Kurdistan: row over oil threatens independence dream

The city of Kirkuk is a blow, if not an end, to Kurdistan's dreams of independence.

Emily Hohler
By
published
in Features

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More than 92% of Kurds voted to break from Iraq
(Image credit: This content is subject to copyright.)

The establishment of an independent Kurdistan was starting to take shape after last month's non-binding referendum, in which more than 92% of Kurds voted to break from Iraq, says Nabih Bulos in the LA Times. But this week, the dream "all but died" when the peshmerga, the Kurdish fighting force, was forced out of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and several other towns by the Iraqi army, aided by a coalition of Iranian-backed Shiite militias known as the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF).

Masoud Barzani, de facto Kurdish president for the past two years, insisted that the defeat did not mean the end for independence. But the Iraqi forces' rapid advance means the Kurdish Regional Government has lost many "areas it could have used as bargaining chips" with Baghdad, says Erika Solomon in the Financial Times.

The Kirkuk province, source of 6% of the world's oil (according to CNN), lies at "the heart of a long-running dispute between Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region and its central government", says Philip Issa in The Washington Post. After Iraqi soldiers fled from Islamic State (ISIS) in 2014, Kurdish forces moved in to secure Kirkuk and its surrounding oil wells.

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However, the city falls 32km outside the Kurds' autonomous region and Baghdad insisted it was handed back. "Matters came to a head" when the Kurdish authorities expanded their referendum to include Kirkuk. To Baghdad, the move was further proof of "unchecked Kurdish expansionism."

The clash puts the Trump administration in a "bind", says Brennan Weiss in Business Insider. The US has supplied weapons to both sides in the fight against ISIS. Now those weapons are being used against each other. Iranian support for the PMF complicates things further, says Joshua Keating in Slate.

The peshmerga have been one of America's "staunchest regional allies", yet despite the "apocalyptic terms" in which Trump framed the Iranian threat last week, "Iraq's territorial integrity and stability is seen as a larger priority, especially while ISIS still maintains... pockets of resistance". On Monday Trump told reporters: "We're not taking sides."

Emily Hohler
Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.

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