to sustain and protect its people. Yet in spite of this, is not a completeĚýde jureĚýstate by any means. Just like the South China Sea, Kurdistan is centered between a host of sovereign nations: Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.

Stipulations for Statehood

What makes international law particularly relevant to Kurdistan is that in order to recognize one, we must recognize the other, and in doing so bolster international relations across the board. Right now, until we validate and enforce the decisions of international law tribunals—which hold ubiquitous jurisdiction over matters that concern multiple sovereignties—Kurdistan will not receive the autonomy it deserves.

This goes against current norms which dictate that as long as free and fair elections can be conducted—concomitant a rule of law—a democratic state exists. Kurdistan deserves this recognition for some very simple reasons.

First and foremost, the nation of Kurdistan qualifies for statehood via the enumerated provisions of the 1933 Montevideo Convention on Rights and Duties of States. One of the requirements for statehood under this multipolar treaty is to have a fixed and steady population, which Kurdistan fulfills. Evidenced by an by theĚýde factoĚýruling government, Kurds are clearly tallying their people at a modest rate. Estimates have to err on the side of caution, as many internally displaced people from Iraq and Syria often traverse their land.

The second stipulation for statehood is that a government be founded by a people, and this condition is easily satisfied by the establishment of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG). Moreover, to dispel any lingering doubt, Kurdistan has gone leaps and bounds to nuance and authenticate its government, by both expanding the political parties toĚýĚý“two main parties of Southern Kurdistan, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK),” and alsoĚý by its parliament.

A third provision considers the relation of territory to a sovereign nation, but before a sovereignty can be officially allocated territory, the government must first provisionally decide which lines demarcate its country. The KRG has successfully satisfied this requisite by administering territory through national and regional sources, which thereafter is compiled by theĚýĚý(FAO) for dissemination.

As an objective, impartial, global entity, the UN has a legal duty to acknowledge Kurdistan’s predicament as well.

Finally, we confront the test of all tests of the convention: Can a nation successfully negotiate foreign relations?ĚýThis question requires only a binary response: a yes or a no. American media outlets have emblazoned Kurdish insignias on their prompters often when leveraging a story about the war against the Islamic State. To an extent, this is already a soft indication of foreign relations. However, more explicit negotiations have been going on as well. In 1992, 1999 and 2002, a majority ofĚý—prompted by the vast implications of US sponsorship—had acceded to Kurdistan’s proposal of a two-unit federation in Iraq.

Doctrine of Self-Determination

In accordance with the international law doctrine of self-determination, the Kurds have a shared cultural identity that is significant enough to warrant an establishment of statehood. One of many constructivists’ assertions is that history reveals the societal framework of a country. In other words, genesis and subsequent development is the cornerstone to how outsiders should evaluate a state.

If one was to analyze the historical advancement of Iraq, ±ąľ±˛ő-Ă -±ąľ±˛ő the evolution of Kurdistan, they would immediately discern a diverging rift: Leaders in Baghdad have, generation after generation, soldĚýĚýof a national language, education and local self-governance rights to Kurds.

The burden of this struggle to be heard does not solely rest on Kurdistan’s shoulder. The United Nations (UN) has precedent for actively involving itself in the preservation and initiation of statehood by calling for General Assembly proceedings. As an objective, impartial, global entity, the UN has a legal duty to acknowledge Kurdistan’s predicament as well.

It is self-evident that Kurdistan can invoke the higher calling ofĚýĚýthrough “Paragraph 2 of General Assembly Resolution 1514 of 14 December 1960, which recall[s] the important role of the United Nations in â€�assisting the movement for independence in Trust and Non-Self-Governing Territories.’ In 1960 it adopted Resolution 1514(XV), which determined that a Non-Self-Governing Territory is a territory which is â€�geographically separate’ and â€�ethnically distinct’ from the country administering it.”

The UN has been outspoken in instances of and independence, so other analogous cases must surely apply as well.

The bottom line is that international law and a “sovereign” Kurdistan complement each other in ways where exponents of one must rally behind the other. For the validation and implementation of either in a respectable sphere, it is not only sufficient, but ever so necessary that we understand their symbiotic relationship. Only then can we move forward with a precedent that underscores rapport in our secularizing and diversifying world.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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The use of marriage as a means of averting blood-feuds and vendetta killings is ancient, found in texts from the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf to the 16^th century .

In the 1940s, , administrator of the British Mandate in , wrote about the use of marriage to put an end to tribal blood feuds. “It is very common,” he wrote, “for a girl to be given away in marriage in payment of blood money. Thus if £90 is owing, the price of the blood of one man, the debt might be paid by the delivery of one girl, three cows and a donkey.”

These arrangements are termed al-Fusliya in Arabic and badal khueen (blood substitute) or jin be xwên (woman-for-blood) in Kurdish. Such “compensation” marriages have been recorded in and and are increasingly found in modern Iraq. Here, tribes are an enduring method of social organization, in some cases predating Islam in the region, and they have become an increasingly important method of social cohesion as the state has become weak and discredited.

In one striking case, were exchanged in order to resolve a tribal feud in the Basra, al-Shawli and al-Kharamasha area at the end of May.

Women married under such arrangements may not divorce and are required to sever any contact with their natal family. The young bride—who may well be a child for whom no other arrangement has yet been made—may be mistreated by the family in reprisal for the initial crime against their kinsman, and live as a virtual slave with none of the status or recourses of an official wife. Poor people, unable to raise blood money, are most likely to marry off their daughters in such forms of reconciliation. They are also least likely to be able to intercede in cases of marital abuse.

The 50 cases inspired and on compensation marriage. The reason for the growth in these marriages are the high levels of chaos and bloodshed between competing tribes—the legacies of conflict and misgovernment; a lack of faith in the corrupt state to deliver justice; and, for those in regions that are rural or stricken by conflict, difficulties in accessing formal methods of dispute resolution.

In southern and central Iraq, particularly Basra, Maysar and Dhi Qar provinces, tribal justice is becoming widely adopted. In this chaos, commitments to end compensation marriages, however well-intended, are nigh-impossible to enforce. Child marriage, for instance, is already illegal under 9(2) of the Personal Status Code, but rarely enforced. Around a involve girls and young women under the age of 19.

Child marriage has dramatically increased, as a means to “protect” girls and young women in order to maintain their “honor,” and to pass on the expenses of raising a child to a husband, in a country where the currency has crashed, unemployment is soaring and families go hungry. Women who have been raped are also forced to marry the attacker in order to restore tribal honor.

Over the past decade, women’s rights in Iraq have only been measured in violations. Iraq was the first Arab country to produce a female judge, ambassador and government minister back in the late 1970s, and it boasted state-subsidized childcare and education to the extent that around half of all public sector workers and doctors were women.

Now, IraqĚýis at one of the on the Gender Inequality Index. Women confront increasing levels of violence, both from their own , and from street gangs harassing women, particularly professional women. Women who are forced into prostitution due to the financial situation, many of them widows, are executed by religions militias acting with impunity.

Iraq may have become signatory to several international human rights conventions, but in practice it is tacitly encouraging patriarchal violence against women, whether through permitting tribal practices like compensation marriage, or through following an interpretation of Islamic law that allows women very limited participation in the world outside the home.

The horrendous abuses of women under Daesh (the so-called ) has served to distract from the ongoing miseries of Iraqi women outside their territories, dealing with the aftermath of several decades of war that have eroded both the state and civil society.

We need to address the suffering of women, whoever is victimizing them, and see the deeper linkages in violence against women across the region, and support those who are making the best grassroots efforts to raise the status of women in Iraq and the Middle East.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Translation is more than just transporting words or sentences from one language to another. It involves the translation of feelings, emotions and thoughts. The real challenge a translator faces is: Can one translate all the sentiments attached to the text, bridge the cultural differences and overcome language barriers?

It is for this reason that translators are accused of being traitors. Even if a translator is capable of conveying the message, he or she may still lack the ability to transform either the music, rhythm or deeper meaning of certain words and expressions.

Despite this, technological advances have made the job of translators much easier in terms of speed and quantity, but not quality. Electronic translation runs the risk of not only losing meaning, but also the music of language. However, the artistic aspects of some texts and the importance of scientific discoveries make translation crucial to people’s ability to understand each other and share experiences.

In this guest edition of , Aras Ahmed Mhamad talks to writer Jutyar Zhazhlaiy and lecturer Lona Mariwany about the endless challenges of translation.

Aras Ahmed Mhamad: Is translation a job or an art? What is the bedrock for the act of translation?

Jutyar Zhazhlaiy: In reality, there are still different opinions on this. Translation is more of an art. Like many various genres of art, it demands such artistic ability which, in the case of many translators, happens to be inherent.

Let us take the example of a musician. The guitarist’s trade, for instance, is with fingers and strings, while theĚýtranslator’s is with fingers and words. In both, not everyone can play well, and from both petty and prodigious works/translators can emerge. Besides, like the musician, the born translator enjoys the whole process of translation, sometimes reviewing his bulky productions several times.

Having said that, translational skills are still subject to improvement, but the talent with words and the passion a translator needs to possess should be there in the first place. Later, an original work triggers them and the translator is born. These days, quite a few people in Kurdistan speak a second language well, but we have only a few translators. That is because translation is much harder than what you think.

Mhamad: Meaning is sometimes lost in translation. How does that make you feel as a translator and teacher? Ěý

Zhazhlaiy: Loss and/or violation of meaning is exactly what fine translation is not about. There is no room for this in professional translation because it is not only very unimpressive, but also questions the translator’s overall ability to comprehend the source language and translate from it. This problem could also be the result of reading inattentively.

If you sense you have lost meaning somewhere in your translation, you should expect the reader to put your work down at any moment. Loss or maintaining the meaning of the source text are the touchstone I use to weigh good and bad translators.

Mhamad: What are the most obvious problems that translators encounter whileĚýtranslating a text from source language into target language?

Zhazhlaiy: The translator may struggle with finding the right equivalents in the target language—usually the case with the field of medicine and law. Lacking sufficient knowledge of the source and the target languages can also trouble a translator.

One should be aware of all characteristics of languages—from knowing the different meanings words may have to semantic and cultural differences between languages and the culture of their speakers. To exemplify the above, we may first think of the translation of homonyms (words with the same spelling and pronunciation but different meanings), which can raise difficulties for a translator. Words like “right,” “type,” “suit,” “fair,” etc., should be handled carefully in the process of translation for the fact that they have more than one specific meaning. Furthermore, homophones and homographs may mislead the translator too.

© Shutterstock

As for cultural differences, for example “an ox” symbolizes strength in English culture and it is fine to describe someone as “as strong as an ox” without sounding offensive, but if the same idiom is translated into Kurdish as aley gaye, it will sound offensive; and at the same time it gives a different meaning because to describe someone as an ox in Kurdish culture is usually reference to people who eat a lot. Thus, a translator should find another way to translate the word in a way the idiomatic expression is kept and the target language readers can relate to it in the way the writer meant it. Extra attention should also be given to the translation of colloquialisms, hidden meanings and slang and humor expressions.

Mhamad: The funniest joke in English may be a flat joke when translated into Kurdish. Can this also be true for idioms, songs, poems and proverbs?

Lona Mariwany: While there are some jokes, idioms and proverbs that have a universal theme and can be found in any language, there are many others that are culture-bound. These create an obstacle for translators. This is more common with songs and poems that rhyme because you cannot usually keep the rhyme when translating these into a target language, and this becomes even more challenging when there’s a pun or play on words.

Usually the pun is lost in translation, and this also applies to jokes that depend on a play on words. However, understanding or finding jokes funny sometimes relies on how familiar you are with the culture of the text’s source language.

Mhamad: The translator’s ideology, the history of the source and target languages, and the psychology of the translator play a significant role in translation. How would you comment on that?

Mariwany: These can sometimes affect a translator’s approach to the text they work on, but whatever the text one translates may be, they should stay as objective and professional as possible.

However, sometimes one needs to translate using terms understandable to their audience, and here the translator’s choices are derived from the culture and history of the target language because one cannot always use footnotes to clarify certain things. For example, the Kurdish society used to be mainly an agricultural one that depended on the joint efforts of all its members, including women, to survive. Instead of slavery, there was the feudal system that exploited poor Kurdish farmers. In fact, the very first black people the Kurds encountered were the ones that came with the Muslim armies that invaded the area.

Therefore, while in English there are several words to describe black people (many of which are considered offensive), fortunately Kurds have a very limited vocabulary for that. In translating To Kill a Mockingbird, I faced many of these words, some of them were not considered offensive at that time and others were offensive but in common use like the word “nigger.” In Kurdish, we don’t have as many words to refer to black people; therefore, I stuck to the two Kurdish words we have, one is qul or qule reş, which is offensive, and reş pěst, which literally means dark-skinned and is considered acceptable. I used the first for the word to translate “nigger” and the second for the other variations—for the convenience of the readers to avoid describing in the footnotes what each word meant.

Mhamad: Literary, scientific, political and philosophical books have different contents and styles. What do you think is the best approach in translating a literary text?

Mariwany: The translation of each type of text differs from the other, while for some texts all you need is to translate the meaning of the original text to get an idea through. In other texts, particularly literary texts, the style and literary devices the writer uses are as important and sometimes even more important than any other elements of the text.

For example, in some well-known novels we hardly have any plots or interesting events, but it is the writer’s style, their choice of words and the kind of language they employ that make the novel very popular in the first place. Novels like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha! that don’t have clear and consistent plots, and we have so much interruption in the narrative following a child’s train of thoughts, but that in itself is what gives these novels value. In translating such works, one often struggles to keep the childish and sometimes messy narrative as it is in the original text, avoiding big words and mature expressions.

This is why translating literary texts is very tricky because you have to translate things that are beyond meaning. You translate certain impressions and feelings that the writer could create with a single word, and you have to find words equal to that in the target language.

Mhamad: “Taxi,” “ideology,” “pizza” and “philosophy”: These words have been universalized and the world is getting smaller. What is your expectation for the future of translation?

Mariwany: Because in translation we usually use standard language rather than street language, there are some words that will never manage to enter any translated texts, especially some words that are already well-known to all. However, maybe in the future there will be two kinds of translators and two kinds of translated texts: The elite who keep to the standard text and use standard language in their translation, and a larger group of translators who allow the new words in their translation.

I expect the second group will be bigger because people are usually drawn to the easy way of doing things, but I personally hope the first group will keep its grounds for long enough.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: Ěý/Ěý / Ěý/Ěý

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The leadership of all five major political parties in the Kurdistan region of know, as democratically elected representatives, that the independence of Kurdistan is an uncompromisable demand and the ultimate objective of their electorate. Testimony to this is the consultative independence referendum conducted on January 30, 2005, alongside theĚýIraqi andĚýIraqi Kurdistan parliamentary elections. The referendum asked the people ofĚýIraqi KurdistanĚýwhether they favor remaining a part ofĚýIraq or an independentĚýKurdistan. The result was an overwhelming majority of in support of an independent state.

Since the overthrow of in 2003, the Kurds have stressed three major requisites to stay within the confines of the artificial borders of the Iraqi state. First, democratic rule manifested in the full implementation of the Iraqi constitution and broad national consensus in Baghdad. Second, a peaceful Iraq free of violence and civil war. Third, equal Arab-Kurd partnership in the governance of Iraq. Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) high representative to the , has repeatedly stated that if Iraq reverts to dictatorship, is plagued by civil strife or the Kurds are not treated as equal partners, then they will ultimately secede. All these conditions have now been realized.

Expect Change

In light of the current upheaval in the , it is only natural to expect change. The old order is quickly disappearing, and the is evolving at considerable speed. The transition is still in its early phases, and what will follow —Ěýand when —Ěýis uncertain. Some borders, however, are likely to be redrawn and new states may emerge as a result. Most of the states in the Middle East were artificially created at the beginning of the 20^thĚýcentury with complete disregard for theĚýethnic and sectarian make-up of the region. Hence, the only way to ensure the stability of the region is to readjust some of these borders based on the facts on the ground.

Massoud Barzani © Shutterstock

In the Iraqi Kurdish political arena, none of the five major political groups —ĚýKurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the Change Movement (Gorran), Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU) and Islamic Group of Kurdistan (IGK) —Ěýpragmatic as they may be, would find it feasible or advantageous to prioritize short-term tactical gains over losing the support of the Kurdish people; especially since the issue of independence has gained momentum and huge domestic support as a consequence of the recent turmoil in Iraq.

However, political ties to outside actors also have an impact in this realm. The alliance of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) with the and the geopolitical consequences of PUK-controlled areas directly bordering Iran has possibly given the party less freedom than they would desire, as TehranĚýis strictly against Kurdish independence when compared to largely vague, but seemingly more flexible and unexpectedly positive stance on this issue. Consequently, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which has strong ties to Turkey, has gained greater freedom on this matter, partly as a result of the huge economic interests Ankara enjoys in the Kurdistan region.

Prerequisites for Independence

To achieve the goal of independence, Kurdistan has to fulfill five major requisites to ensure independence.

The first prerequisite is economic independence. Without sufficient revenues the survival of Kurdistan is impossible. The Kurdistan region is already developing its own oil resources and distribution network, which is a helpful factor for preparing a potential secession. What is perceived as Kurdistan’s unilateral energy policy is, in reality, an attempt to gain economic independence, as complete independence will be easier to achieve and sustain if Kurdistan produces enough oil. According to Kurdistan’s Ministry of Natural Resources, the oil production is 1 million barrels per day (bpd) for the end of 2015 and 2 million bpd by 2019. If this forecast materializes, the international community would benefit from a viable, stable and oil-producing Kurdistan contributing substantially toward steady and possibly cheaper oil prices on the world market.

It is for these very reasons that the (KRG), despite all the obstacles created by Baghdad, is unwavering and determined to produce and export its own oil. The KRG currently produces a monthly income of $400 million, but for the daily running of the Kurdish areas, $1 billion is needed per month, according to data obtained from leading consultants in the field. The KRG has recently connected Kurdistan’s oil pipeline to the newly controlled oil fields of Kirkuk and Bai Hassan, which means their economic independence is closer than ever. Additionally, Hoshyar Zebari’s recent appointment as Iraq’s new minister of finance is indicative of the Kurds not wanting to be subject to any more financial pressure from Baghdad. However, judging from Baghdad’s previous practices and the tensions between the previousĚýSunni finance minister, Rafi al-Issawi, and former Prime Minister , this Kurdish objective may be difficult to achieve.

Second, the KRG must demonstrate that an independent Kurdistan will be a viable entity internally. This can be done through good governance, respect for human rights, a competent and professional police force, and economically sound policies. Many Western states will certainly support the Kurds if it is felt that the KRG is committed to democracy and the rule of law.

Kurdistan Regional Government © Shutterstock

In addition, the issue of the disputed territories needs resolving. The newly defined de-facto boundaries of Kurdistan should be fortified, consolidated and secured by the Kurdish military, known as the . Crucially, to formalize and legitimize this process a referendum in these newly controlled areas should be held, followed by an agreement with Baghdad. This, however, is not going to be done without compromise from Erbil with regard to certain Arab- and Turkmen-dominated territory. Greater attention also ought to be paid to the training of a professional, effective and devoted military, making use of the arms provided by Western powers in the wake of the recent tragedies in Sinjar and the Nineveh plains.

Third, at the international level, the KRG must guarantee that regional stability will be maintained and that an independent entity will not upset regional states and threaten their territorial integrity. This can be achieved through mutual security treaties and the establishment of good trade and diplomatic relations with regional states, especially Iran and Turkey.

Turkey will play a major role in Kurdistan’s bid for independence. Regional stability and the stability of its NATO ally are major considerations in Washington when it comes to the Kurdish issue. Veteran US diplomat Peter Galbraith once told this author: “Turkey is the only reason there is no independent Kurdistan.” In political and economic terms, it is better for Kurdistan to be closer to Turkey because it is a secular country and close ally of the Western world; Kurdistan sees itself in the same grouping. KRG Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani has stressed on various occasions that Turkey is already Kurdistan’s top trading partner with an annual of almost $8 billion in 2013. In addition to a wide range of other business opportunities, Turkey is benefiting immensely from Kurdistan’s oil sales as the major export route to the sea terminal of Ceyhan runs through Turkey. Turkey sees the case of Iraqi Kurdistan differently from Kurdish advances in Ěýdue to their connections to the PKK, thus Turkey’s own Kurdish problem.

Realism in international relations also dictates that the KRG must maintain good relations with regional states, especially a crucial regional power like Iran. Iran already holds the second spot in annual trade with the Kurdistan region at $4 billion for 2013.

Kurds are an Asset

Fourth, gaining the support of a major Western power is also essential. The United States is the ideal candidate to fulfill this role, as it would benefit greatly from a friendly Kurdish state in a largely hostile region. There is already some recognition in Washington that, in a region with a variety of problems, the Kurds are an asset — the USĚýrecognizes a reliable ally in the Kurds. As former US Ambassador to Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad recently :Ěý“[S]trengthening ties with Kurdistan now will serve American interests down the road.” After the Sinjar massacre and (IS) incursion into the Kurdistan region in August 2014, US President described Kurdistan as an “island of decency the Kurds have built.” He expressed determination to preserve this tranquil space as a model for the rest of Iraq and even the Middle East. He stressed: “I do think the Kurds used that time that was given by our troop sacrifices in Iraq.”

Nechirvan Barzani © Shutterstock

Privately, Washington now accepts that Iraq has the potential of breaking up. Based on this author’s research, it can be asserted that while the US used to be opposed to Kurdish independence, the reasons for this opposition no longer remain. Due to the continuous calls by the Kurdish leadership for the right to self-determination, Washington now understands this is what Iraqi Kurdistan really wants. This is a huge barrier to have overcome. America’s major concern now is stability in the Middle East, and contrary to traditional and wrongly held perceptions of the Kurds, the Kurds in Iraq are actually a major stabilizing factor in the region. Thus, a strong, democratic and economically viable Kurdistan —Ěýa major partner and ally for the US in the fight against Islamist extremism —Ěýwould, in fact, be in America’s long-term interest.

Fifth, for this enterprise to succeed, a united Kurdish front is essential — using the office of the president for the Kurdish region as the public face of the campaign, in addition to parliamentary support and the legitimacy derived from the people. ‘sĚýposition as president of the Kurdistan region gives him the necessary legitimacy and authority he needs to advance Kurdistan’s independence agenda. Still, Barzani will need all the support he can get from all five major political parties, especially those with parliamentarians and ministers in government. As Benjamin Franklin famously said before signing the US Declaration of Independence: “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Looking Ahead

After the events in Sinjar, the Kurdish leadership was forced to change tactics and temporarily make undesired compromises. They suddenly had to make the defeat of IS a national security priority, delay the independence referendum and head back to Baghdad to participate in the reconciliation process. The economic hardship faced by the Kurdish people since February 2014 as a consequence of Baghdad’s decision to suspend the KRG’s share of the national budget, Kurdish attempts at regaining territory lost to IS after August 3, and the cold reception of Western states to Kurdish independence were all contributing factors. This does not mean the Kurds have abandoned their ambition to secede from Iraq. Hemin Hawrami, head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party’s Foreign Affairs Office, has that the current Kurdish strategy is to work on two fronts. First, engage Baghdad to participate in the reconciliation process and to allow for the stabilization of Iraq. Second, make the necessary preparations for Kurdistan’s independence.

The Kurds are only buying time, since the Kurdish leadership knows that Kurdish aspirations will not be realized in Baghdad as they will never be seen as true partners in Iraq, nor is the government in Baghdad trustworthy. The Baghdad-Erbil signed on December 2 —Ěýstipulating the resumption of oil exports (550,000 bpd) from the KRG-controlled Kirkuk oil fields and others situated in the Kurdistan region through Iraq’s state-owned oil company SOMO, and the transfer of 17% of Iraq’s national budget from Baghdad to Erbil —Ěýmerely constitutes the temporary suspension of hostilities. The Kurds see independence as the one and only solution. The Iraqi Arab mentality has not changed; the only thing that has is the politicians. There is no real will for peace, reconciliation and coexistence, as all major Iraqi groups have separate agendas.

The very first Iraqi king, Faisal I, stressed this in a 1932 private memo to a close circle of advisors: “In this regard and with my heart filled with sadness, I have to say that it is my belief that there are no Iraqi people inside Iraq. There are only diverse groups with no national sentiments, they are filled with superstitious and false religious traditions with no common grounds between them.” Nothing has changed in 2015. There is no trust between Baghdad and Erbil, and palpable is the huge tension and ample mistrust between the Arab Sunni leadership and the Shiite leaders in Baghdad. While Kurdish independence has been postponed, the vision, view and goal is still alive and well.

The Kurdish leadership knows very well that a good opportunity has presented itself for independence. Hasty decisions, however, will not be in their interest, as the Kurdistan region already enjoys the trappings and privileges of an independent state without the burdens and commitments it brings. The Kurdish leadership must try to legitimize the process before taking any such step. The president of the Kurdistan region has already indicated that a national referendum will still be held. Preparations are underway — the Kurdistan parliament recently established an independent electoral commission to this end. The date, however, has not yet been determined. He has asked for Ěýsupervision akin to the UN-supervised independence referendum of East Timor in 1999. Based on recent developments in the last two decades, and especially since June 2014, an independent Kurdistan seems all but inevitable.

*[Note: Some sources in this article have not been explicitly named. The author and 51łÔąĎ respect their right to remain anonymous.]Ěý

51łÔąĎ is a nonprofit organization dedicated to informing and educating global citizens about the critical issues of our time. PleaseĚýĚýto keep us going.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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The post A Kurdish State is Inevitable appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

The lighting advance of the (IS) in June 2014 remainsĚýa direct threat to coexistence in . Sparking intensified religious conflict, and economic and political , the sudden surgeĚýprompted fears ofĚýfurther destruction in the minds of the country’s various communities.

The IS and appallingĚýacts against religious minorities is the legacy of the unresolved, deeply rooted distrust that successive Arab politicians brought about while in power. In particular, they failed to promote a culture of coexistence due to theirĚýabuse of political power and by neglecting the rights of other ethnicities in Iraq, including but not limited to the Kurds. IS poses a grave danger to Iraq’s fragile unity and to its neighbors, as recent events in highlighted.

Hundreds of thousands have to Iraq’s region. How do the people see the conflict and potential ways forward? I spoke to Kurdish students, academics and authors to learn more.

Minorities, Despotism and Coexistence

Jalal Hasan Mistaffa, a PhD student at Newcastle University and lecturer at the University of Human Development, points out that the dreadful deeds of IS have historical and political-religious bases:

“Historically, a quick look at the history of the early Muslims demonstrates that minorities, either political or cultural, were not sufficiently respected. As an example, Imam Hussein and his followers, a political minority, were ruthlessly eradicated by the political majority of MuawiyaĚýand his followers. IS considers the establishment of a caliphate as a religious requirement, which is, in fact, a political concept. Accordingly, this has massive consequences for the way IS has been treating minorities. Minorities, either political or religious, have been perceived as threats on the way of strengthening their caliphate and, thus, have been subject to an eradication campaign.”

Erbil, Iraq © Shutterstock

Prior to 2003, always endorsed the hegemony of Sunni Arabs and smeared the Kurdish nation in his wars against in the 1980s and Kuwait in 1990. Further, the tendency for rulers to hold onto power and refuse to step down has long plagued the .ĚýThroughout the past hundred years you are unlikely to find any Iraqi leader who has retired from their post unless there is a coup d’état. Late Prime Minister Abdul-Karim Qasim, for instance, overthrew King Faisal in 1958 and was then overthrown himself by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr’s Baath Party in 1963. The partyĚýthen remained in power until it was overthrown by coalition forces in 2003.

Yasin Mahmoud Aziz, of Dum Dum Castle, tells meĚýthat the culture of despotism was established due to the creation of Iraq and other Middle East countries by colonial powers:

“This despotic culture has grown into a culture of war and hatred, consequently leading to a continuously volatile situation in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. This is rooted in the colonial powers’ reliance on the culture of tribalism and religious and ethnic differences, with their own political agenda at stake. Therefore, there was no space left for the values of tolerance and respect for human rights and democracy. Added to that were the Baathist regime’s policies of corrupting and dehumanizing Iraqi society. Thus, patching up a sense of togetherness in Iraq is impossible. However, the final solution for the current situation in Iraq might be three loose autonomous regions under the umbrella of a federal government.”

Speaking about the tools that were used to dehumanize the Kurdish people, Aziz explains that the Baathist regime forced people to support them, to become Baathist and to spy on others regarding any political activities against the regime:Ěý

“Their allegiance was conditional to get good jobs or higher education posts, and they had to spy on their neighbors, family members and friends, reporting them to the security services if need be. Undermining all the religious, friendship, familial and human values, that is dehumanization, is it not? People feared losing their jobs and the regime’s reprisals such as arrest, torture and execution. They were dehumanized for the sake of the regime’s survival. It used all methods of repression, including barring people from leaving the country. That is why many young people gave up their own life and went to the mountains to join the ; there was nothing left to hope for. As Peshmerga knew, most probably would be killed or badly injured, but they still went to fight the regime.”

Erbil, Iraq © Shutterstock

With regard to the escalation of violence and extinction of the culture of coexistence and pluralism among the various nations in Iraq, Pishtiwan Faraj, assistant lecturer at the University of Sulaimaniya and a PhD student at Brunel University, thinks that more than anything else, the age-old rivalry and animosities between ShiiteĚýand Sunni and the toppling of Saddam have sparked a wave of between the two sects:

“The civil war, insurgencies and political upheaval that followed regime change and characterized former Prime Minister ‘sĚýShiite-dominated government damaged all the fabrics that once held Iraq together. Therefore, it is logical to assert that Iraq was not, is not and will never be a stable, tolerant and peaceful country, unless it is further divided into three semi-autonomous states. The Kurdistan Regional Government already presents an ideal model for others to learn from its principles of coexistence, prosperity and the rule of law.”

The Kurdish Struggle: Past and Future

In the past, Kurds struggled to survive due to a lack of recognition, lack of political representation and statelessness, particularly after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 suspended the commitments of the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, where the Kurds were promised the right to an independent state.

However, in recent years, their struggle has taken other forms due to the dramatic changes in the Middle East and Kurdish resistance against political and religious intolerance of the occupiers. Kurds across the region, in general, and in Iraq, in particular, now demand equal access to , cultural activities, health care, unemployment insurance, economy and political participation. Needless to say, Kurds in Iraq have better access to education since 1991 compared to those in Iran, and . This is due to the 1991 uprising by Iraqi Kurds and the eventual establishment of semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, including the region’s ministry of education.

Jafer Kakawawisi, an MA student with a BA in Law at Staffordshire University, tells me:Ěý

“Landlocked on all sides, Kurdistan has been partitioned between four invading countries. For centuries, the Kurds have been coerced into the harsh reality of having to live with their occupiers, whilst fighting one of the longest as well as bloodiest struggles for their independence. Inspired by the recent geopolitical developments in the Middle East and the rapid rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic StateĚýin the region, the Kurdish struggle has reached a new level, with many analysts believing that the Kurds are closer than ever to their long dream of independence. As inspirational as it may seem, this idea of coexistence in perpetuity with the enemy is on the verge of a total breakdown and an independent Kurdish state appears to be one of the most credible alternative in the circumstances.”Ěý

© Shutterstock

Iraq was known as the homeĚýof the prophets, the cradle of civilization and the land of the Code of Hammurabi. The country was known for various religious and nations, especially at the time of King Faisal. Iraq was a place of art, invention and intellectuals, despite sporadic instabilities.

However, a quick look at the history of Iraq tells us that in no era have the minorities faced attacks and destruction as often as in recent years. For example, the Baath regime, under the name of religion, committed genocide and mass killings of the Kurds. Today, IS jihadists target minority groups much in the same way the Baathists did for decades.

Noting the main religion of Iraqi people and IS’ claims to a caliphate, Goran Sabah Ghafour, a novelist from Iraqi Kurdistan and PhD/GTA journalism student at the University of Kansas, tells me that “Muslim” and “” are two different terms:

“The latter is the program and the former are the executors of the program. Therefore, it is a mistake to judge Islam by Muslims as the same is true for judging Christianity and Judaism by Christians and Jews. According to Islam’s definition for a Muslim, IS militants are not Muslim by any means. They use religion to brainwash people and gain power and money. Since their progress in several ways —Ěýthe economy being the most important one — the Kurds have become a threat, or at least are considered as such by the Arabs, Persians and Turks. IS is a complicated case created by many stakeholders with a political agenda.”

On the topic of isolation and oppression of minorities, especially regarding the Kurds, Sabir Hasan, a lecturer at the University of Human Development and a PhD student at the University of Leeds, says there have been moments of tragedy throughout human history, but the bloodiest tragedies humanity has ever witnessed seem to have started from the 20^th century onward:

“I think minorities have been victimized throughout history in some way, form or style. However, Kurdish tragedies and atrocities at the hands of the Baath Party in the 1980s, and the tragedies of other minorities at the hands of IS today are the most infamous in the region. The harsh reality is that some parts of the Middle East are today living in political chaos, where blood-thirsty ideologies compete to seize power by fair or foul means, without feeling responsible for the pain, suffering and tragedies they inflict upon the public at large and the minorities in particular.”Ěý Ěý

Kurdish people are known for their generosity and hospitality. Therefore, helping all refugees and displaced persons affected by the current war is not only reviving the spirit of coexistence, but will also build up a valuable legacy of peaceful coexistence in Kurdish society for generations.

Erbil, Iraq © Shutterstock

Tara Fatehi, a PhD student at Flinders University, tells meĚýthat Kurdistan has always been a safe haven for all ethnicities and religions:

“The world witnessed this on a grand scale after the influx of nearly 2 million refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Iraq and Syria. I know from experience that when speaking to Australian politicians and important decision-makers, this is always the point of relevance for greater support for the Kurdish people and their forces. The fact that Kurdistan was the â€�safe haven’ in Iraq and remained that way after the massive onslaught of IS just reiterated what the Kurds have argued all along:Ěýthat a free and independent Kurdish state would be a model of not just democracy, but tolerance, multiculturalism and harmony in the Middle East. We have also seen this across the self-declared autonomous Kurdish regions in Syria. I know, personally, I am very proud of the fact that Kurdistan has such a reputation — as Kurds, we have every excuse to be intolerant and aggressive to our neighbors, but choose love and peace.”

The Future of Iraq

The hegemony of religious intolerance, close-minded and self-centered politicians in Baghdad is the reason why Iraq is unmercifully divided. Their thirstĚýfor power has led to social fracture, religious intolerance and bloodshed, and trumped respect for pluralism and democracy. Cooperation and assistance between the Sunni and Shiite political elite are undergoing a very difficult phase and there seems to be no light or hope for repairing this relationship, despite efforts by , the Iraqi prime minister, to integrate Sunni politicians into his government.

However, only time will tell if he is be able to gain not only the trust of Sunni rebels and tribal chiefs, but also some well-known religious figures among the Shiite to eliminate the IS threat. Moreover, Abadi mustĚýwork on gaining the trust of Kurdish Peshmerga and Erbil if he isĚýto win the war against IS, asĚýKurdistan shares a border with IS-held territory and since Kurdish forces have proved to be more effective than the Iraqi army.

According to Mohammed Shareef, of The United States, Iraq and the Kurds: Shock, Awe and Aftermath, all the major political groups in Iraq, whether Sunni, Shiite or Kurdish, are pursuing different agendas:

“There is currently no national solidarity, nor any intention to achieve that end. The Shiite majority are clinging on to power, which they feel is rightfully theirs after decades of suppression and subjugation by Sunni-dominated Baghdad. The Sunnis, on the other hand, think they have been forcefully and unfairly removed from power, which they feel is rightfully theirs. As for the Kurds, they are working towards diminishing any influence of Baghdad in the Kurdistan region. Iraq is fragmented and dissolving quickly — the problem is the West and regional powers still refuse to acknowledge it.”

The current situation seems to be the most hopeful for the Kurds, especially after countries like the , , , , , and the have offered military and humanitarian assistance.

Accommodating the vast number of IDPs and refugees will have a huge impact on the legitimacy of the Kurdish question, and serves as a clear reprimand and reminder for those who oppose the Kurds and accuse them of being mountain Turks and illiterate people. It was the Kurds’ spirit of hospitality toward refugees that influenced millions of people around the world to put pressure on the international community through demonstrations, in order to support the Peshmerga and quell the IS threat.

The defeat of the Iraqi army at the hands of IS in 2014 and the theft of advanced American weaponry by Sunni groups have paved the way for IS to further expand its military assaults — especially in those places where minorities reside. As a result, many Yazidis have been killed, while Yazidi women and children were captured and enslaved. Furthermore, many Christians from Qaraqosh escaped and are now mostly sheltered in churches in Kurdish territory.

Kurdistan is theĚýonly place on the divided map of Iraq where a glimpse of light appears for harmony between all sects and minorities. In this region, there is still breathing space for creating a pillar ofĚýpeaceful coexistence.

51łÔąĎ is a nonprofit organization dedicated to informing and educating global citizens about the critical issues of our time. PleaseĚýĚýto keep us going.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect fair observer’s editorial policy. ĚýĚý

Photo Credit:Ěý / Ěý/ĚýĚý/ Ěý/

The post Kurdish Voices on Iraq’s Future Must Be Heard appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

Iraq’sĚýĚýregion is thought to beĚýĚýapproximately 1.4 million internally displaced persons (IDP) andĚý. This number is expected to rise due to ongoing instability inĚýĚýKurdistan and Iraq’s Nineveh province, especially with escalating violence in areas surroundingĚý,Ěý‘s second largest city. The sudden occupation of Mosul by (IS)ĚýmilitantsĚýin early June forced tens of thousands of ethnic and religious minorities to seek refuge in Iraq’s Kurdish region, as they fled execution, sexual enslavement and cultural elimination.

This new surge of IDPs hasĚýstretchedĚýlocal resources beyond their limit while putting enormous pressure on the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), as well as local nongovernmental organizations (NGO). The KRG is already facing significant economic challenges. The payment of civil servant salaries has been delayed as the central government in Baghdad has withheld large parts of the Kurdish share of the national budget since February, due toĚýĚýover oil exports toĚýĚýand revenue sharing.

Life Inside the Camps

There are approximatelyĚý26Ěý in the Kurdistan region, which are usually half-finished and very crowded, with limited privacy due to shared areas for bathrooms and showers. In addition, thousands of public buildings, particularly schools, are inhabited by refugees and IDPs — in some places, Syrians and Iraqis mix together.

The physical and mental conditions of refugees and IDPs are very difficult. Each displaced person has tragic stories of his or her own escape from war-torn regions and how they undertook long and dangerous journeys to reach safety, leaving behind homes and loved ones, which has led to trauma and suffering. For many families, there is at least someone who is missing, killed or still struggling to leave the conflict areas.

Karwan Haidari, the communication manager atĚý, a Swedish humanitarian aid organization, toldĚý51łÔąĎ:

“The largest camp is Domiz refugee camp in Duhok, where more than 40,000 Syrian refugees reside. I believe Duhok governorate has the most mixed-up IDP population; IDPs can be seen everywhere inside and outside the city, most of them living in harsh conditions without having any specific settlement. In Erbil, there is Bahirka camp, where you can find displaced people from most of the violence-affected areas in Iraq.”

The refugees who fled violence said that locals treat them with respect. Most families 51łÔąĎ spoke to do not want to return to their homes until peace has been restored and the war is over.

European andĚýĚýofficialsĚýĚýthe KRG for opening its borders to accept the displaced and offer humanitarian aid regardless of ethnicity or religious identity. The KRG, however,ĚýĚýthe international community to offer financial support and medical supplies to deal with the large flow of refugees and IDPs.

Marco Rotunno, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) camp manager of the Arbat Camp nearĚý, did not deny the harsh conditions for refugees and agreed that KRG officials were supportive and the locals were hospitable. “The sudden flood of refugees has placed great stress on the NGOs and humanitarian organizations,” Rotunno added.

Health Conditions

Disease runs high in Arbat Camp and other public buildings that are used by IDPs, due to a shortage of water and medical supplies. Rotunno confirmed that they are only able to provide basic health facilities, but “whoever has a severe case is given a specific ticket to be treated in governmental hospitals.”

Iraq’sĚýKurdistanĚýregion is thought to beĚýhostingĚýapproximately 1.4 million internally displaced persons (IDP) andĚýrefugees. This number is expected to rise due to ongoing instability inĚýSyrianĚýKurdistan and Iraq’s Nineveh province.

Khiada Aimen, a 26-year-old mother of two, was desperate to get help for her younger daughter. “An organization came about a year ago to check my daughter, but they never let me know what her exact disease is,” she toldĚý51łÔąĎ, holding her younger child. “My daughter has a severe pain in her stomach and I do not know what to do with her.”

Salah Ramadan Rasul, a 35-year-old father of seven, said his main concern is that he cannot buy diapers and infant milk for his children because he is jobless. “Usually, two of us are sick and the quality of medical supply is not good.” Another man sitting beside Rasul said he cannot see properly and his condition is deteriorating day by day.

Farid Khalaf Shamsadin, a 40-year-old father of eight, complained about a water shortage and the sewage project that was supposed to be finished a while ago. During this author’s visit, a group of Shamsadin’s friends asked for canned food and complained about the quality they receive. Some stated that they sold the goods in the market to buy food they like.

Besides concerns over water shortage, electricity and sanitary arrangements, refugees and IPDs are in dire need of psychological sessions and counseling, toĚýovercome their fears and the repercussions of war.

Unemployed Youth and Peshmerga Recruitment

51łÔąĎ spoke with many young people — men and women — inside the camps. They asked officials to find them job opportunities because, as they stated themselves, they spend most of their daily lives wandering unproductively. Fatma Ramadan, a 20 year old, was one of the few refugees who were hired by the IRC along with seven other women and five men. She said there are many young people who have the potential and will to work alongside the NGO teams, but they usually hire people outside the camp to run their affairs. “[The] IRC gives me less than $200 per month. It is not enough to provide for my family,” Ramadan stated.

Four young men were demanding to be employed as security personnel, so they could “defend their dignity.” Ashraf Mohammed said: “We seriously need to register our names as volunteer Ěýbecause our very existence is under threat.” He added: “It is not only Syrian Kurds who have been victims of civil war, but also our Kurdish brothers and sisters in Arabized lands surrounding Mosul. Our Kurdish identity has been targeted.”

The majority of IDPs and refugees who were interviewed asked for more aid in terms of food and medical supplies. However, other factors like the need to protect the Kurdish identity and deal with the psychological damage that has been caused by IS and other militant Sunni groups were apparent. This was symbolized by Walid Imael, who stated with pride: “I am young and have the energy to protect anyone, and my people need me. Freedom is more important than electricity and food.”

Refugee Influx and NGOs Operating in the Region

According to theĚýĚýHigh Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), at the time of writing there were over 221,000ĚýĚýSyrian refugees in the Kurdistan region — mostly Syrian Kurds — and 948 others awaiting registration. Estimates for the IDPĚýĚýdisplaced by IS range at around 862,000 people.

Jane* Hill, the manager of a local NGO operating in Sulaimaniya province whose focus is primarily on child protection, claims that before the crisis there were only 2,700 registered IDPs in Sulaimaniya. Now, the number of registered IDPs has jumped to over 171,000; among them are 66,000ĚýĚýand 23,000 Shabaks, with the rest being Christians,ĚýĚýand Kakayis. In addition, there are 6,500 children accounted for under the age of 15, who are looked after by local and international charity organizations.

IS continues to target vulnerable religious minorities in its military campaign, especially Yazidis and Christians. When it overranĚýSinjarĚýin northwestern Iraq, home to the Kurdish-speaking Yazidi minority, it forced 200,000 Yazidis to flee their homes.Ěý

Regarding the role of NGOs and the local government, Tafan Kamal, head of the International Reports Department at Youth Activity Organization (YAO), said not all local NGOs are supported equally. This is mainly due to the large number of recently founded local NGOs. Moreover, due to the current Syrian refugee and IDP crisis, funds are getting harder to come by. Kamal added: “One can easily notice that there is no complete fairness in terms of fund allocation, which can sometimes prove disastrous. However, there is hope that competence and delivery by NGOs are taken into consideration and priority is given to those who score more.”

Asked whether the donors and local charities specify to whom their donations should go, Kamal reaffirmed that there are many NGOs that are not funded properly by their donors, which is apparently an issue raised by an increasing number of organizations. This is despite the fact that, according to the new NGO foundationĚý,Ěýit will not be easy to start a local NGO as there are now strict regulations in place.

Speaking about cooperation between NGOs and local authorities, Karzan Fadhil, the national coordinator of Arab Youth Climate Movement, toldĚý51łÔąĎĚýthat NGOs usually do not receive support from the government, but sometimes resort to other organizations either inside or outside Iraq for financial support. This issue has caused many NGOs in Kurdistan not to perform their tasks effectively and efficiently.

This must be seen in the context of the aforementioned budget dispute that has been ongoing since February, which has significantly affected living conditions in the Kurdistan region. Delays in salary payments for KRG civil servants have been reoccurring for the past eight months, and there have been hundreds ofĚýĚýacross the region demanding that the central government and the KRG resolves the issue. The KRG’sĚýĚýto increase gasoline prices from 500 Iraqi Dinar to 900 in order to manage the budget hole is also having an impact.

Security and Humanitarian Situation

The KRG‌’s appeal for urgent international humanitarian assistance has been met generously —Ěýsupplies have been pouring in, including food, clothing, bedding, medical supplies and tents. When asked whether the supplies have reached the IDPs fairly and on time, Hill replied: “We have made sure that at least the basic items have reached the children, even if we had to raise funds and buy these items locally.” She went added: “Local communities have been extremely helpful; without them, it would have been almost impossible to achieve this.”

In response to a question regarding the security risks of NGOs, Hill said:

“Most of the IDPs we deal with are based in Sulaimaniya and can be reached with ease. We, however, do avoid areas like Kirkuk or closer to the conflict zone. We also have a slight concern about the radicalization of young Kurds who may potentially establish links with ISIS [Islamic State]. We tend to manage our security by talking a lot with other agencies and we share information. We also get information from the government and the local security forces.”

Every community has a local security force office. As trucks drove near the gateway of Arbat camp distributing packages of food and other supplies, security forces were vigilant to avoid chaos as men, women and children were pushing each other to quickly receive as many supplies as possible.

IDPs and Refugees Living Together

Azad is a camp official working at one of the schools outside of Sulaimaniya, where 80 IDP families are residing. He said: “There are IDPs from different ethnic and religious backgrounds choosing to live separately and with people of their own ethnicity or religion. This is causing issues in terms of shelter availability.”

Faisal Khazi Aziz, a Shabak IDP aged 51 from Bashiqa — a historically Assyrian town near Mosul — now residing at a school building just outside Sulaimaniya, said: “Supplies and accommodations are good; however, we have issues with clean bathrooms and toilets that are closer to the buildings and the need for privacy.” Aziz further commented by praising the local officials and security forces for treating them with respect.

With regard to the tensions inside the camps, Haidari detailed that there are many tensions between the IDPs. People from different religions, backgrounds and identities are intensively mixed up inside the IDP camps. This has led to a number of problems, such as fighting over limited resources and social interaction. The most noticeable social challenge within IDP camps in Iraqi Kurdistan is the high rate of divorce.

Yazidi Plight

Meanwhile, IS continues to target vulnerable religious minorities in its military campaign, especially Yazidis and Christians. When it overranĚýĚýin northwestern Iraq, home to the Kurdish-speaking Yazidi minority, it forced 200,000 Yazidis to flee their homes. The number of dead Yazidis is still unknown, but preliminary figures show that nearly 1,000 women wereĚýĚýby IS in August and are feared to have been subjected to sexual enslavement. Yazidi‌ holyĚýĚýwere destroyed and the community’s dignitaries are routinely murdered.

In the very first days of the Sinjar onslaught, thousands of Yazidis sought refuge in the Kurdistan region, while hundreds crossed the border to Northwest (commonly referred to as Rojava by Kurds). Yazidis are thought to be the most vulnerable IDPs, as they literally had nothing with them when they sought refuge in the Kurdistan region.

Furthermore, they were the main target of IS jihadists and their main area, Sinjar, is still under occupation. There are still thousands of YazidisĚýĚýon Sinjar Mountain. For over a month now, 22 Yazidi families have been given shelter in one of the gardens in the outskirts of Sulaimaniya by a generous local who owns the land. Shkor Rashon is a Yazidi who came to Kurdistan ten years ago to work as a gardener. He supervises the families and calls the authorities to help them.

Describing their perilous journey, Rashon said that the families now residing in the garden went to Rojava first, then came back to the Kurdistan region after first living in Zakho, then in Duhok and now Sulaimaniya.

Overall, whereas it remains unclear when or if the majority of refugees and IDPs will be able to return home, their dire situation is obvious. While physical needs such as shelter and nutrition are more visible, there is also an urgent requirement to provide psychological support for traumatized victims, especially children and women — something KRG officials have been emphasizing..

Identity issues play an increasing role here as well, as the testimonies of several young Kurds and their desire to defend their “Kurdish brothers and sisters” have shown. A lot of relief effort is being provided by the KRG and the international community, but the vast number of displaced people in a region that is economically strained underlines the urgent need for further action.

*Jane Hill is a pseudonym.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

The post What’s Life Like for Those Fleeing the Islamic State? appeared first on 51łÔąĎ.

A modern education system facilitates development, prosperity and peace. A good education raises awareness, increases tolerance and helps to create broadminded, creative and productive individuals. However, when looking at the and in particular, the blatant neglect of education is an observable and sad truth. The media is partly to blame. Political debate and security dynamics feature more prominently in the media, leaving little room, if any, for raising awareness and highlighting the importance of education and its current flaws.

A good education has the potential not only to rescue the people from economic deprivation, but also to build a stable and peaceful society where support for violence and ignorant practices is rejected, the fight for equality is relentless and where injustice, discrimination and oppression areĚýunacceptable. From child education all the way to university level, the in the region, as well as the rest of Iraq, is outdated. University graduates lack sufficient skills and competence needed to create a modern and progressive society. Despite the modern advances in education methods, in Kurdistan, Iraq and the Middle East is generally still designed in such a way that memorizing facts wrongly replaces training and practical knowledge. Likewise, listening and writing often replaces discussion and debate.

To learn more about education in Iraq and the Kurdistan region, Aras Ahmed Mhamad speaks to Dr. Mohammed Shareef, a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society (London). ShareefĚýhas worked for the United Nations and is a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sulaimaniya in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. He is the author ofĚýThe United States, Iraq and the Kurds: Shock, Awe and Aftermath.

Mhamad and Shareef talk about effective teaching methods, the importance of debate and the impact of Kurdish culture on education.

Aras Ahmed Mhamad: Student, teacher, and curriculum: How do you look at this triangle? Which one is more central to education?

Mohammed Shareef: All three go hand in hand and are central to any quality education. However, I would place greater importance on the academic standards subscribed to by the academic institution itself more than anything else. The criteria adopted by any academic institution define its prestige, input and productivity. So many excellent students and academics are the victims of the poor public academic institutions in Kurdistan.

Mhamad: What are the most important things you first teach your students?

Shareef: Self-dependency, independence and self-discipline are aspects of education I hold in great esteem. However, these are all very difficult to convey and implement at the academic institutions in Kurdistan, whichĚýare fervently committed and passionately devoted to upholding the outdated spoon-feeding culture.

Mhamad: How do you psychologically prepare them for the year?

Shareef: I try to convince them that I am on their side and not against them. I always tell studentsĚýin my very first class, at the beginning of every year, that I am more committed to their success and them passing their exams than they are themselves.

I felt the female student population had been excluded, as if politics and law — my area of undergraduate teaching — were professions exclusive to male members of society.

Mhamad: Weak students usually feel unappreciated and become stressed. How do you engage them and let them gain confidence?

Shareef: The current dysfunctional education system in Kurdistan totally discourages students withĚýlowerĚýintellectual ability. This is an unmistakable reflection of the poor and outdated standards implemented in assessing students for university admission. Many students in Kurdistan are not university-level students at all. However, due to cultural pressure and the wrong parameters implemented, they end up at university.

This phenomenon creates a negative impact on the state of education, disallowing the more capable students a decent and effective education, with the less capable ones simultaneously left feeling disenchanted and disillusioned. The best way is to create various academic institutions catering to different degrees of intellectual ability. Moreover, not all pupils should be required to enroll at university. The culture must change, to this end, and vocational colleges and service sector training should be introduced and increased.

Mhamad: Education is every citizen’s essential right, regardless of religious beliefs, political affiliations, gender, skin color and ability. What is your viewĚýon that?

Shareef: This is undoubtedly true. But I would most certainly introduce various rigorous and effective filters to separate, distinguish and categorize these students into different groups based on intellectual ability, skills and talent — to essentially “separate the wheat from the chaff,” as the English say.

Risking being politically incorrect, I have noticed that many decent and well-behaved students have suffered greatly in Kurdistan, substantially impacting their academic performance at school or university, because they have been mixed compulsorily with less-motivated students of a different social class (i.e. culture).

Mhamad: What are the key strategies for increasing student involvement, motivation and understanding? What do you think is the most suitable pedagogical way of teaching?

Shareef: I was one of the very first academics at Sulaimani University to encourage academic debate and discussion inside the classroom, and was the first academic to insist on weekly seminars, presentation hand-outs and PowerPoint presentations. I tried to convey Western pedagogy to Kurdistan and persevered, despite the enormous challenges in front of me. I also requested that every presentation be given by two students — one male and the other female — to allow and encourage female participation.

I felt the female student population had been excluded, as if politics and law — my area of undergraduate teaching — were professions exclusive to male members of society. All these steps were quite significant and often difficult to persuade and implement in the Kurdistan region, where a spoon-feeding teaching culture was the norm and very dated academic material was being used. I attempted to change the old-school teaching tradition, from memorizing material to comprehension, analysis, critique and creative thinking.

Mhamad: Which one is preferable and more productive: student-focused approach or a teacher-centered one?

Shareef: A student-focused approach is much more effective, as students learn to rely on themselves and evolveĚýwith supervision and guidance from academics. The current academic culture in Kurdistan’s universities has created an absolutely ineffective, totally uncreative, unimaginative, uninspired,Ěýlazy, unreliable and unproductive workforce.

Mhamad: What are the hurdles a teacher faces in communicating with their students effectively?

Shareef: On the one hand, Kurdish culture has clearly set certain boundaries of authority and respect between a teacher/lecturer and the pupil/student, so essentially it is very difficult to change the current situation without changing the culture. On the other hand, a Kurdish student would totally misinterpret and misunderstand any flexibility from the lecturer, and any breaking down of such barriers and would most probably be exploited by students, leading the teacher/lecturer to return to the old and usually strict, less communicative and authoritative posture.

Students in Kurdistan are victims of a dysfunctional educational system that has impacted them negatively since the age of six. Frankly speaking, they are now beyond repair.

Mhamad: How can teachers initiate and foster classroom interactions, develop a student’s self-confidence and improve outcomes?

Shareef: By encouraging debate and free speech inside the classroom, and most definitely by not embarrassing the student, a teacher can get a healthy exchange and increase student confidence.

Mhamad: From your experience, can examinations determine the true value of a student?

Shareef: The student evaluation system in Kurdistan fails four major tests: First, comprehension; second, analysis; third, creative thinking; and finally, critique. So, it hardly allows a fair and genuine assessment of the student. It is more of a memory competition rather than an evaluation of academic ability. It pursues the old-school teaching tradition of memorizing very dated academic material — a method long overdue.

Mhamad: Fear of making mistakes, an inability to take responsibility, unwillingness to read and lack of confidence — these are the most observable traits of some Kurdish students. What is your opinion on this and what are some characteristics of a good teacher? Ěý

Shareef: I totally agree! Students in Kurdistan are victims of a dysfunctional educational system that has impacted them negatively since the age of six. Frankly speaking, they are now beyond repair. It is far too late to initiate change in the current generation of university students. The only source of hope is to nurture a new generation of pupils/students from a very young age — preferably from nursery.

As for teachers, today’s educators in Kurdistan are themselves a reflection of the poor education system. A new generation of teachers has to be recruited in the future whoĚýare professional, well-trained, well-informed, assertive and have excellent communication skills — traits that are currently lacking.

Mhamad: What are the seeds of learning? Is it the arranged curriculum?

Shareef: Excellent education manifests itself through a host of components and requirements: quality education (enrolling at an academic institution that subscribes to high standards); wealth (adequate family funding helps tremendously in giving the student stability to learn); environment of upbringing; social network (interaction with successful individuals encourages ambition and hard work); values (the values placed by one’s family on education); place of education (the seriousness and prestige of the academic institution); and manners.

Mhamad: What are the most obvious characteristics of a successful student?

Shareef: A successful student works hard and is usually articulate, confident, well-behaved, self-disciplined, independent and devotes time to reading extra-curricular material relevant to his or her area of academic study, in addition to other literature.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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is in the news. As extremists battle armed forces and Iraqi soldiers, one might assume that Kurdistan is a region plagued by death and destruction. But the Kurdish homeland, stretching across , , and , is more than that. Kurdistan is a complex land shaped by years of struggles to achieve the recognition of Kurdish identity.

in Iraq have threatened to secede from the state, as political turmoil mars the country. Sykes and Picot shoved a wedge between the ’s communities after , with borders that ignored ethnic and religious origin. But the future of Kurdistan could see new lines drawn in the sand, leading to a potential Kurdish state.

My Name is Kurdistan, a documentary by Italian filmmaker , invites viewers to delve deeper into the Kurdish struggle. Taking the audience on a journey across the region, Giroffi meets Kurdish guerrilla fighters in Turkey’s mountains, Syrian in northern Iraq and Kurdish political figures. This series of testimonies sheds new light on the Kurds, a people without a homeland.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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SoJust, the Art of Social Justice, was an international arts festival designed by the English Department and Drama Program at the American University ofĚý, Sulaimani (AUIS) to encourage the rising generation of intellectual, social activists in their current and future projects. It was backed by theĚýĚýState Department and hosted sixĚýĚýartists for a week of workshops, classroom visits, panel discussions, plays, poetry readings and other events. The vignettes that follow are snapshots from the festival.

Jamal Khambar

The poet, famous inĚý, the first face to be broadcast decades ago byĚýĚýtelevision, waits at the table with Bzhar, AUIS’ media relations officer, and Soran, an emerging poet who is also an AUIS student. ByĚý9pm, the restaurant has filled with smoke and men. Built narrowly, tables on both sides of the small aisle that leads to the back, the restaurant forms a perfect gauntlet for a woman. A crest of muted conversation rolls behind me as I head for Jamal Khambar’s table.

Khambar keeps ordering: hummus, chicken tikka, fatoush, hot glasses of beef broth and fresh orange juice. But when the two of us can’t pull ourselves away from his books to eat the food, he stops. He sips at his whiskey, I my orange juice, and he begins to read. With tables crowded in the restaurant, he has to lean into me more than is considered appropriate. The two of us, bent over his book, ear to ear, he intones the words, caressing each syllable. He twists himself around the lines, coaxing emotion from them. I become an ear. The restaurant falls away.

He is reading the poems he would like for me to translate for the reading we’re hosting together as the festival’s opening night. He has chosen poems he dedicated to specific women who have died in honor killings. One poem mourns, satirically, the meaning “honor” has come to have in Kurdish society. The lovers in his poem cry out:

“Go inside … bar the doors and the windows.

The knife is coming … the dagger is coming … honor is coming!

Go inside.

Don’t open the door, even for the clouds.

Don’t open the window, even for the rain.

Daggers are falling like rain, honor has begun to storm,

Don’t open the sky, even for God … go inside!”

Later, after he and I read his work, in Kurdish and English, to the gathered SoJust audience, students swarm toward him, elbowing each other for a chance to ask more questions or get a picture with him. What we imagined would be an hour’s reading pushes deeper into the evening. Khambar hands his phone to me from inside the throng of students. Please would you call my friend, he asks, I was supposed to meet him. Make pretty apologies? Then he disappears back into the cluster of questions, into the buzz of fame.

Castle Climb

ĚýjoinedĚýĚýand a small group of student-writers: Umniyah, Mohammed, Saud and Mewan. They headed out of the city. SheaĚýbegan talking with the students about what they were seeing, using the natural landscape around us to discuss how a writer sees. The striations on the hillside: what were they? Geological features or goat paths, worn over decades of grazing? The augers resting by the roadside beside piles of aluminum poles: what is happening in this village? At the top of the range, before bouncing on the bus’ shocks down into the valley, a herd of goats in the road stopped them. A water tank had been opened on the shoulder and the animals were flocking, drinking, unconcerned with the driver who honked and yelled out the window. A small puppy, guarding the goats, barked back.

Community and Memory, a workshop on photography and the process of memorializing, began in the city of Sulaimani and took its students to Halabja. The site of Saddam Hussein’s 1988 chemical attacks, Halabja is a gravitational center in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region for community and commemoration.ĚýRadcliffe Roye, a photographer, andĚýMichael Galinsky, a filmmaker, worked with students as the workshop leaders andĚýJillian Armenante, an actor and director, accompanied them as an observer.Ěý

When they arrived at the base of the hillside, the castle ruins looming above, the students groaned. The climb to the castle comes in three parts. The first is uphill, but steady: a nice walk. The second is steeper, a scramble from pasture to the top of an almost vertical rise. The third is on the flat top, tracing the edge to the castle entrance. Umniyah, revealing her deep fear of heights, rested with RaffoĚýbelow an overhang. The rest of us pushed on to the castle, writing as we went, looking at our surroundings and contemplating the nature of seeing.

Mewan noticed the way that water flowed through the landscape below the ruins. It was the end of spring, the last of the water, and the hills had begun to brown, though their crevasses remained green. Wherever the land creased, it kept its moisture. The castle’s water catchment system, hundreds of years old, revamped with concrete to preserve the original masonry, still sits within what would have been the original walls and still collects water. Exploring the cistern’s construction, Neil discovered the almost human hair of a goat. Where there’s hair, there must be bones. Someone had walked their meal up the mountain and slaughtered it, leaving the hooves and head to rot in the sunlight several feet from the path. The guts they left next to the water, where they must have washed their meat.

The group of students at the top walked over lines of stone that hinted at old walls, peered through what must have been windows and up chimneys that still conducted air. In one room, they found six alcoves perfect in their peaked domes. In another, at the edge of the castle exposed to the sun, Neil pointed out carnivorous plants: long vines lined with little green jugs. The cilia around the opening allowed bugs to enter easily, but made escape impossible. Once a bug fell in, it became lunch, like the goat at the fortress well, dissolved in the stomach of the plant. A horrible way to die, and Saud wanted to see the process. He caught a bug, dropped it in. Then, taking pity, he shook the plant upside down until the bug tumbled out.Ěý“I felt bad,” he said.

At the road again, hours later, they ran into a man who lives nearby and has been appointed by the Sulaimani Museum as the castle guardian. Neil prompted the students to ask the man questions about the castle. “It’s called Sirochik,” he said. But he knew little more. The castle, its former occupants, were nearly as much as mystery to him as they were to the visitors.

Slogans

The visiting artists began to play a game: If the KRG had a slogan, like Las Vegas or New York City, what would it be? Shea suggested:ĚýĚý— we got this.ĚýHe had just passed a pick-up truck on the highway with a horse, tethered complacently in the truck’s bed.Ěý, director of Iowa’s International Writing Program, offered:ĚýKurdistan — it is not what it will be. He reflected for a moment, laughed, and added: “Yes,ĚýVirginia is for lovers, butĚýWest Virginia is open for business.” This game of mottos, what they say about a place, the people living there, intrigued him.

He had just come from Baghdad and felt both uplifted by the creativity he’d seen and deeply unsettled by the way the city had felt. The Baghdad book fair, he said, was vibrant, but US officials and visitors ran between the cover of buildings.

In Iraq, women often shy away from singing or dancing in public. It is considered unfeminine and immoral to drink or smoke. Reputation is both essential and fragile.

Driving from Erbil to Sulaimani, through the Red Valley, green before summer’s heat, it was hard for him to believe that he was still in the same country. After he led a poets’ field trip to Three Oaks, he drove through the Naked Valley to Lake Dukan. From the rocky shore, he dove into fresh snowmelt. Swimming in Iraq. MerrillĚýlaughed again, perched, shivering and drying in the last hours of the day. “Baghdad,” he said,Ěý“it is what it is.”

The Women

All the plays that AUIS students have performed under Peter Friedrich’s leadership have confronted their audiences with relevant and vital questions. Raffo’sĚý9 Parts of DesireĚýportraysĚýĚýand Iraqi-American women, with all their various desires, before, during and after the American invasion. A series of monologues, the play showcases its actresses.

In Iraq, women often shy away from singing or dancing in public. It is considered unfeminine and immoral to drink or smoke. Reputation is both essential and fragile. Under these conditions, this cast of young women threw themselves into their characters.

One is an Iraqi woman exiled in London. On opening night, the young woman’s character saunters onto stage, British punk rock blaring, swinging an empty bottle of Jack Daniels. In a burst of emotion, she improvises: the bottleneck becomes a fret and she wails on her glass guitar. Throwing her head back, she sinks to her knees, still shredding. The audience gasps, then, in sudden exaltation, whoops and applauds.

Another character, an irreverent and brutally honest artist who is killed in the invasion, tells a joke: Above a restaurant hangs a sign, “You eat for free! We’ll give your grandchildren the bill.” A young man eats and eats until he is contented. His waiter hands him a bill. “Oh, there must be some confusion,” the young man says. “No, there’s no confusion,” the waiter says, “this is your grandfather’s bill.” As the audience sits in contemplative silence, the character cackles. Into the silence, she laughs herself breathless.

A third character, an Iraqi-American woman living in New York City when the invasion begins, lists the names of her relatives back home in Iraq. As she intoned her list, I felt audience members around me making their own: names of dear ones lost, names of family members and friends still in danger. I found myself listing names I had learned in my two years of teaching and living in Sulaimani: names I didn’t know when our country began the invasion, names I came to know and love, names of people who had survived. The actress kept going, her list relentless, each name passing her lips like a rosary bead between fingers, calling out love across the continents that separated her from home.

The Professional Victim

Community and Memory, a workshop on photography and the process of memorializing, began in the city of Sulaimani and took its students to Halabja. The site of Saddam Hussein’s 1988 chemical attacks, Halabja is a gravitational center in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region for community and commemoration.Ěý, a photographer, andĚý, a filmmaker, worked with students as the workshop leaders andĚý, an actor and director, accompanied them as an observer. Armenante had her own interest in the events of Halabja: She was directing a production that examined the Herero genocide in Africa during the Second Reich.

Genocide is a life-long concern for Armenante. “When something that global happens,” she said, “it always distills to the personal for me. I took in each image [in the Halabja Museum] and tried to pay respect as much as I could to as many names on the wall as I could.” She didn’t realize until she had completed her tour and was watching the closing film of the exhibit, she didn’t realize until her guide, Omed, pointed at the screen and said, “That’s me,” that he was one victim of the tragedy. There he was, on screen, in 1988, sobbing and talking to reporters, and wearing the white piece of cloth that had been draped over the six family members he had lost.

The two embraced, tears in their eyes.ĚýHe said: “Please tell my story – please tell my story.” Her eyes watered. She embraced him again. Days later, Armenante still felt reverberations from the encounter. “The fact that he worked there, among photos and videos of his own personal tragedy for years and years and years left me with chagrin,” she said.

Levantine Viper

Muhammed spotted a snake, sitting in the courtyard outside the administrative building at dusk. He waved Neil over. Without a thought, Neil picked it up, looked it over, and carried it to a line of shrubs at the edge of the courtyard. We found out later that it was a Levantine Viper: highly venomous. I laughed: “Well, at least it was a small one.”

“No,” he said, laughing, too, at his own dumb luck. “Those are worse: They don’t know how to control their venom yet.”

“Will There Be Violence?”

We left for dinner in the gardens of Mangal. Poised above the river sometimes clogged by construction debris and misdirected sewage, these gardens can be quite cool and spacious. Over salt-soaked blanched almonds and cucumber salad dressed with lemon juice, GalinskyĚýand RoyeĚýbegan arguing with a student about the pitfalls of national pride. Competing with the student’s escalating volume, they only wound him up.

GalinskyĚýkept repeating, “I’m not proud to be an American.” RoyeĚýwent further, asserting, “Obama has done nothing for black folk in America.”

It is easy purchase for an American in the Middle East to condemn his country and his country’s leaders. These statements’ pyrite glitter can seem like the only counterweight to extreme and unexamined nationalism.

Merrill sat listening. These were individuals whose trip had been funded by the US State Department. These were artists making statements with no room for uncertainty. After 45 minutes, he interrupted.

“You’re an idiot,” he said to Galinsky.

“I’m sorry?” said Galinsky, stunned.

“No, no, you’re right, I’m sorry,” MerrillĚýsaid, “you’re a f**king idiot.”

One of the girls attending the dinner looked to Shea and murmured, “Will there be violence?”

“Oh, no,” Shea replied, “They’re just arguing.”

A few days later, I discussed the event with university colleagues. They showed me day-old video footage of Iraqi diplomats beating Jordanian supporters of Saddam at a seminar on mass graves in Amman. “This is where we live,” they reminded me.

*[Note: Read the full anthology of the SoJust FestivalĚý.]

The views expressedĚýin this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflectĚý51łÔąĎ’sĚýeditorial policy.

Ěý/Ěý

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The auditorium fills. A janitor weaves through the crowd to unlock the upper balcony, and soon that fills, too. Men sit on each other’s knees, three to a seat, careful not to touch the women around them. Men fill the center aisle, flowing around the five video cameras that will broadcast the event to several television channels. Groups of women sit on the floor, leaning against the bolted-down chairs. Photographers clog the stairs to the stage. When the enters the room, those not already on their feet spring out of their seats, applauding.

The poet, in a collared shirt beneath a sweater vest and elbow-patched blazer, takes his seat. The more audacious fans push to shake his hand; he rises to accept, to graze cheeks in the formal kiss. Each time he stands, the audience follows, breaking into fresh, ferocious applause. He takes the stage flanked by three bodyguards who clear a path through the grabbing attendees.

During his short speech on political parties and their failings, the language and its splintering, the audience keeps bursting into applause, like peals of thunder. I start a tally as he reads his . Audience members mouth the words along with him. After one poem, the clapping synchronizes and the audience takes up a chant, “Doo-bah-rah! Doo-bah-rah!” — “Again! Again!” and the poet relaunches, delivering the poem a second time. He leans over the lectern to deliver the lines. The tally: 48.

Backbeat

I remember the first time I’d seen such a response to live — at an elocution contest sponsored by the American University of , Sulaimani (AUIS). Some 20 contestants took the stage and at least 100 students crammed into the cafeteria just to watch try-outs. At the time, the school only had 400 students. When the student-translator took the stage to read the poem in its original language first, the audience interrupted him, cheering at the end of each line. All this while the university had trouble galvanizing students to come to soccer games. The audience heard the same poem 20 times and never seemed to tire of it, developing a steady beat to their clapping which, during the longer transitions between contestants, they used as the backbeat for spontaneous line dancing in between the seats.

It was a delight to watch, and yet I wondered why these students responded so fervently to poetry.

Only in 2003 did Kurdish become the state language for the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq. Until then,ĚýIraqiĚýKurds were forced to fluency in Arabic. TheĚýTurkishĚýgovernment banned the use of the Kurdish language for a hundred years.

Back in the auditorium, the joy had an odor, intensified by the struggling air conditioning: cologne, dust and sweat. All these people pulled together so tightly in anticipation of rhyme, meter and reflection. Why such devotion to these poets? To their poems?ĚýI asked a few Kurdish poets to reflect on this question.

The Two Worlds’ Effect

In his poem, “Two Worlds,” Hemin Latif asks: “Don’t you see how I’m divided? / Don’t you see how I am two parts? / Don’t you know these two worlds?” His readers might imagine that these two parts, these two worlds are the corporeal and ethereal or perhaps the western and eastern. As an emerging poet and the former chair of the IT Department at AUIS, however, Latif means to indicate the worlds of poetry and information technology. Though he is an extreme example, with his two worlds as unrelated as they are, he is not unique in the pantheon of contemporary Kurdish poets.

While American poetry has become professionalized through the academy, Kurdish poetry remains, in Latif’s words, “a hobby, secondary.” So, Kurdish poets remain intimately connected to worlds other than poetry. Sherko Bekas, after he retired as aĚýpeshmergaĚý— a Kurdish freedom fighter — ranĚýSardam, a publishing house in Sulaimani. Jamal Ghambar, renowned for his beautiful readings, practices law and just this fall ran for political office. Sherzad Hassan, a poet and translator, works as a media specialist for the Directory of Education in Sulaimani. Latif now serves as the acting provost at AUIS and will eventually transition into his role as the vice president for University Advancement.

In our conversation, Abdulla Pashew, one of the most famous living Kurdish poets, remarked: “I think you know, or have heard, about the Russian poet, Yevtushenko. He said, �In Russia the poet is more than a poet!’ Sometimes it seems to me that he said these words about Kurdish poets.” Referencing a particularly political poem he wrote, “12 Lessons for Children,” he says: “Could I write such a poem if I had been born or grew up in Paris or Stockholm? There, the papers, broadcast television and radio, the PMs, they say such things: not poets. Yes,” he adds for emphasis, “in poets are more than poets!”

Dana Gioia starts hisĚý, “Can Poetry Matter,” arguing: “American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group.” This is the academic poetic environment in which I grew up. Even my favorite poets, writers I considered famous, receive not even name recognition in broader circles. Is it possible that in Iraqi Kurdistan I have witnessed what poetry can mean before it confines itself to the academy? Is banishment behind academic walls the inevitable fate of poetry, or does Kurdistan show us another path?

Perhaps contemporary Kurdish poetry demonstrates the inverse of Gioia’s theory. These Kurdish poets are part of the larger world around them, so the world responds to them. Or these poets engage in professions other than poetry, so they write on topics and in styles that achieve greater relevance to their audiences.

“He Says What We Cannot Say”

At one point, as I translated the controversial poet, Sheikh Raza Talabani, with a young Kurdish woman, she sat back and paused. “I see why he’s so important now,” she said. “He says what we cannot say.” In a society where certain things simply aren’t said, or can even be dangerous to say, poets become voices for all that individuals keep silent.

Pashew is known for being critical of Kurdish society, ungoverned by the political parties. In 1972, he read “12 Lessons for Children” in Kirkuk. A poem against the forced Arabization of Kurdish regions, it was “a forbidden poem,” only published in Kurdistan in 1991. He had been warned not to read it. Pashew remembers the event well: “During and after the reading, it was unbelievable! [The poem] was a demonstration under that bloody regime. I don’t know whether it was a good poem or not, but I know that I said what was forbidden to whisper, even to friends.”

The Kurds are divided across five politically sovereign nations. They have survived many military conflicts in the past century alone. It wouldn’t be surprising that Kurds would cherish recitation as a reliable method of cultural transmission.

When I asked if the connection between politics and poetry was a more recent trend, Homer Dizeyee, a famous lyricist, singer and political advisor to former President Jalal Talabani, responded: “The 400-year-old epicĚýMem u ZinĚýis not only a love story. There is patriotic motive behind it. Consider the nationalistic poems of Haji Qadiri Koye; a few verses of Mustafa Pasha Yamulki; Ahmed Mukhtar Jaff,” and so many more.

In a more recent poem, “Viagra,” Pashew remains concerned with the silence surrounding corruption and betrayal in politics, but uses a lighter tone. He writes:

“There’s no need to advertise it

The whole world knows the blue eyes of Viagra,

The service it does for the right and the left,

But it strikes me

That our parliamentarians, when they eat it,

Get weak

Go silent.

Even swallowing 1000 pills

Won’t help.

Only their hands and their pockets can get erect!”

He speaks what others consider unspeakable. Even Sherko Bekas, author of the poem that would become the anthem for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), evolved into a man who implicitly turned away from politics. One of his final books bore the title,ĚýNow a Girl is My Homeland. Bekas moved his attention from “Garmyan’s Hurricane” to a “cloudy girl”:

“Instead of the river

I sit beside the rim of her body

Instead of on moss and beside the waterfall

I sit under her lovelocks.”

To a Western audience, this love-language is innocuous. Yet most readers of this poetry may not have, as Latif said, “free, open relationships and interactions with the opposite sex.” He adds: “Love poems are always welcome. People find they meet their thirst for thinking, interacting, and relating to the opposite sex.” It is as controversial to speak of love, especially anatomically explicit love, as to be politically critical.

A young woman, translating Kajal Ahmad, a female poet known for her fierce, sensual, poems, worried that simply bringing Ahmad into English might damage her reputation. With poems like “Nietzsche,” her fear doesn’t surprise me.ĚýNietzsche said:

“Women are cats

And if they breed they become cows!”

If fate had put me

Before that mad man

I would have told him, […]

Give me one night

But let there be a conscious sun

Not a drowsing, dull moon,

Until I give you truth like a kiss and

Turn from the philosopher to philosophy.”

Dizeyee, famous for his more explicit romantic lyrics, is adamant: “I am a politician, artist, and lyricist. Critics see sensual inclination in my lyrics; I am fond of beauty, beauty in all its senses; I roam in a realm of aesthetics when I write.” But this realm of aesthetics, in the daily life of the young people I have known, is circumscribed. It is poets who set people free; through language, they liberate thought.

Present and Past Entertainments

From Latif’s perspective, until recent developments, including the Iraq War and a rise of investors in the KRG, there have not been public entertainments aside from concerts and poetry readings. Readings retain popularity because there have historically not been many other options. “In Western countries, such as the ,” Latif said, “people have a plethora of options when they need a break. Options in this country are limited. Anything that promises difference is worth it.” Sulaimani, for example, a city of a million people and several major universities, didn’t have a movie theater until 2009.

The history of the Kurdish people, Dizeyee counters, has as much bearing on poetry’s popularity as the present: “Oral literature flourishes” in “nomadic societies”; “in rural areas, this became a deeply rooted culture, which has gone on and on until our day.” Additionally, have undergone significant political persecution that would force literature to remain oral and performance-oriented. used the Kurdish population as the national scapegoat, perpetrating acts of genocide.

Only in 2003 did Kurdish become the state language for the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq. Until then, Kurds were forced to fluency in Arabic. The government banned the use of the Kurdish language for a hundred years. Though this ban was recently lifted, the legacy of an outlawed language remains in the oral transmission of literature.

The Kurds are divided across five politically sovereign nations. They have survived many military conflicts in the past century alone. It wouldn’t be surprising that Kurds would cherish recitation as a reliable method of cultural transmission.

National Identity

One way to conceive of the Kurdish identity revolves around negatives: past atrocities and persecutions, recent civil wars, current political fissures. Often the reference points for Kurdish identity in Iraq are and . But how can the Kurdish identity be something to celebrate that is neither tragic nor inherently politicized?

Even a poem about Halabja, the city that Saddam chemically bombed in 1988, is an act of creation. However small that creation, it stands in the face of that destruction. The poem is not contested territory. Even if it discusses controversial ideas or contradicts itself, it belongs to each reader equally. Each poem that articulates ideas through beautifully crafted Kurdish is an intimate celebration of that identity. “The nation” is not a political entity for Kurds at this moment. Poetry might offer Kurds an affirmative way to participate in their nationhood.

In our interview, Pashew mused: “Poetry is, first of all, the sound of nature and instinct. Material prospect and technological progress lead to rationality, which blunts instinct. Grown-up nations need poetry less than others.” It’s possible that in a “grown-up nation” like America, the reason a writer or a reader turns to poetry has changed. Perhaps the writer and the reader aren’t looking to tap into a larger ethnic identity, but to reach singularity.

*[Note: Read the full anthology of the SoJust Festival .]

The views expressedĚýin this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflectĚý51łÔąĎ’sĚýeditorial policy.

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An unknown, yet significant dimension of in is the involvement of thousands of women in the peace process. When it comes to , there is a tendency to see women through aĚýsimplistic prism of victims. However, women may — and often do — play a proactive role in , sometimes as combatants or peace negotiators.

In order to explore this issue,Ěý51łÔąĎ’sĚýClotilde de Swarte her conversationĚýwith Elodie Sellar, who is currently conducting research on the women’s movement in Turkish . They talk about the women involved in the peace process, the nature of their role and the impact of their actions.

Clotilde de Swarte: You mentioned in our Ěýconversation that a key incentive for women to get involved in the peace process is the sentiment of being trapped “in an infamous double bind” — combining the two labels of “women” and “Kurdish.” What is their official goal?

Elodie Sellar:ĚýFor the time being, the objective is to have their rights and identity respected, and to put an end to the brutal and violent oppression that Kurds have faced. Furthermore, these women would like to see a devolution process for the Kurdish region in Turkey — or to use their words, “democratic confederalism.” This implies that every ethnicity, identity and people would have their own autonomy within the Kurdish region.

According to Kurdish women, this idea stems from the fact that they do not want to reproduce the state in the Kurdish region, whereby one ethnicity or identity would dominate, hence the idea of having each group granted its autonomy, which amounts to democratic confederalism. In the long-term, there is still hope of a reunification of the four Kurdish territories [in Turkey, , and ] and independence.

De Swarte: What are their means of action?

Sellar: There are three main areas. First, Kurdish women protest a lot. In any Kurdish protest, you will always see a substantial amount of women, and not just politicians. During protests, it is important that women make themselves visible in the public eye. It carries a strong message and, in addition, they always wave the Democratic and Free Women’s Movement’s (DOKH) symbol on flags, which allows them to make their movement visible and known.

Second, Kurdish women employ a variety of other means in the peace process. For instance, they always try to cement ties with other women, including Turkish. They hold various conferences and meetings, some of which are broken down into specific ones for different groups of women.

I feel this shows the maturity of their movement because there is a tendency to view and/or present women as a homogenous and often victimized group. This portrayal is essentialist and, thereby, debilitating for the wide variety of women. So, having a variety of meetings allows each group to convene and discuss issues before meeting in a wider conference for DOKH.

In fact, the Turkish state is overtly hostile to the challenge these women pose to patriarchal order. As a result, repression faced by these women is ruthless: arbitrary arrest, torture, rape and assassinations. Today, 70% of DOKH’s leaders are in prison.

— Elodie Sellar

Third, DOKH has even held women’s conferences for those all over the . As I said during our previous , this is another thing that DOKH is trying to achieve: peace for the wider region and freedom for women. So these conferences are really important for bringing women of the region together, in order to create an organized, coherent and united front.

De Swarte: To what extent are their claims gender-related?

Sellar: Almost all their claims are gender-related. For these women, there can be no free and peaceful Kurdistan without free Kurdish women. The very essence of this peace process for women is achieving freedom for themselves as well, without which peace in itself is unachievable. They are generally geared toward helping women to be free and independent, by giving them opportunities to have spaces where they can discuss their problems, needs and interests.

DOKH has fought enormously for women. For example, if a woman is sexually or physically abused, its members will organize massive protests and help the victim seek justice. Of course, this is not directly related to the peace process, but DOKH has been going for a long time. It has made gender-related claims for a while and, in the peace process, the same gender-related claims apply.

De Swarte: What role do women play in the peace process?

Sellar: In the peace process with Turkey, women play a central role. To explain why, I will take a step back and briefly talk about women’s participation in peace processes.

In short, there are generally two prevailing theories on the topic. First, that women are involved through their presence in civil society, therefore, a bottom-up view of change. Second, that women need to be involved in the political process, which is a top-down approach. However, in my opinion, you need change coming from both directions. This dynamic of both spheres working together is very important as it enables a socialization of peace at a grassroots level, as well as the implementation of women’s needs, interests and demands at the formal negotiating table.

I interviewed women from civil society and politics to test this theory on the importance of having them involved in both spheres of the peace process. They are heavily involved at a grassroots level, thanks to the work of DOKH, while they are also present in political negotiations.

The reason they are involved in negotiations is due to the immense change that DOKH has effected in the political field. In the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), there is a quota of 50% for women, which is respected. Women also have their own branch within the BDP. There are always two leaders in the BDP — one is a man and the other is a woman. As a result, women are not invisible in political negotiations. They are always present in large numbers, so they have a say.

When it comes to conflict, there is a tendency to see women throughĚýaĚýsimplistic prism of victims. However, women may — and often do — play a proactive role inĚýwar, sometimes as combatants or peace negotiators.

— Clotilde de Swarte

Kurdish women have an influential role in how the peace process is conducted. For example, the ruling (AKP) announced that it would set up a truth commission. However, there were going to be no women present in this commission, so Kurdish women refused to let it go ahead without their involvement. So again, women have an influential role in the peace process, in ensuring that both genders are represented.

De Swarte: What are their relations with men? Do women work hand in hand or is there rivalry between sexes?

Sellar: In general, women and men work hand in hand in the peace process. As I have explained previously, the political structures of the BDP mean that both are equal. This is undoubtedly a result of harmonious relations. I conducted an interview with a male politician of the BDP who admitted that men’s contribution had been to change their perception of women and to change themselves. He also said this stemmed from women’s work — that women had taken all these initiatives and pushed for change relentlessly and successfully.

Of course, the question of equality between women and men takes a very long time to change and things are not perfect. In society at large, there are plenty of men who still resent women’s emancipation — probably more in rural than urban areas, as is usually the case.

However, it is important to point out that there are female political leaders in the BDP and at municipal levels, and no one challenges this. It has been fully accepted by Kurdish society, which is a huge change. The notorious “glass ceiling” has not really been broken anywhere. So I think what makes Kurdish politics in Turkey different is that actual structures of the political party have been changed to ensure equality between women and men.

Therefore, in general, I would say at the political level there are not rivalries between women and men. Of course, in society there are men who do not agree with women’s emancipation, but they are gradually accepting the idea of female leaders in politics. And they have certainly accepted that women play a significant role in the peace process and that is already a huge step.

De Swarte: Being members of a minority group related to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is considered by many as a organization, is complicated. What are the difficulties and problems these women encounter?

Sellar: The picture is not entirely rosy and Kurdish women still face obstacles — mainly three of them. First, there are obstacles emanating from Kurdish society in general. Although women have succeeded in raising their profile in society and reaching an equal representation in politics, this has yet to be accepted by all. Nevertheless, this is a minor obstacle as most Kurds in Turkey support the Kurdish women’s movement. I believe this is because DOKH has successfully sent the message that women’s freedom is fundamentally linked to Kurdish freedom.

The second obstacle faced by Kurdish women comes from the Turkish state, which is far from supportive of women’s rights in Turkey. In fact, the Turkish state is overtly hostile to the challenge these women pose to patriarchal order. As a result, repression faced by these women is ruthless: arbitrary arrest, torture, rape and assassinations. Today, 70% of DOKH’s leaders are in prison. In addition, any peace-building strategy that is undertaken is inevitably followed by a battle from Kurdish women to ensure representation.

The last obstacle is the lack of Turkish women involved in the peace process. This is due to the nature of Turkish state , which has been co-opted by the ubiquitous cult of Turkey: the Kemalist ideology. As a result, Turkish women have portrayed Kurdish women as enemies of the state. Instead of concentrating on the destructive consequences of militarism and Kemalist , Kurds and Turks have tended to categorize Kurdish women as enemies, often linked to the PKK.

Due to this hostility, it is difficult for Kurdish women to create links with their Turkish counterparts and, therefore, create a gender-sensitive peace process. This defeats the purpose of talks. Nevertheless, the situation has slowly started to change, with some Turkish women coming forward and acknowledging the efforts of Kurdish women to create links with them.

However, these obstacles should not distract from the monumental progress Kurdish women have made, from their remarkable participation in the peace process, or their constant efforts to create solidarity with Turkish and Middle Eastern women. They have contributed a great deal in building peace and freedom for women and Kurds in Turkey, and for all those in the Middle East. So despite the resistance they still face, Kurdish women are in no way discouraged. If anything, they are emboldened. Their struggle is outstanding and brave, and carries a hopeful, peaceful and heart-warming message for all of us.

The views expressedĚýin this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflectĚý51łÔąĎ’sĚýeditorial policy.

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The capture of by fighters and their allies on June 10 marked a historical moment for , particularly Arabs and . The division of , which has now effectivelyĚý, had to occur at some point. A nation like Iraq, where disparate components were annexed together nearly 100 years ago through the use of violence and compulsory assimilation following the ĚýAgreement, was bound to have a limited lifespan.

Kurds see the currentĚýupheavalĚýas a historic opportunity to seek independence. The -majority government has failed to not only integrate Kurds, but also persuade Sunnis to embrace the unity of Iraq. As the (re-)emergence of Shia militias, an increase in killings in the Baghdad area, the support by some local Sunni populations for the Islamic State or other Sunni rebel groups, and theĚýĚýof and minorities have demonstrated, sectarian tensions are on the rise in Iraq.

The recentĚýĚýand escalating violence are echoes from the past. They hark back to a different era but suggest similar results. To understand the problems of today, one has to look back in history. In order to grasp the policies of the Shia-majority government in Baghdad under Prime Minister , it is crucial to analyze the former regime, its rise to power in 1968 and ensuing policies.

Redrawing the Lines

The map of Iraq changed dramatically over the course of one night, from June 9-10. Iraq was, practically speaking,ĚýĚýinto three parts: Sunnis in the northwest, Kurds in the northeast and Shia in the south. TheĚýcollapseĚýof the Iraqi army, trained by the and equipped with the latest combat technology and advanced weaponry, indicated that Sunni-dominated areas are prepared to endorse any kind of group, in order to escape oppression. This is related to theĚýĚýof the Sunni sect, while they were yearning for more power and to possibly gain the post of president — Sunni Iraqis were in power since the end of until the in 2003. Moreover, the brutal crackdown on demonstrations in 2013 by government security forces exacerbated the political equation.

Kurds have run out of patience with Iraqi leadership that continues to insult and create policies that hurt the Kurdish people. In the past, successive Iraqi regimes deprived Kurds from clean water, health care and moderate education systems, which are basic human rights.

TheĚýfallĚýof Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, on June 10, and the subsequent withdrawal of Iraqi troops from other regions created a political and security vacuum. This was especially apparent in , an oil-rich city traditionally claimed by Kurds but outside the administrative reach of the (KRG). This vacuum created an opportunity for Kurds to regainĚýĚýand other areas outside the KRG administration, which have been at the center of disagreement since the forced displacement of Kurds in theĚý.

A decision was made by KRG President Masoud Barzani toĚý the , the armed forces, to Kirkuk in order to stop the advances of Islamic State fighters and protect civilians and safeguard oil fields. From a Kurdish perspective, this decision has, in the short-term, proved to be a wise and historic move. Historically, this is the first time Kirkuk has been under the control of the Kurds since the 1957 general census of the population. As Kurds now say: “This house is in the hands of its real owner.” This saying sums up a century of Kurdish struggles against their enemies and the occupiers of Kurdistan’s lands and Arabization policies, which targeted demographicĚýĚýof Kirkuk and the identity of Kurdish citizens.

Since the takeover of Kirkuk by the Peshmerga, very few terrorist attacks have taken place in and around the city. This refutes Ěýof Shia officials that Kurds harbor terrorists. Recent upheavals highlight that the Islamic State equallyĚýĚýKurds not only in Iraq, but also inĚý. In fact, when Mosul was falling into the hands of the Islamic State and its allies, thousands of refugees fled into the Kurdish region, especially Christians.

Failure to Build a United Society

Several key factors have contributed to the failure of the plan to integrate all components of Iraqi society under the umbrella of national unity after the 2003 invasion. These include theĚýĚýof Sunnis in government, especially in the military; theĚýĚýof arrest warrants for high-profile and symbolic leaders; theĚýĚýof Sahwa militias that defeated al-Qaeda; theĚýĚýand restriction of the main Sunni areas to vote in the April parliamentary election; the neglect of the Kurdistan Peshmerga byĚýĚýtheir salaries and those of KRG civic servants; the centralization of power; and the failure by the Shia-led government in Baghdad to share its power.

When the State of Iraq was established in 1920, the southern portion of the area inhabited by Kurds was annexed against the will of the people. Kurds have run out of patience with Iraqi leadership that continues to insult and create policies that hurt the Kurdish people. In the past, successive Iraqi regimes deprived Kurds from clean water, health care and moderate education systems, which are basic human rights.

The central government resorted to a process of ethnic cleansing and Baathification, in order to change the Kurdish identity and demography of Kirkuk. Likewise, the Shia, despite having a shared history of oppression with Kurds, used them to gain more governmental posts and secure their positions after the fall of under the guise of power-sharing and coalition, while withdrawing the Kurdish share of the national budget in spite of constitutional prerogatives. The Shia-Kurd relationship should have been based on reliability rather than disunity orĚý.

US PresidentĚýBarack Obama’sĚýdecisionĚýto deploy 300 military advisers is only a short-sighted move that cannot prevent Iraq’s partition, as revengeĚýkillingsĚýand sectarianĚýviolenceĚýare on the rise. The latter only deepens the internal conflicts, as Sunnis feel isolated from the Iraqi army.

Successive Iraqi rulers sold Kurdish oil not only to expose Kurds to hardship andĚý,Ěýbut also to force other minorities to live in fear, seek revenge and consequently defeat Arabs themselves. Although the KRGĚýĚýthat shipping its oil to international buyers through Turkey isĚýĚýand in accordance with the Iraqi constitution, the central government causes distraction, apparently to mask its defeat in administrating Iraqi affairs in the past ten years. Baghdad has petitioned a US court toĚýĚýan oil tanker with 1 million barrels of crude oil from the Kurdish region. The Kurdish people do not have problems with specific Iraqi leaders, be it Saddam, Maliki, Ibrahim Jafari, Hussein Shahristani or others, but the overall mentality of seeing Kurds as second-class citizens.

Iraq has failed to politically and culturally absorb Kurds into Iraqi society since its beginning until after 2003. The army failed to occupy the Kurdish region, despite horrendous crimes against the civilians ofĚýĚýand the notoriousĚýĚýgenocide, when some 4,500 villages and 50 towns were leveled to the ground. Kurds were marginalized politically; the Kurdish language was banned; Kurdish books burned; and thousands of Kurdish intellectuals and leaders tortured, killed or forced into exile. In the 1991 uprising, 2 million Kurds wereĚýĚýand migrated beyond Iraq’s borders. These activities have not only failed to integrate Kurds into Iraqi culture and society, but have been counterproductive and increased the community’s yearning for their own nation.

US President ĚýdecisionĚýto deploy 300 military advisers is only a short-sighted move that cannot prevent Iraq’s partition, as revengeĚýĚýand sectarianĚýĚýare on the rise. The latter only deepens the internal conflicts, as Sunnis feel isolated from the Iraqi army. Ironically, the US refused to equip the Kurdistan Peshmerga after 2003. Eleven years later, the US sees that Kurdish forces areĚýĚýnot only themselves, but also other minorities in Kirkuk and the Christians who have fled Mosul.

Kurdish Independence

Kurdish de facto independence is already taking place, as seen in the following developments: A KurdishĚýĚýwas established in 1992; the school system is successful compared to other Iraqi cities; it has a fair banking system and a Ěýtourism sector; foreign direct investment is flourishing; private universities are ; the region has national health care, with modern hospitals and well-trained physicians; it has advanced telecommunications technologies; it has an enlightened perspective on women’s rights, compared to Arab Iraq; Ěýopportunities have increased following theĚýĚýof Ěýoil companies; and sectarian conflict is non-existent.

These are the realities on the ground, which serve as evidence that the Kurdish people are moving forward despite the policies of the central government in Baghdad. However, Kurds need international support to provide them, for example, with a “no-flyĚý” if their land is threatened because they are inhabiting a landlocked territory surrounded by Iran, Turkey, Iraq and Syria. Any move by the KRG to seek independence will undoubtedly face a backlash from neighboring countries since it will activate national sentiment of Kurds in other parts of Kurdistan, leading to a possible rebellion and internal unrest within the other states. Turkey, for instance, may halt exporting KurdishĚýĚýto international markets, if its Kurdish population rises up, threatening that country’s security and thereby bringing about economic crises in the Kurdistan region.

Iraq’s unresolved historical Ěýfor political leadership and the successive Sunni and Shia regimes’ oppression are why the nation is divided. As history shows, Iraq has never been, and never will be, an inclusive country. The ultimate question is: If Kurds themselves do not declare independence, who will they wait for?

The views expressedĚýin this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflectĚý51łÔąĎ’sĚýeditorial policy.

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armed forces, the , are heavily involved in the crisis. They continue to combat the Islamic State, a jihadist group previously known as the (ISIS), and have gained territory south and east of the Regional Government (KRG) area, including the disputed Kirkuk. In latest developments,ĚýĚýforces have seized control of the Kirkuk and Bai Hassan oil fields, which was condemned by the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. Kurdish leaders, including KRG President Massoud Barzani, have indicated they do not intend to give up control of the disputed territories.

Kurds in Iraq were heavily oppressed under . Part of this oppression was the Anfal campaign, which included the Halabja gas attack in 1988 and an Arabization policy in areas such as Kirkuk. While a Kurdish Autonomous Region was established in 1970, Kurds only saw an improvement in their semi-autonomous status after the Gulf War of 1990-91, the toppling of the Baathist regime and, ultimately, the pullout in 2011. Ties between Baghdad and the KRG have been tense for years, as issues such as oil revenue and political power cause friction, while the situation of the armed forces remain unresolved.

Amid the current crisis in Iraq and the political impasse in Baghdad,ĚýĚýhas asked the Kurdish parliament to prepare for an independence referendum. The KRG president , “Iraq has been divided.” Further steps toward an independent Kurdistan are likely to strain relations with the Iraqi government, and could be the final nail in the coffin of a united Iraq and herald a new level of Kurdish self-determination.

51łÔąĎ’sĚýManuel Langendorf talks to Kurdish journalist and political analyst Kamal Chomani about the situation in Iraq, the Kurdish bid for independence and the future of the country.

Manuel Langendorf: Kurdish Peshmerga forces have been very active in the current fighting in Iraq and have, for example, seized the disputed city of Kirkuk, an important oil hub often described as the Kurdish “Jerusalem.” What is the aim and strategic thinking of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and its armed forces in the conflict?ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý

Kamal Chomani:ĚýFirst of all, if Kurdish Peshmerga forces had not filled the vacuum that Iraq’s army created in disputed areas, either Kirkuk would have become a battlefield or Islamic State extremists would have arrived at the doorsteps of the city. It would have, therefore, become a threat for thousands of people as well as for Kurdistan. Peshmerga forces were able to control the areas where Iraqi armed forces had earlier been deployed. This limited the Islamic State’s ability to advance on Kurdish territory. International media organizations have overblown “the seizure of Kirkuk,” but they miss the point that if the Peshmerga had not taken these territories, then the Islamic State would have done so.

The KRG’s aim, which all Kurdish political parties have unanimously agreed upon, is that Kirkuk’s destiny should not be delayed any longer. A referendum on the status of Kirkuk and other disputed territories should have been carried out in 2007, according to Article 140 of the constitution. A potential incorporation of Kirkuk into the KRG should be based on a mutual stance of both dominant Kurdish parties — the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

Langendorf: What is their view on this?

Chomani:ĚýThere is a division between the KDP and PUK on this issue. KRG President Massoud Barzani stated after his visit to Kirkuk on June 26 that we should not talk about the implementation of Article 140 or even question it. But the PUK prefers to go through Baghdad as Article 140 is a constitutional issue.

Kurds in Iraq were heavily oppressed under Saddam Hussein. Part of this oppression was the Anfal campaign, which included the Halabja gas attack in 1988 and an Arabization policy in areas such as Kirkuk.

Whereas Barzani asks for a referendum to be held for Kirkuk through the KRG’s upcoming Electoral Committee — parliament will pass a bill for it in the near future — PUK leaders, especially the ones from Kirkuk, have clearly said the current situation has made the implementation of Article 140 much easier. A further confrontation with Baghdad could, therefore, be avoided. Beyond any doubt, all Kurdish people aim at the incorporation of our “Jerusalem,” a term Jalal Talabani once used for Kirkuk. However, there is no common and clear strategy at present. In that sense, the participation of all political parties, instead of unilateral statements on behalf of different Kurdish figures, is imperative. Despite Barzani’s statement that Kurds want to make Kirkuk a place for coexistence, peaceful life and better public services, the implementation of specific policies toward this direction are still pending.

Security and Peshmerga forces should not withdraw from Kirkuk again, a mistake repeated in 2003 and 2007 due to US pressure. Before 2011, we thought that American presence on Iraqi soil, as well as Iraq’s subjection toĚýChapterĚýVIIĚýof the United Nations (UN) Charter, would guarantee peaceful coexistence in a united Iraq devoid of any exercise of violence against Kurds. Instead, the situation is now very different and complicated. US forces are no longer present and UN sanctions are not in place. A potential withdrawal from Kirkuk and other disputed territories would be a tragic mistake, given that Iraq’s armed forces were not able to resist the Islamic State’s offensive.

Undoubtedly, the KRG will wait and analyze the situation. But focusing on the legalization of incorporating Kirkuk into the KRG, with the consent of Iraqi forces, appears to be the most suitable move. On these grounds, we could further work in favor of Iraq’s reunification — of course, with strengthening Iraq’s federalism by creating a region in Sunni-dominated provinces.

Langendorf: The situation in Iraq has led to interesting dynamics with regard to Kurdish independence — an option that President Barzani has openly raised. Will the Kurds in Iraq push for independence? How united are the different Kurdish factions on this issue?

Chomani:ĚýI don’t think Kurds in Iraq are going to push for independence — not at the moment. Rather, I think Kurds will continue working on gaining independence. Unfortunately, the ruling Kurdish parties have not prepared Kurdistan for full autonomy. Therefore, I do agree with Barzani’s deputy, Kosrat Rasul Ali, that prior to independence there are some conditions that should be addressed. I also agree with Fareed Asasard, one of the PUK’s leaders and head of the Strategic Studies Center, who underscored that independence in times of peace is more stable than during chaos.

As independence is our long deferred dream, few people can criticize claims for Kurdish autonomy. But most intellectuals who are really aware of the Kurdish cause insist that independence is not desired at the moment. We have already experienced two failed declarations of independence — one in the 1920s in Slemani and the other in 1946 in Mahabad. I believe declaring independence should not be done for the sake of scoring a historical event or becoming a known figure, but for the sake of a stable, democratic and independent country.

For the last part of your question, unity is the most important task before declaring independence. Unfortunately, we are not united. Kurds are divided on two issues: Iraqi Kurdistan and other Kurdish lands. In Iraqi Kurdistan, it is clear the KDP and PUK have differing views over independence due to their stances on and . Ever since Barzani’s comments on full autonomy, Iran has taken a harsh position against the move, whereas Turkey initially kept silent due to its good relations with the KDP. I believe the PUK has better analyzed the situation, as it underscores that independence should not destabilize the region. The party also believes that, for independence, Iran should accept the formation of a Kurdish state in present-day Iraq to ensure that ties are amicable in the future.

The history of the country has showed that Iraqis have not been able to coexist due to political conflicts. If Iraq falls apart, the people need to cast their differences aside so they can all live in peace.

I support working hard to protect Kirkuk and call upon Turkmen, Arabs and other communities to vote yes for incorporating the city and other disputed areas into the KRG. If we can protect Kirkuk, win it legally and have control over oil, we will nearly be independent. I also prefer the idea of those who call for a division of Iraq into separate states, with a weak central government. This will bring stability to other parts of Iraq, especially for Sunnis as they will enjoy their take of power.

Langendorf: What do regional actors think of Kurdish independence, including Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran, all of which have significant Kurdish populations?

Chomani:ĚýIn 2003, we chose to join Iraq again under an Iraqi constitution and a federal state structure. However, Kurds were ready to seek independence if the constitution was violated. So far, most of Iraq’s constitution items, including Article 140, have been violated by government. Thus, Baghdad should work on implementing the constitution. Otherwise, Kurds can no longer be part of a country in which their existence is in jeopardy. If independence is announced, Iraq would be the most important country to recognize Kurdistan as it would be our neighbor. On disputed areas, we should reach a final agreement as Sunnis will be our neighbors, not the .

has not taken any position yet as the regime is falling apart. However, the country is very important in many ways. The Islamic State rules part of Syria, so it is a serious threat. In an independence scenario, we need good relations with Damascus and ties might be easier if Kurds can protect their liberated region, even though bad relations between the KDP and Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) have negatively impacted the Kurdish uprising there. Syria could be the bridge to reach international ports, which we require to be less dependent on Turkey. Ankara has economic interests in Iraq and the KRG. If it finds better opportunities in Baghdad, then it will back the central government instead.

Turkey has taken a different position for the first time over independence. But there is a difference between the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) position and the hostility of the National Movement Party (MHP) and the Republican People’s Party (CHP). Even the AKP’s support is unclear, as Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu declared that Ankara stands in favor of Iraq’s unity. Overall, it is more of a neutral position considering Turkey’s economic interests in the KRG, which it does not want to jeopardize. Our economic ties with Turkey are huge but unbalanced, as Turkey profits more than the Kurds do.

Iran is the only regional country that has announced its opposition to an independent Kurdistan. Tehran does not want Iraq to fall apart, as the Shia dominance would disappear and Sunnis would rise again. Iran is also afraid that Kurdistan’s independence may fuel its own Kurdish movement to ask for their political, civic and cultural rights. But we should not forget that Iran has important political and economic interests and, therefore, may take a different position if Kurdistan receives widespread support for independence.

Langendorf: If a Kurdish bid for independence succeeds, what will this mean for Iraq, the Kurdistan region and the Kurdish community in terms of historical, political, economic and security implications?

Chomani:ĚýIf a Kurdish bid for independence succeeds, Iraq will be split up into three countries: Kurdish, Sunni and Shia. I don’t think Sunnis will accept a Shia-dominated government, as the former will have no partner in office if a Shia majority deprives them of their rights. In an independence scenario, the incumbent government would need to regulate its relations with the two new states to avoid further bloodshed. Failing to do so will result in a continuation of suffering.

For the Kurdistan region, a bid for independence would bring many difficulties as the route toward state-building is rocky, which is why the KRG has to prepare in terms of its security, food and economy. The whole Kurdish community will seriously observe any moves toward independence, as Kurdistan’s breakaway needs to go hand in hand with improved freedoms, public services and democracy.

As far as security is concerned, the threat from the Islamic State against Kurdistan will continue. Therefore, the international community ought to remove the terrorist organization from Sunni areas, so citizens can better manage their own country and Kurdistan’s security will not be at risk.

The history of the country has showed that Iraqis have not been able to coexist due to political conflicts. If Iraq falls apart, the people need to cast their differences aside so they can all live in peace.

The views expressedĚýin this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflectĚý51łÔąĎ’sĚýeditorial policy.

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For more than eight decades, the Kurdish people have been pushing for cultural recognition and territorial independence. The Kurds are another contemporary example of a people without a land. After the Treaty of Lausanne was signed in 1924, the Middle East was divided into several countries and the territorial region known as Kurdistan was split between Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey.

As a response, Kurdish political organizations and military factions were created across the region to defend the Kurdish cause. However, they have met fierce resistance from the central governments in all four countries, which has often resulted in armed conflict and violence such as theĚý chemical attackĚýin Iraq in 1988.

At present, only Iraq and Iran have recognized the existence of a Kurdish zone on their territory: the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq and the Kurdistan Province in western Iran. In Syria, taking advantage of the civil war, the Kurds self-ruleĚýin November 2013 — although the proliferation of Islamist brigades who question their legitimacy undoubtedly represents a great challenge.

In Turkey, despite decades of violent conflict, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), along with other Kurdish insurgent groups, has not reached their longstanding dream of achieving independence or at least a certain degree of autonomy. However, it is important to stress that people on both sides have been working to solve the issue and promote peace.

Since December 2012, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip ErdoÄźan and jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô haveĚýengaged in known as the “Solution Process.” On March 21, 2013, Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛ÔĚý a ceasefireĚýand an end to armed struggle. But strongmen and well-known political figures are not the only actors playing a role in constructing peace.

An unknown, yet significant dimension of the Kurdish issue in Turkey is the involvement of thousands of women in the peace process. When it comes to conflict, there is a tendency to see women through the simplistic prism of victims — as widows, as casualties of attacks, as mothers of fallen combatants, and as abused vulnerable human beings.

However, women may — and often do — play a pro-active role in conflict, sometimes as war combatants and sometimes as peace negotiators. As it turns out, women in Turkey are deeply committed to the resolution of the conflict between the Kurds and the Turkish government, and they play an essential role in the peace process.

In order to explore this singular dimension of the conflict,Ěý51łÔąĎ’sĚýClotilde de Swarte speaks to Elodie Sellar, who is currently conducting research on the women’s movement in Turkish Kurdistan. De Swarte and Sellar talk about the women involved in the Kurdish peace process, the nature of their role, and the results of their action.

Clotilde de Swarte: When it comes to Kurdistan, one tends to focus on Kurdish fighters, notably those of the PKK. Yet most of them are male, while your work suggests that women also play an active role. Who are the Kurdish women that are getting involved in the peace process in Turkish Kurdistan?

Elodie Sellar: On the Kurdish side, it is basically fair to say that all Kurdish women are getting involved — young and old; educated and uneducated; from poor and wealthy backgrounds; from a variety of professional backgrounds; from the political world as well as from civil society or academia and also housewives; from rural and urban areas; and so on. In essence, there is no single or at least dominant group of women in this peace process. It is a very united and heterogeneous involvement. After all, every single woman has a stake in trying to ensure a successful outcome of this peace process and they are more than aware of this.

Kurdish women realized the power and emancipation the women in the PKK had.ĚýGradually, this filtered down into society andĚýthe Kurdish women’s movement was born.Ěý

However, on the Turkish side, there are only a few women getting involved.ĚýIn fact, during my interviews, I realized that, ironically, some of the more active Turkish women are involved in the peace process by virtue of being part of the BDP [Peace and Democracy Party], as I was reminded by a couple of women I interviewed that they were Turkish, not Kurdish. This is because they (the ethnically Turkish women) feel that in order to support the Kurdish cause and also women’s rights within the political arena, they can only do so through the BDP. Indeed, if one takes a glance at the main Turkish political parties, there are still very few women, while broaching the Kurdish issue is still very taboo. Whereas in the BDP, women have a central position.

De Swarte: Do these women represent a united front or are there rivalries between different groups?

Sellar: The answer to them being a united front is a definite yes. They are an impressive united front. In fact, during my interviews with various Kurdish women — bearing in mind that I deliberately chose to interview women from both the political and civil society worlds — I always asked what relation they had with one another. At this point, I was often told that I had missed the point by asking this question.

In order to understand the nature of involvement of Kurdish women in this peace process, it is crucial to emphasize that they are a movement. Their movement is called DOKH (Democratic and Free Women’s Movement). This women’s movement is by far the most united, organized and largest women’s movement in the Middle East.

So, even before the peace process, they functioned as a movement, and the same goes for during the peace process. Of course, within this movement, there are many different groups — there are women in politics, in NGOs, and the “peace mothers” — but they all work together under the umbrella of DOKH. For example, before they present a female political candidate, the movement gets together to choose a woman.

I believe this is what makes their movement so strong because in any other country where women have tried to get involved in peace processes, they are either confined to civil society or there are a few token women in negotiations — or they are simply non-existent. In Colombia, for example, where a lot of women are involved at both the grassroots and political levels, one problem has been internal politics and consequent dissension. However, in the Kurdish case, they are a united and thoroughly organized women’s movement.

In addition, I would just like to mention that DOKH is not only for Kurdish women: it is for all women of all ethnic backgrounds in Turkey, including Kurds, Turks, Armenians, Arabs, Jews, Laz and Charkaz. In a country as diverse as Turkey — yet simultaneously with a nationalist ideology that denies any identity or ethnicity other than the Turkish one — the inclusive and homogenous nature of DOKH seems of primordial significance and carries with it an inclusive, representative and peaceful message.

I do want to stress here that this is the message it carries. As I mentioned regarding the first question, one of the problems in this peace process regarding women’s participation is the lack of Turkish women. Nevertheless, Kurdish women have created some links with Turkish women and others. With regard to the Kurdish women themselves, this movement has helped them enormously to become a strong, united and vociferous force. The movement has made huge progress regarding the condition of Kurdish women, while it relentlessly keeps the fight going.

De Swarte: Why do women get involved in the peace process? Is it for ideological reasons, economic imperatives or political motivations?

Sellar: First of all, I think it’s important to briefly mention the origins of the Kurdish women’s movement in order to answer this question properly. Knowing that these women are organized as a united front through this movement will also help to understand their involvement.

Many Kurdish women expressed feelings of being trapped in an infamous double bind: not only are they women, they are Kurdish women, so they are doubly oppressed for being of the female gender as well as for being from an ethnic minority.Ěý

When I asked about the origins of the Kurdish women’s movement, I was met with a unanimous resounding answer: “the PKK.” For many Kurdish women, joining the PKK guerrilla movement in the mountains was a way to escape the living conditions that were very oppressive for women. Of course, there are quite a few liberation movements that have had a significant number of female fighters, but I believe there are two reasons that make the PKK different for Kurdish women.

First of all, they had support from the leader of the PKK, Abdullah Ă–ł¦˛ą±ô˛ą˛Ô. Second, once in the PKK, the women created their own independent movement within this movement — a sort of sub-movement. They created their own army, their own party, and their own philosophy. The effect of this was very powerful.

Other Kurdish women realized the power and emancipation the women in the PKK had. Gradually, this filtered down into society and the Kurdish women’s movement was born. In essence, once this movement was created, its aim and philosophy was to emancipate and free women in Turkey (both Turkish and Kurdish), and ensure that women had their own independent movement in order to change society.

De Swarte: How does this relate to the peace process?

Sellar:ĚýOne of the women I interviewed told me that when she was young, she thought it was a disadvantage for the Kurds to be a stateless people. Later, however, she understood this was an advantage — an opportunity even — to create a new society in which men and women would both be free. In general, peace processes have the potential to be moments of great transformation. Sadly, in reality, there is often merely an end to violence and a return to an antebellum status quo that is very unfavorable for women.

Looking at peace theory, we can see that Kurdish women, as women tend to in general, view peace processes as a positive step rather than a negative one. Until fairly recently, negative peace processes have generally prevailed, which entail merely seeking to end violence — hence why there is usually a return to a pre-war status quo. In contrast, a positive peace process addresses the root causes of a conflict, which is due to structural inequalities within society that lead to outbursts of violence and, occasionally, war.

Consequently, women have contributed to positive peace processes by highlighting that one of the most fundamental inequalities in society is, and always has been, the one between men and women. Indeed, violence against women is as prevalent in times of peace as it is in conflict — there is a sort of continuum of violence.

I think this is exactly why Kurdish women are involved in the peace process, as they strongly believe that a constructive and sustainable process for all Kurds and Turks will be achieved by addressing this gender inequality, and ensuring that women gain the emancipation they seek. As I previously mentioned, this is precisely why women have such a large stake in a successful peace process. In short, they are involved so they can participate in the transformation of society and ensure the outcome will be a free, equal and democratic society for men and women.

In fact, many Kurdish women mentioned that they don’t want an exploitative, capitalist and patriarchal system to remain either. Historically, women have always suffered more, so the chance to be involved in a peace process, as well as to influence it, is of paramount importance.

Many Kurdish women expressed feelings of being trapped in an infamous double bind: not only are they women, they are Kurdish women, so they are doubly oppressed for being of the female gender as well as for being from an ethnic minority. The stakes are, therefore, very significant for women in this peace process.

Finally, as they are such a strong movement, and a very powerful and influential one, they want to be involved in the peace process and in changing society to help women in the entire Middle East — most of whom do not yet have such women’s movements. So, Kurdish women are aware of the impact their movement can have on the region. They hope their case can act as a model for other women and have a sort of ripple effect on the Middle East.

*[Read the final part .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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The prospect of Kurdistan as a homeland for the Kurds began with the colonial division of western Asia, which followed World War I. With the breakup of the Middle East that created new borders in the Levant, the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 betrayed promises to give the Kurds their own state.

The Scattered Lands of Kurdistan

Since then, Kurdistan has come to be recognized across the borders of four different countries: Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey — different Kurdish regions, yet with the same problems throughout the last century.

The fight for Kurdish rights has always been a problem for those Kurds willing to use their own language, which is often banned in state institutions. This is just one aspect of repression that Kurds face in their demand for autonomy and historical recognition.

Today, a part of Kurdistan lies within Turkey, where a ceasefire was agreed upon between the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in early 2013. The conflict in Turkey has lasted for over 30 years, resulting in approximately 40,000 deaths.

The Kurds in the Middle East have adopted different strategies. The PKK opted for guerrilla warfare to prevent the Turkish Army from trampling on Kurdish rights. In Syria, after the uprising in 2011, which turned into a civil war, the Kurds were able to establish a higher degree of self-organization in the predominantly Kurdish parts of the country by building new institutions such as hospitals and schools.

The Kurds in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan or northeastern Syria) have achieved a certain degree of emancipation from Assad’s regime, but are forced to fight against rebel groups such as the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra.

In Iran, there even existed a Kurdish Republic from 1946-47. After its demise, a long period of repression against the Kurds began. Today, Kurds in Iran enjoy cultural benefits since they are allowed to write and publish in the Kurdish language. Nevertheless, the political problems have not been resolved.

After many years of popular struggle against Saddam Hussein’s regime, Iraqi Kurds carved out an autonomous region and a parliament, officially part of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq.

During my recent journey, I crossed three parts of Kurdistan to create a first-hand account of the territory, which is important for the region’s contemporary geopolitics and human rights struggle. I traveled along the borders of Iraq, Turkey and Syria.

PKK Fighters: How a Guerrilla Lives

My first stop was Iraqi Kurdistan. One night, I was getting ready to meet several Kurdish guerilla fighters camped out in the Qandil Mountains. I passed through countless inspections by the Iraqi Army and soon, almost every sign of human life seemed to have disappeared. I didn’t know where I was exactly, I just knew I was very close to the Iranian border.

Finally, I reached the Kurdish outpost. Following further security routines, I could finally leave my pick-up. After spending one night at their camp, where I slept in a small, concealed hut, at 5:30am I began my day, following two guerrilla fighters: a man and a woman. These people have chosen to dedicate their lives to the Kurdish struggle.

I conducted several interviews with them, which took place both in military training areas and in sites used for studying. The guerillas placed great emphasis on issues such as feminism and environmentalism. I talked with them about the guerrillas’ personal lives, what they missed from their old lifestyle and what, instead, is essential and indefeasible about their life in the mountains. They also discussed the Middle East’s political issues and gave their opinion about the “crisis” of the ceasefire with the Turkish government.

A guerrilla fighter told me: “We want the Kurdish, the Turkish and the Arabs to live side by side in all the countries of the Middle East, just like they do in Lebanon, Jordan or Turkey. So, you see, we don’t want to overpower other communities and create a Kurdistan supreme.”

The woman I spoke to grew up in a Kurdish family in Germany, but every summer used to go back to Turkey where she suffered different forms of humiliation and discrimination. She believes that Europe has accepted the Turkish oppression of the Kurds.

Looking for a way to counter this repression, during one of her summer holidays spent in Turkey’s Kurdish regions, she decided to climb Qandil and joined the guerrillas’ fight.

Meanwhile, the man has been living in the Qandil Mountains since 1995. He said he does not trust the negotiation process with Turkey. He is worried that it will lower the attention toward the conflict, which could carry dangerous consequences.

The journey into the guerrillas’ world continued along the bunkers used for medical assistance, up to a hospital built by the PKK, but only for use by civilians living around Qandil.

Here I met Medya, a German volunteer doctor, who has decided to support the Kurdish fight with her knowledge. Medya doesn’t want to go back to Germany, since its government does not recognize the Kurdish struggle and labels the PKK a terrorist group. In contrast, she considers the PKK to be a party that fights for freedom.

In the hospital with around 60 beds, Medya and a few volunteers are in charge of surgeries for the civilians of the area.

After leaving the guerrillas in the Qandil Mountains, my trip continued over the lands of Iraqi Kurdistan to reach one of the places where, during the 1990s, some Kurds, escaping from mass repression in Turkey, found refuge in Mahmura, a province of Mosul which is located in Iraqi Kurdistan.

In the past this was only a desert and a few tents; but now, 14 years later, the camp has become part of daily life for refugees. The people living there have transformed their unstable situation and temporary set-up into something normal, with stable habitations and even self-organized elections.

Escaping From Syria

Afterward, I decided to continue my journey inside Iraqi Kurdistan, which is where new perspectives and dreams for all Kurdish people hope to be realized, since it has become an autonomous region. This area has recently become a shelter for many fleeing the Syrian Civil War. Six refugee camps are located there, accommodating Syrians who have managed to escape the violence. In essence, the Kurds of Iraq are helping the Kurds of Syria.

In Bardarash, Mosul province, refugees are welcomed and babies are born, but people die as well. Everybody is waiting, hoping for better — this is the life of a refugee.

I traveled to the enormous refugee camp near the city of Domiz in Iraqi Kurdistan. For decades, the Assad regime of both father and son had ignored the hardships of the Kurds, scoffing at them.

On many occasions, the Syrian government has refused to grant basic rights such as education, health care and identity cards to the Kurdish people. With the outbreak of the Syrian revolution and the civil war, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad finally made some concessions to the Kurds and gave some of them citizenship.

The Kurds in Syria have survived the chaos of the recent upheavals, established a network, and eventually taken control of the cities they were allowed into.

However, just when the Kurds had resolved their issues with the Syrian Army, new threats were posed by various factions within the rebel ranks — by jihadists, smugglers and mercenaries, all involved in the effort of opposing Assad’s regime.

In Domiz, I was able to meet Edrees N. Salih, the director of Domiz camp. In our conversation, he denounced the lack of aid from the international community.

Oil, Autonomy and Interests: Iraqi Kurdistan

Iraqi Kurdistan is very rich thanks to the oil that the region sells to foreign companies like Chevron. When I was there, I visited the autonomous parliament, where I talked to Aso Kareem, an MP from the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).

He discussed the relationship between Kurdish rights and the economy of the region, arguing that it is important not to disturb the building of a gas pipeline between Iraqi Kurdistan and Turkey. Moreover, despite the presence of PKK fighters in the region, the Kurdish Iraqi government does not have official contact with the guerrillas, whilst it has strong commercial relations with Turkey. Indeed, the Kurdish struggle has its own logic and inner challenges.

The Heritage of Colonialism and Turbulent Borders

I left the Kurdish Iraqi landscapes and headed to the Syrian-Turkish border. The place is emblematic of the colonial division of Nusaybin (in Turkey) and Qamishlo (in Syria), which used to be one city during the Ottoman-era.

The Syrian War, that has dramatically affected the lives of Kurds in Syria, has also had strong reverberations on those Kurds who live on the other side of the border, in Southeast Turkey.

In Nusaybin, I witnessed how the city’s mayor, AyĹźe Gökkan, was about to start her hunger strike to protest against the Turkish government’s construction of a wall along the Turkish-Syrian border. The mayor claimed it would sharply affect the solidarity relations with Kurds across the border and also prevent the delivery of aid to the suffering Syrian population. Despite her protests, the wall was built.

In this city, right at the border of Syria, I was also able to meet Abdulbari Eren, head of the local section of the Kurdish political movement, the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP). He talked very enthusiastically about a new life for Kurds who live in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) and their capacity to self-organize their society by building new institutions such as hospitals and schools.

He also pointed out that, despite their emancipation from Assad’s regime, Syrian Kurds are forced to fight against Jabhat al-Nusra.

We Want Kurdish

The last step was again a trip inside Kurdish territory. I traveled to “the capital” of Turkish Kurdistan: Diyarbakir. In the streets, I spoke to three young men: two lawyers and a journalist — meaningful jobs for the protection of human rights in Turkey.

Sitting on a bench, the young lawyer explained his stance toward the ceasefire between the Turkish government and the PKK. To him, the PKK took the first step and tried to respect the agreement by withdrawing its fighters from the borders.

The lawyer was certain that this time the public’s reaction would be very optimistic in comparison with the past because, all in all, what people ultimately want is an answer to the Kurdish question. He said: “Maybe today there aren’t the same casualties of the past, but people are killed anyway. We need to keep working in order to find a durable solution.”

The two other men focused on the hard life of a community that strives to achieve their rights. First and foremost, language remains a big issue. While in the past it was forbidden to speak the Kurdish language even in daily life, today it is possible to speak it in the streets but still not in hospitals, courts and schools.

They reminisced about their adolescence when one of them had been arrested because he owned a Kurdish record. All of them do not agree with the package of proposals the Turkish government presented during the last negotiations.

One point of contention is that Kurdish-language lessons are only available in some private schools:

“During my education, why can I learn [the] Turkish language and not Kurdish? As a second language we can learn English [and] French, but the courses for the Kurdish language are forbidden. We want to study Turkish and other languages, but above all we would like to enjoy Kurdish courses.”

This last encounter in Diyarbakir, at the end of my journey across Kurdistan, has reinforced my awareness that there still is a long-road ahead for Kurdish rights.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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The civil war in Syria has opened new windows of opportunity for the Kurdish cause. After decades of nationalist struggle in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, the Syrian conflict may redistribute the cards.

While Iraqi Kurds gained regional autonomy in 1991, Syrian Kurds have taken advantage of the chaos caused by battles between pro-governmental and revolutionary forces to  in their region in northeastern Syria. In Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has shown an increased  with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan, since 2012.

Thus, today seems to be a historical opportunity for the Kurdish people to reach for its long-held dream of achieving independence. Logically, what we could be expecting is:

• Coordination and collaboration between different Kurdish groups across the region
• United front against national governments

Instead, what we are currently witnessing is:

•  between the Turkish Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)
•  between the KRG and the Turkish government
•  between the KRG and the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Union Party (PYD) 

Therefore, the overall Kurdish project might be threatened by intra-Kurdish tensions, especially those between the two main Kurdish organizations: the Iraqi KRG and the Turkish PKK. This apparent paradox actually has rational explanations.

Indeed, as is often the case in the Middle East, relationships between different political or ethnic groups are shaped by a great sense of pragmatism. Thus, Kurdish groups are not merely concerned with achieving Kurdish autonomy. Undoubtedly, ideology is part of the equation. However, this is sometimes supplanted by other imperatives, notably political and economic ones.

A closer look at the PKK's and the KRG's strategies helps us understand why two brothers have chosen the path of confrontation rather than that of fraternity.

The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK)

For the PKK, the equation is quite simple. Its primary goal is to achieve autonomy for the Kurdish people in Turkey. To do so, it has fought an armed struggle against the Turkish government for nearly three decades. Since late 2012, an  has taken place.

After Prime Minister Erdogan announced he wanted to  with the Kurds and initiated , the PKK's imprisoned political leader, the Kurdish organization  in March 2013.

Yet today most of the Kurdish population remains very suspicious of the central government. They fear Erdogan's apparent conciliatory attitude is nothing but a political strategy aiming at stopping the Kurdish insurgency before the next municipal and presidential elections — which will be held respectively in March and August 2014.

According to some experts, armed struggle is . In September 2013, the PKK  because it believed the Turkish government was not honoring the agreements made. As a result, opposition to the central government has been and is likely to remain the core component of the PKK's strategy.

The Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)

For the KRG, the picture is more complex. Undoubtedly, it is also concerned with Kurdish autonomy. However, it has been facing its own challenges, meaning it has adopted a different strategy.

Firstly, Iraqi Kurds have achieved some degree of autonomy. Since the ratification of a new  in 2005, Iraqi Kurdistan has been  , with its own government: the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG). It also has its own parliament and armed forces – peshmergas.

Consequently, the KRG's strategy primarily aims to consolidate and deepen its autonomous status. This is especially true since it has been facing constant pressure from the federal government, which is worried about losing complete control over the region.

Secondly, the KRG enjoys a good economic situation. The Kurdish region of northern Iraq is oil-rich. It has  of proven reserves.  for the last couple of years. Erbil, the region's capital city, is becoming the "" as foreign companies invest in hotels and luxury companies.

Foreign investments have been facilitated by an advantageous : companies benefit from tax exemptions for the first ten years and are allowed to repatriate their profits. It is worth noting that Turkish companies represent more than half the foreign firms located in the region.

Compared to the rest of the country, Iraqi Kurdistan looks like an island of prosperity and security in an ocean of instability and economic difficulties. As a result, a major component of the KRG's strategy is also to preserve and develop its economic interests, even if this means partnering with Turkey.

Thirdly, Iraqi Kurdistan has  of the Kurdish cause. Since it has been the first Kurdish region to succeed in achieving autonomy, it has enjoyed great popular support across Kurdish territories. Current KRG President Masoud Barzani strives to . In this respect, another component of the organization's strategy is to maintain and expand its leadership.

Bones of Contention: Syria and Turkish-KRG relations

These two Kurdish organizations have a common goal: promoting the rights of the Kurds and achieving independence (or at least autonomy). But they both are embedded in geostrategic calculations as they face challenges of a different nature stemming from different sources. Their respective strategies are shaped accordingly. This sheds light on the ongoing tensions between the two organizations. There are currently two main bones of contention.

The first issue is related to the situation in Syria. As mentioned above, the Kurdish region in Syria has achieved de facto autonomy since government troops left the region. The Democratic Union Party (PYD) declared self-rule in November 2013 and it is now   Created in 2003 by Syrian PKK remnants, the PYD is affiliated with the PKK and is one of its most important allies.

Yet the Iraqi KRG does not approve of this relationship. First, it is hostile to the PYD because it has . Second, the KRG is afraid that this newly-born cross-border Kurdish axis represents a threat to its own political leadership.

The second issue is concerned with a rapprochement between the KRG and the Turkish government. Indeed, over the past few months Erbil and Ankara have initiated a new relationship, based on mutual understanding and tightened economic cooperation.

In November 2013, Erdogan and Barzani met in Diyarbakir, the capital city of Turkish Kurdistan. This was an unprecedented historical event. Later on, they also signed a 

For the PKK, this new relationship is like a knife in its back. While the KRG is supposed to be its Kurdish brother, it is now siding with the enemy. But for the KRG, it is the result of pragmatic calculations.

In political terms, getting closer to Ankara enables the Iraqi organization to tackle the influence of the PKK on its own territory. It is also a means to assert itself against the new PKK-PYD Kurdish axis. In economic terms, signing oil deals with Turkey increases the KRG's economic prospects and furthers its independence from Baghdad. Thus, Barzani's new friendship with Erdogan is in line with the KRG's overall strategy.

Inter-Kurdish tensions are damaging not only because they hinder the Kurdish national project. They also represent a gift to other regional actors eager to instrumentalize them. For the Turkish government, PKK-KRG rivalries are a godsend.

By allying with the Iraqi Kurdish government, Turkey shows openness towards the Kurds, presenting itself as a conciliatory and cooperative actor. But at the same time, it also weakens its most important domestic opponent: the PKK.

Today, the overall Kurdish project is at a crossroads. Regional events along with the emergence of new powerful Kurdish actors seem to provide all the necessary ingredients to give a dynamic impulse to the idea of an autonomous Kurdistan.

Yet Kurdish groups across the region lack a general view of the situation and still determine their strategies in response to direct, close and pragmatic issues. Therefore, it is likely that inter-Kurdish tensions will continue as long as self-interest will be the primary motto of most Kurdish organizations.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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On August 15, a car bomb ripped through a Beirut suburb, killing 21 people. The explosion was but the latest in a wave of attacks across Lebanon throughout 2012 and 2013, that were linked to events inside Syria.

The ease with which violence in Iraq and Syria has negatively impacted surrounding countries, underscores the declining significance of borders throughout the Levant. Sectarian and ethnic identities, rather than citizenship, are proving increasingly influential in shaping the political orientation of communities throughout the region. From Beirut to Baghdad, conservative Sunni Islamists wish to rid the Arab world of Iranian influence, weaken Hezbollah’s position, and restore Sunni rule to Iraq and Syria. Naturally, the Levant’s Shi’a and Alawite communities are unified in opposition to this agenda.

Amid these deepening regional divisions, a new opening has emerged for one of the Middle East’s longest-suffering minority groups: the Kurds.

The shifting regional balance of power has enabled the Kurds to exercise greater control over their destiny. While the future is unpredictable, it is entirely plausible that Syria’s Kurds will maintain autonomy in northeastern Syria when the dust eventually settles.

However, the ongoing war between jihadist and Kurdish militias over control of northern Syria — a conflict far less well-known than the battle between Bashar al-Assad and the rest of the Syrian rebels — will likely lead to a major humanitarian catastrophe for Syria’s Kurds before any political gains can be consolidated.

Filling the Vacuum

After the Syrian crisis erupted, the Kurds — who comprise nine percent of Syria’s population — were faced with a challenging dilemma. Both joining revolutionary forces and allying with the regime posed grave risks given the conflict’s unpredictable nature. While some pundits have claimed that the Kurds ultimately sided with the regime, this assessment oversimplifies a complicated picture.

Syria’s “Kurdish Spring” preceded the Arab Spring and began in 2004, when anti-Assad Kurds were massacred in Qamishli for protesting against an Arab nationalist regime that had for decadesĚýĚýKurdish farmers,ĚýĚýKurdish land, and outlawed the teaching of the Kurdish language. Yet the Kurds’ grievances against the Assad regime failed to yield an alliance between the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the Kurdish minority. The FSA’s relationship with Turkey, combined with the Islamist and Arab nationalist identities of influential rebel factions, prompted many Kurds to fear a Muslim Brotherhood-led overthrow of the Ba’athist regime.

In July 2012, under pressure from a growing insurrection in the rest of the country, the Syrian government withdrew most of its security forces from the Kurdish-majority areas, leaving the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) as the de facto regional government. Assad’s withdrawal was driven by three strategic calculations.

First, the Syrian military sought to consolidate its resources toward the battles in Damascus and Aleppo. Second, given Turkey’s support for the FSA, Assad wanted to deliver Ankara a tit-for-tat response to Turkish support for the Syrian rebels. Given that the PYD is affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which waged attacks against the Turkish state from Syrian soil under the later years of Hafez al-Assad’s rule, the Ba’athist regime sent a clear message to Ankara by offering a PKK-affiliate group a safe haven on Turkey’s doorstep. Third, Damascus sought to further divide the opposition by seeking to enhance the allegiance of some Kurdish factions to the Ba’athist regime.

Since then, there has essentially been a truce between the Syrian military and the PYD. Instead, throughout 2013, the PYD has been the target of ongoing attacks from Salafi jihadists determined to overthrow the Assad regime and deny the politically secular Kurds any spoils of the conflict. As the battles between the PYD and al-Qaeda-affiliated militias intensify, ethnic lines are increasingly being blurred, and a power vacuum has indeed developed.

Throughout the first week of August, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat Al-Nusra reportedly killedĚýĚýKurdish civilians in the border town of Tal Abyad. Other jihadists, meanwhile, shelled the Kurdish town of Ras al-Ayn. The FSA has also waged attacks against the PYD on the grounds that the Kurdish militia is loyal to Assad’s regime. However, some Arab groups in Syrian Kurdistan have offered up their full support for the PYD, for fear that Islamist extremists may be gaining control over the territory. The brewing Islamist-Kurdish war in northeastern Syria pressuredĚýĚýSyrian refugees to flee to Iraqi Kurdistan in mid-August. Shortly thereafter, Masoud Barzani — leader of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) —ĚýĚýthat the KRG was “prepared to defend” Syria’s Kurds.

While many analysts doubt that the KRG’s well-trainedĚýpeshmergaĚýfighters would enter Syria to fight on behalf of the PYD, the KRG’s military training and financial support for the PYD underscores Barzani’s greater pan-Kurdish policies. Barzani’s likely motivation stems from his suspicion that a future war between central Iraq and the KRG could occur, and under such circumstances, Syrian Kurdistan could provide strategic depth. In the meantime, the PYD’s posture ±ąľ±˛ő-Ă -±ąľ±˛ő the jihadist fighters is strengthened by the strategic depth provided by Iraqi Kurdistan. If violence continues to plague Syria’s northeast, the border between Syrian and Iraqi Kurdistan may ultimately dissolve.

The Kurdish Spring

While most Syrian Kurds are Sunni Muslims, their staunchly secular politics pit them against the al-Qaeda affiliated groups seeking the creation of an Islamic emirate in Syria. Ethnic concerns, including the rebels’ apparent hostility to Kurdish self-determination, exacerbate the division. Reports of al-Qaeda fightersĚýĚýKurds and issuing calls for their extermination will only further expand the PYD’s support base from secular Kurds.

As the majority of Syria’s oil and gas reserves exist in the country’s northeastern region, the stakes are high for both sides. The geopolitical ramifications of an established, autonomous Kurdish region — or independent Kurdish state — in northeastern Syria are complicated. From Turkey’s vantage point, a PKK-run Syrian Kurdistan would constitute a major setback given the likelihood that the PKK would utilize the territory to launch attacks against the Turkish state (especially if the ongoing Turkey-PKK peace talks fail and the ruling leaders in Damascus and Ankara remain in power for the near to medium term). Turkish officials are naturally concerned about the prospects of Turkey’s own Kurdish minority demanding greater autonomy from Ankara after being inspired by their Kurdish counterparts in Syria. That said, after the Gulf War, Turkey feared a semi-autonomous Kurdish state in northern Iraq, yet the KRG eventually became one of Turkey’s closest Middle Eastern allies.

For Turkey to form a similar alliance with any semi-autonomous Kurdish state in Syria, the ongoing peace talks with the PKK would need to succeed (an unlikely prospect in the near term), or a pro-Turkish rival of the PKK would need to assume power in northeastern Syria (also an unlikely outcome given that the PYD is more heavily armed than its Kurdish rivals). For the time being, Ankara has supported jihadist militias in northern Syria not only to weaken the Assad regime, but also to weaken the PKK/PYD. However, Turkey is playing a dangerous game, as the establishment of a PKK/PYD-run Kurdish state along its border may prove to be less hostile than an al-Qaeda-run Islamic emirate on the other side of the border. For now, Turkey has hedged its bets.

The ongoing battle between Kurdish forces and al-Qaeda’s Syria-based branches poses a difficult challenge for the United States. Wary of alienating its NATO ally Turkey, Washington has vested interests in the Syrian state’s survival in a post-Assad era, and thus opposes a semi-autonomous or independent Kurdish state in northeastern Syria. However, the United States also has no interest in al-Qaeda affiliate groups maintaining control of a strip of land on NATO’s Middle Eastern doorstep.

Washington could certainly benefit from gaining additional allies in the region. Given the pro-American orientation of Barzani’s KRG, the Obama administration would be wise to establish ties with Syria’s Kurds, given that the tide may continue to turn in the Kurds’ direction over the long-term. If Western states decide to provide the Islamist rebels with more advanced weaponry that ends up being used against the PYD, this could sour Washington’s relationship with an autonomous Syrian Kurdistan in the future. There is little evidence that this has been considered by the Western countries arming the rebels.

Like their Iraqi counterparts, Syria’s Kurds have sought to break free amid their country’s chaos and violence. From their perspective, an independent Kurdish state was promised, but not delivered, by the powers that won World War I. Almost a century later, they smell a genuine opportunity for greater autonomy, and possibly independence. For generations, the Kurds’ alliances have fluctuated given the region’s fluid geopolitical developments and their need to play off their host governments’ evolving tensions.

For now, Syria’s Kurds are enduring a little-reported humanitarian crisis amid grave human rights abuses from al-Qaeda after decades of tyranny under the Assad government. In the longer term, the Kurds may ultimately achieve their dream of greater autonomy or independence. If so, the “Arab Spring” may be remembered more accurately as the Kurdish Spring.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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The many actors stoking the long smoldering Syrian Civil War have now seen the conflict explode, following the Bashar al-Assad regime’s employment of sarin gas to stall the rebel advance in the Ghouta suburbs of Damascus.

In Syria, the Arab Spring has now mutated into a Sunni-Shi’a struggle creating a functional alliance between Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Emirates, Jordan, and (quietly) Israel, pitted against Iran, Syria, and a Shi’a-dominated Iraq. The permutations of this functional alliance are somewhat convoluted with Israel preferring, on the one hand, to deal with the devil they know in Assad but wishing on the other that the demise of the Syrian president deals a crippling blow to Iranian ambitions.

The objective of the US administration to calibrate its now delayed response to Assad’s use of nerve gas, in a way that maintains the current stalemate within the Syria while enhancing the Obama administration's political credibility, is likely lost to realities on the Syrian landscape.

Impact of Potential Military Strikes

A very basic norm used to understand civil conflicts argues that if the ostensive government is not actively winning, it is by definition losing.

This principle has played out in Syria over the last two years. Any American-led raids, however configured and limited, will necessarily degrade the Assad regime’s ability to fight. The mere act of forcing Damascus to disperse its forces and minimize their active engagement of the rebels because of threatened American military strikes gives the insurgents some respite from the regime's assault. Despite battlefield fluctuations, the trend the Assad government faces is a continued loss of control over more and more territory.

Syria has seen a massive displacement of its population through what amounts to ethnic cleansing between the Sunni population on one side, and everyone else on the other.

stated on September 3 that more than 2 million Syrians have fled the country and over 4 million have been internally displaced. Syria’s economy, always dependent on Lebanon, has now essentially collapsed. The civil war has devastated Syria’s economic infrastructure, and international sanctions have made Syria’s currency worthless.

The Syrian army is now politically unreliable excepting the strength of elite formations, such as the Fourth Armored and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Special Forces Divisions. The Assad government is becoming totally reliant on support from both Iran and irregular forces like the Jaysh al-Sha’bi (National Defense Forces) to hold territory. The recently formed National Defense Forces uses the same name that the Syrian Ba’ath Party used for their paramilitary organization a generation ago, although the current Jaysh al-Sha’bi is a distinct organization — It is also unrelated to Hafez al-Assad’s Shabiha or ghost militias from the 1980s. Bashar al-Assad has become an Iranian client more than an independent actor governing Syria.

Tehran’s Approach

Iran’s imperial ambition sees its Syrian alliance as a vital national interest and Tehran’s approach to the civil war in furtherance of that interest has been multifaceted. Iran originally supported Damascus with advice and money. When the situation on the ground in Syria deteriorated, Iranian arms were delivered primarily via an air bridge across Iraq. Thereafter, Iran facilitated the introduction of Shi’a militias from Lebanon and Iraq as well as deploying a number of Revolutionary Guards to support Assad.

Tehran has now made a strategic decision to stop relying solely on Assad to protect Iranian interests in Syria. Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, has accordingly tasked the Pasdaran Quds (the Quds element of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, IRCG) and Lebanon’s Hezbollah to oversee the creation of Jaysh al-Sha’bi (Quwat alDifa’a al-Watani) to buttress Iranian interests in Syria and give Tehran an ongoing presence in the Syrian space.

The Pasdaran Quds built on their experience in Lebanon and Iraq to fashion Jaysh al-Sha’bi in mid-2012. Like Iraq’s Kata’ib Hezbollah and Lebanon’s Hezbollah before it, the Jaysh al-Sha’bi is a militia answerable to the Pasdaran Quds and acts as Tehran’s stalking horse in the Alawite-controlled regions of Syria. Assad’s government had no choice but to acquiesce in the creation of the Jaysh, but the militia answers ultimately to Tehran and not Damascus.

The Jaysh al-Sha’bi is something of a variation on the militias Tehran has heretofore shaped. Whereas Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq and Kata’ib Hezbollah were overtly Shi’a in character, the same cannot be said for the current iteration of Jaysh al-Sha’bi.

Right now, the Jaysh is essentially an Iranian-controlled militia with a smattering of Ba’athist ideological talking points attached. Pasdaran Quds and Hassan Nasrallah’s Hezbollah are building the Jaysh al-Sha’bi out of the Alawite-based Popular Committees concentrated in Syria’s urban areas, and using the same methods they have used in creating proxy militias from Lebanon to Iraq over the last generation. They are taking existing groups of fighters who are already associated with the Popular Committees and providing them a structural hierarchy and funding, along with some amount of training and thereby binding them to Tehran. Some of this training apparently allows some Jaysh al-Sha’bi members a two week urban warfare course in Iran, possibly at Tehran’s Imam Ali Garrison, before returning to Syria.

The Popular Committees and Jaysh al-Sha’bi then work in tandem with Assad’s various security services to protect Alawite urban residential areas from Sunni insurgents. The Popular Committees and the Jaysh al-Sha’bi fighters largely originate in Syria’s Shi’a and Alawite communities, and are principally active in Damascus and the Rif Dimashq Governorates.

These Jaysh al-Sha’bi fighters are motivated by both a growing sectarian self-identification and by the fact they are defending their own neighborhoods. This increasing sectarian self-identification may ultimately allow Pasdaran Quds to lay a more overtly Shi’a veneer over the organization. But as yet the Jaysh al-Sha’bi can assert no fatwas, nor are there any scholar-jurists from Najaf or Qom willing to claim them.

Jaysh Al-Sha’bi: A Reliable Asset for Assad

Nevertheless, the motivation of the Jaysh to fight is making them more reliable assets for the Assad regime than many regular army units. The Syrian government is endeavoring to assert some control over the Jaysh al-Sha’bi by providing uniforms and supposedly paying a monthly salary. But Assad himself is now so beholden to the Iranians that whatever differences there are really don’t matter much anymore. Iran’s support of the Jaysh may serve a longer term goal to provide Tehran an infrastructure of militia networks to sustain Iranian interests after Assad’s demise.

Whatever perspective one takes, the Syrian Civil War is still an unmitigated disaster for Iran. The frontiers of Shi’a influence from Iraq through Syria are now poisoned by an increasingly radicalized Sunni population spanning western Iraq and eastern Syria.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah, operating under Iranian tutelage, has buttressed Assad’s forces both in Damascus and in the Orontes river basin — but at severe political and significant military cost. Hezbollah’s political loyalty to Lebanon is now suspect at home and their ability to threaten Israel of its own accord or at the behest of Iran has been meaningfully degraded.

Assad’s control of Syria is now limited to part of the Damascus region, areas contiguous to Lebanon and the coastal Alawite regions, despite an Iranian military intervention and financial commitment to Syria that Tehran can ill-afford and that may foster instability in Iran itself. 

Syria’s Future

A whole Syrian state controlled by Assad is no longer possible. In the case of a de facto, if not a de jure, partition of Syria, what will the country look like as Assad loses power?

Several possibilities are reasonable. The Kurdish autonomous region, already congealing in the northeast of the country, is likely to become more permanent. That permanence creates political tensions with Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, as none of those states supports an independent Kurdistan.

The Jazirah Desert expanse connecting Syria and Iraq, may become more unstable if increasingly radicalized Sunni clans allow a Jihadiland to develop where foreign jihadists can train and operate. Such a Jihadiland would constitute a less governed space, thus potentially threatening countries outside the area. Tehran may eventually attempt to co-opt these jihadists the way they historically co-opted Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to further Iranian interests, but that may be more difficult to achieve in the aftermath of the Syrian experience.

Lastly, we may see the formation of a Russian- and Iranian-dependent Alawite ruled canton originating in Latakia, abutting Lebanon and running south to Damascus. This region would incorporate chemical weapons facilities at Latakia and Palmyra. The chemical weapons, currently reported to be stored at Mount Kalmun and Dummar near Damascus and the al-Safira air base near Aleppo, would likely be secured more deeply in the Alawite section.

Those weapons are of ongoing concern because Syria has a substantial and not an insignificant chemical weapons capacity. Iran, and to a lesser extent Russia, would have little choice but to support such a rump Alawite region. However, it would be an economic dependency, doing little beyond acting as a source of instability due to its chemical arms and providing a land corridor to supply Hezbollah with munitions.

Military intervention in Syria led by the United States and allied with other powers, will undermine the ability of the world community to contain the Syrian war within the borders of Syria. Such intervention, however calibrated, by the international community to minimize the likelihood of a wider regional war involves serious risks of miscalculation and regional destabilization. These risks may be justified by the Assad government’s use of chemical weapons, but the risks are real nonetheless.

The Syrian Civil War has been described as a wicked problem and the wickedness has not diminished.  

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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Giggles. Such was the reaction Marie LaBrosse received every time she mentioned the name “Sheikh Raza” in her new hometown of Sulaimani in Kurdish northern Iraq.

LaBrosse had recently moved from the United States to become the chair of the English Department at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS). An avid poet and translator, she was eager to spend some time translating Kurdish poetry while immersed in the local language and culture. As she began her search for local poets, she quickly encountered the work of renowned classical Kurdish poet Sheikh Raza Talabani.

The more LaBrosse asked about Sheikh Raza, the more giggles she received and the more intrigued she became. Finally, someone cryptically explained to her: “He says what we don’t say.” Not yet having the language skills to translate Sheikh Raza’s poems on her own, LaBrosse knew she needed to find assistance.

The following semester, LaBrosse launched a translation class at AUIS, where she could teach the students translation skills and they could teach her about Kurdish and other regional poetry. The class, now in its second year, has done more than answer LaBrosse’s lingering questions about Sheikh Raza. It has helped bridge the East-West cultural divide, assisted students in addressing local tensions, built a poetry culture on campus, and contributed to the international literary conversation.

Shocking, 150-Year-Old Poetry

LaBrosse’s first class brought together seven students to tackle not only Sheikh Raza’s poetry, but also the work of other classical and contemporary Kurdish, Iraqi, and foreign writers. It was working with these students that LaBrosse finally found an explanation for the embarrassed reactions to Sheikh Raza’s name.

One of the students completed a rough transliteration of a Sheikh Raza poem, entitled “The Bulgarian Boy.” It was a homosexual love poem about a male prostitute — written 150 years ago by a religious figure. That fact alone would have been shocking enough, but the language used in the poem was even more surprising.

As LaBrosse read the two-page translation, the student who had handed it in watched her with a smile and an expression that said, “Is she going to crack?” LaBrosse had been lecturing the students for weeks about the need for artistic maturity and a professional demeanor.

LaBrosse flipped the page and was greeted with several lines of poetry that explicitly described sexual actions between the male protagonist and the prostitute. It took every ounce of self-control she could muster to keep a straight face and to remember what she always told her students: “These are not our words that we are saying to each other; these are artistic pieces that we are serving.”

Translation as a Mouthpiece

“The Bulgarian Boy” is among the most explicit and shocking of Sheikh Raza’s poems that LaBrosse has encountered, but his other works, which address such topics as faith, doubt, sex, aging, and marriage, show that he was in fact a complex character. LaBrosse describes one of his poems as a “gorgeous treatise about language and theology.”

“[It’s as if] he’s saying, ‘Don’t forget that I’m complicated. I write curse poetry but I am a man filled with faith,’” she notes.

It is because of this complexity that LaBrosse sees value in translating the works of Sheikh Raza and other regional poets. They highlight a side of the region that the outside world typically does not see.

Another classical Kurdish poet, Jamil al-Zahawy, discusses in one of his poems his frustration with stereotypes, which fail to acknowledge the diversity of his people. He laments that “this one and those became confused,” by which he means that this person who holds certain beliefs was assumed to be the same as those people who hold different beliefs.

According to LaBrosse, classical Kurdish poetry shows us “that this struggle in the Middle East to grow and change and be liberal and be perceived as complex and diverse is not recent.” In fact, one of the reasons that students are drawn to LaBrosse’s class is to help the outside world understand Iraq’s local culture and people. Darya Abdul-Karim, a student in this year’s class, suggests that “translation builds a bridge between people from different cultures.”

Abdul-Karim hopes that her translations of Kajal Ahmad, a contemporary female Kurdish poet who rebelliously criticizes men in her poetry, will act as such a bridge: “Whenever people think of Iraq from the outside world, especially the West, they probably just imagine a city like Baghdad, and they think that every other city is as bad as Baghdad. I wanted to translate [Ahmad] because I wanted to tell the world, ‘No, that’s not true. There are other people, and there are other problems. Our problems aren’t only political… The world only sees the political problems because of the way media works.”

Another student in the class, Mohammed Khaluq, views translation as “a way to understand other people, respect them, and feel empathy for them.” For his translation work, Khaluq chose to focus on contemporary Iraqi poet Ahmad Matar, who heavily criticized Saddam Hussein during his rule. Khaluq hopes his translations will help the world understand “the difficulties the Iraqis went through during… Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime.”

Addressing Cultural Tensions

LaBrosse sees cross-cultural benefits not only from the finished products but also from the translation process itself. Because Kurdish populations span a region that straddles the borders of Armenia, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey, Kurdish poetry incorporates a large number of languages — Arabic, Kurdish (including several dialects), Persian, and Turkish. In fact, each poem typically uses at least two different languages. As a result, the translation process must include individuals from a diversity of linguistic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds, some of which have historically contentious relationships.

LaBrosse’s classes are no exception. More than nine languages were represented in her first class, and approximately 30 in her second. Many of the students come from Kurdish Iraq (in the north of the country), but others come from Arab Iraq — which has had a tense relationship with the north — or from outside of the country. If the students hope to effectively translate the poetry at hand, they have to work together, despite cultural differences.

LaBrosse makes it clear that the students have always treated each other with respect and that conversations have remained “productive, careful, and honest.” However, the students have also learned that they need to face the tensions in the room, rather than ignore them. LaBrosse explains: “The tensions exist, so if you’re not feeling them, it’s probably just because you’re not doing something that’s eliciting people to be honest about them.”

Abdul-Karim, who is Kurdish, admits that the class has taught her about more than just poetry. “I’ve learned that, especially with the poems [the Arab students] choose, even they have the same problems as we do, as I as a Kurd do,” she says. “I’ve learned to accept that the world is rich and that diversity is one of the main reasons why the world is rich and why it’s important to study other cultures and other people.”

Local and International Audience

With the semester having just ended, LaBrosse is working to compile an anthology of the students’ translations for publication. Last year’s anthology, The City of Nonexistence, was published in the University of Iowa’s literary magazine, 91^st Meridian. In addition to the anthology, LaBrosse also organizes a poetry reading at the end of each semester, at which her students read for the local community.

Through the anthologies and readings, as well as visits from well-known Kurdish poets that LaBrosse invites to campus, she has given the students confidence as emerging scholars, turned the university into a hub for poetry, and provided a voice for Kurdish poetry in the international literary conversation.

A More Ambitious Project

LaBrosse’s experiences with her translation classes have sparked an even grander and more ambitious idea — compiling a comprehensive anthology of Kurdish poetry. She hopes to act as a facilitator, first working with scholars and experts from across the Kurdish region to identify the poetry to be included, then working with young people willing to learn the art of translation and contribute to the anthology.

LaBrosse faces many challenges ahead, not least of which navigating local tensions and allegiances in the publishing industry, but for her, the journey is worth it. Motivated by her passion for translation and her love for her students, LaBrosse hopes that through her anthology project she can continue to explore the poetic voices she has discovered in the past two years and participate in the artistic change happening in the community.

She is also motivated by her belief that Kurdish poetry deserves to be read across the world. “I feel like the moderate voice [in the region] is not heard,” LaBrosse explains, “the vast majority of people are likely very moderate, and we don’t hear from them.” Regional poetry is one of the places where moderate, and even radically liberal, viewpoints are openly expressed. “It’s important to give those people a microphone,” she asserts, “because they are speaking.”

For something as seemingly cerebral as poetry, LaBrosse has shown that not only is it relevant in our lives but it is also valuable for understanding each other as human beings, whether we live in neighboring ethnic regions or on opposite sides of the globe.

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A decision by the European soccer body, UEFA, to grant Gibraltar the right of membership potentially opens the door to Kurdistan to seek association with the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), in a move that would acknowledge demands for increased autonomy and the possible shifting of national borders in the Middle East as a result of a wave of change sweeping the region and the civil war in Syria.

The UEFA decision on Gibraltar following a ruling by the Lausanne-based Court of Arbitration of Sport (CAS) and the possible Iraqi Kurdish application to the AFC, puts pressure on the world soccer body, FIFA, to loosen its rules on membership as the group gears up for its general assembly in Mauritius.

The CAS ruled that UEFA’s adoption in 1999 of FIFA’s policy that members need to be recognized by the United Nations was unfair. UEFA originally accepted the UN rule in 1999 to appease Spain, which was opposed to the British outpost’s membership.

FIFA has used the rule to bar groups like the Kurds but relaxed its criteria for Palestine, which was granted membership despite not having full UN membership. The AFC’s statutes refer to the UN rule only indirectly by stating that membership has to comply with FIFA’s statutes.

An application by Iraqi Kurdistan is likely to be resisted by Middle Eastern members of the AFC. These members are largely controlled directly or indirectly by governments that have been put on the defensive as a result of the popular revolts in the region. Opposition is also likely from an international community that is reticent to see a redrawing of colonial-era borders.

Kurdish Quest for Autonomy

Iraqi Kurdistan has been autonomous within Iraq since Western powers imposed a no-fly-zone in the early 1990s to protect the Kurds from retaliation by then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Iraqi Kurds see their national soccer team as a vehicle to assert nationhood and achieve eventual statehood.

The Kurds are but one group — albeit the most important one in the Middle East — that is demanding greater self-rule and recognition of national rights. The civil war in Syria has raised questions about what a post-Bashar Al-Assad state would look like with Syrian Kurds demanding autonomy, amid fears that Al-Assad’s last resort may be to carve out a state for his minority Alawite sect. Kurdish guerrillas in Turkey are negotiating with the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for greater rights within Turkey.

Sunni Muslim tribal leaders in Iraq are demanding a federation that would give them greater control of their own affairs against the backdrop of increased sectarian violence. Other multi-ethnic states in the Middle East, like Iran, risk minorities demanding greater rights. Israel and the Palestinians have yet to agree on their borders as part of an elusive peace agreement.

“Ominous political realities may be rendering the nation-state system incompatible with the emerging new Arab world…The disintegration that the region has already witnessed – and will undoubtedly continue to witness – will reverberate beyond the Arab map with the creation of a sovereign Kurdish state. Such a state, whether existing de facto or with widespread formal recognition, will have an ever-lasting effect on the boundaries of the Arab world (Syria and Iraq) and of the wider Middle East (Turkey and Iran),” said Saudi analyst Nawaf Obaid, a visiting fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

A statement by Iraqi Kurdish President Massoud Barzani, equating sports to politics as a way of achieving recognition, adorns Iraqi Kurdistan’s three major stadiums and virtually all of its sports centers and institutions. “We want to serve our nation and use sports to get everything for our nation. We all believe in what the president said,” stated Kurdistan Football Federation (KFF) President Safin Kanabi — scion of a legendary supporter of Kurdish soccer who led anti-regime protests in Kurdish stadiums during Saddam Hussein’s rule.

Prospects

While Arab states’ natural inclination would be to reject an Iraqi Kurdish application to the AFC, some believe that opponents of Al-Assad, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, may use it as leverage to persuade Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to reduce support for Al-Assad. Iraq has a one year, 800,000 ton, oil contract with Syria and is believed to allow Iranian cargo planes, headed for Syria, to regularly transit its air space.

The KFF has been demanding, since last year, that FIFA grant its team the right to play international friendlies in much the same way that the soccer body allowed Kosovo and Catalonia to do so.

“Like any nation, we want to open the door through football. Take Brazil. People know Brazil first and foremost through football. We want to do the same. We want to have a strong team by the time we have a country. We do our job, politicians do theirs. Inshallah (if God wills), we will have a country and a flag,” added Kurdistan national coach Abdullah Mahmoud Muhieddin.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture at the University of Würzburg, and the author of  blog.

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Background

As the largest ethnic group in the world without a state, the Kurdish people have endured a history marked largely by rebellion, repression, and marginalization. Approximately 25 to 30 million Kurds live in the Middle East, primarily in a mountainous region known as Kurdistan, which encompasses parts of Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. The Kurdish people possess many attributes typical of a nation: their own language, traditions, and in some cases, government and security infrastructure. What they lack is political sovereignty.

In 1920, the Treaty of Sèvres, designed by the Allies to partition the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, promised the Kurds an independent nation. However, the treaty was never ratified. The superseding Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 divided the Kurdish region among modern-day Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.

The next several decades were marked by Kurdish rebellion in the region. The Kurds in Iraq, Iran, and Turkey separately declared independent Kurdish nations, but each nation lasted less than five years before the respective central government regained control.

Since the end of World War I, Kurdish populations experienced varying degrees of oppression and marginalization. Governments enacted bans on using the Kurdish language, wearing traditional Kurdish costumes, and even registering babies under certain Kurdish names. Some Kurds were deported or forced to resettle to dilute Kurdish population centers, and others were denied citizenship.

Unrest and military crackdowns punctuated this period of Kurdish history. One of the most brutal military campaigns occurred in Iraq under President Saddam Hussein, who killed thousands of Kurds using chemical weapons between 1987 and 1989. After the Persian Gulf War, the US and its Gulf War allies implemented a no-fly zone over northern Iraq, which protected the Iraqi Kurdish population until 2003.

Since the Gulf War, the Iraqi Kurdish region has flourished, becoming the only Kurdish population to establish a semi-autonomous government. The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) held its first elections in 1992, and in 2005, the new Iraqi Constitution designated Iraqi Kurdistan as a federal entity of Iraq.

Why is the Kurdish Community relevant?

The Syrian Civil War has returned the Kurdish question to the global spotlight. The Kurds in northern Syria have used the country’s chaos as an opportunity to establish de facto autonomy — a development which concerns the Turkish government but has been supported by Iraq’s KRG.

The dominant Syrian Kurdish political party has opened police stations, courts, and local councils in northern Syria and has set up checkpoints to prevent the spread of violence into the region. The Kurds have stayed largely out of the conflict. They have little reason to trust the regime, which has historically oppressed the Kurdish population, or the opposition, which is largely composed of groups who do not support Kurdish rights.

Kurdish control in northern Syria worries the Turkish government because of the Syrian Kurds’ strong ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a US and EU-designated terrorist group that has fought against the Turkish government since the 1980s. Ankara fears that the PKK will use Syria as a safe haven for launching attacks on Turkey. Furthermore, the Turkish government is concerned that its own Kurdish population will intensify demands for autonomy.

In addition to the cross-border issues arising from the Syrian Kurdish situation, the Iraqi, Iranian, and Turkish governments have faced recent Kurdish unrest within their own borders. In Iraq, the relationship between the KRG and Baghdad has deteriorated since early 2012 primarily due to disputes over sharing oil wealth. Along the Iran-Iraq border, fighting flared up in the summer of 2011 between Iranian security forces and the Free Life Party of Kurdistan, a militant Kurdish nationalist group. In Turkey, clashes between government forces and the PKK have escalated since mid-2011, resulting in the highest number of casualties in over a decade.

The current Kurdish unrest mirrors that of the past several decades. However, the Arab Uprisings and the US withdrawal from Iraq have introduced great instability into the Middle East, suggesting that governments in the region will need to address the Kurdish issue with more finesse than they have in the past.

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