Iraq

Erbil had a weird feel to it this week.  The euphoria that came when the Kurd’s military, known as the peshmerga, took over Kirkuk on June 11 has not exactly faded, but reality is making people nervous.  The Kurds have never had it so good, but it is all relative, and the Kurds may be getting ahead of themselves which could lead to disaster. The chaotic dissolution of Iraq creates an environment for an independent Kurdistan in Dohuk, Erbil, and Sulaymaniyah provinces to emerge.  The mad rush of the peshmerga down to the city of Kirkuk two weeks ago has created a new fact on the ground.  Kirkuk, which is disputed among Kurds, Arab, and Turkmen, is central to the Kurds’ national narrative. When I was in Sulaymaniyah last fall, one Kurdish interlocutor told me that without Kirkuk there can be no Kurdistan.  Not everyone feels that way, of course, but the status of Kirkuk is an emotional issue, especially since Saddam Hussein tried so hard to alter its demographic balance to strengthen Arab claims to the city.  As a result, the Kurds have declared that Kirkuk is not subject to negotiation.  Lest anyone have any doubts about Kurdish resolve on the issue, not long after moving into the city the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs, Kurdistan’s nascent Ministry of Defense, stated:   The entire Kurdish territories outside Kurdistan Region were [sic] now in the hands of the Kurdish forces….the Kurdish troops have no intention of leaving the area.  We are here to stay... Basically, all Kurdish villages and localities are now protected by the Peshmerga forces.   The Kurds estimate that after some work done on the oil fields in the area, they could eventually export 800,000 barrels of oil a day to fund their state in the making.  Over the objections of both Baghdad and Washington, who remain committed to the Iraqi constitution, which grants the central government control over energy exports, the Kurds began exporting oil through Turkey. Despite the likelihood that the Iraqi government will seek legal damages against the KRG and its clients, the Kurds have sold the four tankers full of oil that they have put on the market.  They have a long way to go, of course.  At the moment, they are exporting 125,000 barrels per day, but they need to do five times that volume in order to make up for the revenue they will lose in the break from Baghdad.  Legal action or not, the Kurds have opened an export channel that they will only expand in the coming months. The control of Kirkuk and the successful sale of Kurdish oil have unburdened the Kurds. When the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Massoud Barzani, told Christiane Amanpour that it was the time of Kurds’ “national self-determination” it was not terribly different from what he or other Kurdish officials had said in the past, but he also made a point of emphasizing “new realities.” These new realities are the collapse of Iraq, its military, and U.S. influence in the country.  The Kurds, especially Barzani, also have a good relationship with Turkey, which has its own concerns about Kurdish independence, but that pales in comparison to the threat that ISIS nihilism poses.  The Kurds claim that they are willing to work with a new Baghdad government so long as they can be assured that new leaders are committed to federalism and Kurdish rights are protected.  These are just words, however.  The Kurds can make these demands knowing they will never be fulfilled. Declaring that they are no longer pawns in someone else’s game, Erbil now believes it has the wherewithal to play as well. For all the confidence in Erbil, the Kurds have a host of significant problems that seriously complicate the establishment of an independent Kurdistan.  The Kurds have enjoyed something that looks a lot like a state for the past three decades, but they have never actually had the responsibilities of a state.  Even as they railed against Baghdad for routinely bilking them out of large amounts of the 17 percent share of government revenue they were supposed to receive, they were still dependent on the central government.  The answer is obviously oil revenues, which are promising, but it is clear that with legal challenges and capacity issues, it is no panacea.  The Kurds will be living hand-to-mouth for quite some time. There is a lot of oil and a fair number of Western oil guys hanging around the Divan and Rotana hotels, but beyond that there seems to be very little economic activity in Kurdistan.  Erbil is notable for its half-finished construction sites, including a shell of what is slated to be a JW Marriott and some of those exclusive have-it-all-in-one-place developments that cater to expats and super wealthy locals all around the Middle East.  The Kurds clearly envision Erbil to be the next Dubai, but it is not even Amman yet.  There are shops and some good restaurants, but no real banks to finance development. Other than oil, the Kurds do not produce much of anything. If there was ever an indication of Kurdish economic vulnerability, it was the immense lines for gas at Kurdish petrol stations.  Last Sunday, one line in Erbil stretched for two miles.  Even though the Kurds have refineries in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah, they remain dependent on the much larger Iraqi refinery in Baji, which has (or has not) fallen to ISIS and its allies.  A number of years ago there was a lot of breathless commentary about how the Turks were building Kurdistan. The Turks are in the Kurdish areas in large numbers, but the construction boom—which is their specialty—seems to have ground to a halt.  If you want to buy Turkish crackers and cookies or a Turkish-manufactured air conditioning unit it is no problem, but the availability of Turkish consumer goods says nothing about the real economy, which does not seem to exist. One can, of course, imagine the development of a sustainable Kurdish economy over a long period.  There is a more fundamental significant challenge to Kurdish goals, however. Writing at Nick Kristof’s New York Times blog last week, Cale Salih put her finger on it:  Since 1991, Kurds have been of Iraq, but they have not been in Iraq.  Consequently, they built an island of stability that generally works, especially in comparison to the rest of the country, which suffered terribly under Saddam and in the decade since the U.S. invasion.  That is not to say that there have not been problems.  Late last September, terrorists attacked the headquarters of the KRG’s intelligence arm, Asayish, in Erbil.  In December, there was a similar attack in Sulaymaniyah.  Overall, however, Kurdistan has been spared the blood-letting of the rest of Iraq. With the fall of large sections of Iraq to ISIS and its Baathist partners, the Kurds are suddenly vulnerable.  No one wants neighbors like Abu Bakr al Baghdadi or Izzat Ibrahim al Duri—who allegedly leads the Baathist push against Maliki—but that is now part of the Kurds’ reality.  They know that they will have to fight at some point and nothwithstanding the near universal respect for the peshmerga, they have old and unreliable Russian equipment. No one is worried about the fall of Erbil, but when the Kurds have encountered ISIS and its partners in and around Kirkuk, it has been a fight. In a twist that only politics in Iraq and the politics of the American invasion and its aftermath could produce, the Kurdistan Regional Government has been under an American arms embargo.  Washington has not wanted to do anything to that could be interpreted as supporting the partition of Iraq so it was willing to give all kinds of weapons to the Iraqi military under someone as unreliable and incompetent as Nouri al Maliki, but not the Kurds.  Rumor was that Barzani’s first request (even demand) of Secretary John Kerry in their meeting on Tuesday in Erbil was for American arms.  Given the new realities that the Kurds face, they should get them.  The future of Iraq is no future at all. It is one of chaos and violence.  That is probably not the new reality to which Massoud Barzani (and every other Kurdish official) has been referring to, but that is precisely what they are confronting. It is hard not to be sympathetic to the Kurds.  They have accomplished much despite the very real conspiracies against them.  The end of Iraq makes it a lot harder for their opponents to continue to deny the Kurds the independence they want. Yet as RUSI’s Michael Stephens commented to me over coffee at the pretty solid O’Caffe in the Ainkawa area of Erbil, “the Kurds want to run before they can actually walk.”  You cannot blame them.  They have suffered much in the last century.  Still, it seems that the appropriate response of the United States is to help the Kurds instead of hindering them.  Washington has it so upside down in Iraq that only the Obama administration and the Maliki government remain opposed to Kurdish independence. The Turks and Iranians may not like it, but right now Ankara actually grudgingly accepts the idea and the Iranians may be too busy trying to save their interests in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq to care very much.  It is time to give up the fiction that somehow a more inclusive government in Baghdad is actually possible, though I understand why the Obama administration cannot.  To do so would be to acknowledge that the arguments that Secretary Kerry put to Massoud Barzani about the downsides of independence are meaningless.  Yes, it is better to be part of a wealthy Iraq than an independent Kurdistan, but a unified Iraq does not exist. To accept reality as it is would also run contrary to what seems to have been the most important aspect of U.S. Iraq policy to the White House: preventing the country from breaking up as long as President Obama is president.  

Faysal Itani examines the jihadists’ threat to Iraq (and Syria). Inside Iraqi Politics offers a roundup of what has been going on in Iraq while everyone else was paying attention to anything else. Robert Beckhusen on the weapons that the United States is/was supplying to Iraq’s military.  

Istanbul--The United States should help Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki fend off the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria given the threats the group poses to American allies and interests, but Washington should also let Iraq go.  The country no longer makes sense to the people who live there. When the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) marched into Mosul last week it was hard not to imagine that the Middle East was entering some previously unimaginable new era. A terrorist group that suddenly looked like a liberation army of sorts was setting up a proto-state across two major countries of the region.  If all the incorrect references to the “end of Sykes-Picot,” which died in 1919, are any measure, the ISIS invasion and prospect of Iraq’s split evoke an earlier time when Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson as well as newcomers to the scene, Feisal bin Hussein bin Ali al Hashimi, Mustafa Kemal, Saad Zaghloul, and Chaim Weizman, among others, struggled over the “Near Eastern” or “Turkish question.”  In the ensuing almost one hundred years, the borders that came to be after Versailles have become institutionalized and a sense of national identity has become embedded in the minds of Jordanians, Lebanese, Palestinians, even Syrians, but the Iraqi story is more complicated. The cases of peaceful dissolutions of countries are few and far between—the velvet divorce between Czechs and Slovaks being the only one of recent memory.  It is also likely that if Scots vote for independence in September, Royal Marines will not march on Edinburgh.  The end of the Soviet Empire did not result in the bloodshed that one might have imagined, unless one is a resident of Grozny.  Still, most partitions are hard and bloody.  How many South Asians died when Pakistan split from India or when East Pakistan became Bangladesh three decades later?  The Sinhalese fought a bitter war against the Tamils to save Sri Lanka.  How many Bosnians, Croats, Serbs, and Kosovars died fighting each other in a country that no one much wanted to exist?  Yugoslavia was the Iraq of the 1990s and it may yet be that Libya is the Iraq of the next decade (or this one). Just because dissolution and partition is hard and bloody, however, does not mean that the United States and its allies should do everything possible to forestall this outcome in Iraq.  Leslie Gelb and then-Senator Joe Biden set off a bruising debate in May 2006 when at another desperate moment they suggested that Iraq be dismembered for the sake of Iraqis and the poor Americans who were stuck in the middle of someone else’s civil war.  Iraq looked to be on the verge of collapse, but the force of American arms and a policy right out of the colonialists’ handbook of enlisting locals—with copious amounts of money—to fight on the side of the United States rescued the country.  There will be no surge this time, however, and no sahwa (or “awakening”) nor “sons of Iraq” to fight off al Qaeda of Iraq. Ironically, those sons of Iraq are not as committed to Iraq as the historiography of the surge and awakening suggest.  It is true that Abu Musab Zarqawi in the first iteration of ISIS overplayed his hand and alienated the people of Anbar, Nineveh, and the other parts of Iraq west of Baghdad.  Yet the fact that Zarqawi’s nihilism repelled them does not mean that the tribes of the area were necessarily committed to the idea of Iraq.  The Anbar province, in particular, was never completely assimilated into the country in a manner that made sense to the people there. It is no surprise then that at those moments when even Saddam Hussein faced challenges to his rule,  they invariably came from Anbar—with the exception of the Shi’a and Kurdish uprisings of 1991.  It should not come as much of a surprise that ISIS began its offensive six months ago in Anbar and has now extended it to the neighboring Salahaddin province all the way up to Mosul.   These are places of profound alienation and resistance to Baghdad, but it is not just Saddam’s Baghdad or Maliki’s Baghdad that is the problem; it is Baghdad, more generally. Had Maliki been inclusive—something that was impossible given the constraints and incentives of Iraqi politics—he likely would have still confronted resistance from areas of the country that chafe at the centralizing propensities of those in the capital.  And herein lies the fundamental problem of Iraq:  The country’s political physics create pressure to pull it apart.  To the extent that people in Anbar and neighboring areas, no less the Kurds and many in the south, do not want to be ruled from Baghdad, it only gives impetus for rulers there to accumulate power in an effort to ensure that the country remains intact.  Yet this only fuels yet more resistance to the capital.  It seems that only Saddam-like brutality could keep the country together.  Once American forces smashed that system of fear, the process of dissolution was set in motion. If the Sunni tribes of Anbar and elsewhere have chafed under the centralizing forces of Baghdad, the same (and more) can certainly be said of Iraq’s Kurds.  In 1925, at the recommendation of the League of Nations, which was under the pressure of the British Foreign Office, the former Ottoman vilayet of Mosul was unceremoniously attached to the state of Iraq.  The British, who held the Mandate for Iraq, were less interested in the people who inhabited the area than what was underneath them—oil.   The inclusion of Mosul in King Feisal’s synthetic realm happened over the strenuous objections of both the large numbers of Kurdish inhabitants and the government of the newly established Republic of Turkey.  The Kurds wanted nothing to do with Iraq and the Turks feared the loss of Mosul would—despite the fact that Iraq’s Kurds were folded into what was then the Kingdom of Iraq—nurture the development of Kurdish nationalism. In the eighty-nine years since, the Kurds have been searching for ways to undo what the League did while Ankara has sought to block them from doing so. In a quirk of fate, ISIS has done significant service to Kurdish independence.  They have struck a blow to the Iraqi security forces, allowing the Kurdish army—known as peshmerga—to take over Kirkuk, a city central to the national aspirations of Iraq’s Kurds.  Now that it is in Erbil’s hands, they are unlikely to give Kirkuk back. There remain many obstacles to that Kurdish dream, including the Kurds’ own difficult internal politics and an economy that cannot yet support it, but ISIS has removed one of the biggest obstacles in the Kurds’ path: Turkey.  Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s march on Iraq all the way down to Tikrit will likely force Ankara to accommodate itself to Kurdish independence.   As counterintuitive as it may seem given Turkey’s one-time implacable opposition to the emergence of an independent Kurdistan, Kurdish strongman Massoud Barzani will be Turkish Prime Minister (soon to be president) Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s best partner in insulating Turkey from the security threats emerging from Iraq.  Suddenly, for Turkey’s foreign policy establishment and military leaders, an independent Kurdish buffer in Mesopotamia looks rather appealing. Iraqis in the south do not seem any more committed to the country than either those in the rapidly expanding areas under ISIS control or Kurds.  Just because Maliki is Shi’a and the southern part of Iraq is predominantly Shi’a does not mean there is a shared sense of national identity. The response among the Shi’a to defend Baghdad is impressive, but it remains to be seen whether the volunteers view this as a national or religious duty.  Of course, it could be both, but the intention of ISIS to replay something akin to the battle of Karbala in 680, which contributed to the emergence of Shiism, has certainly aroused Iraq’s Shi’a on specifically religious grounds.  Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who did everything possible to keep the lid on Sunni-Shi’a violence during the dark days of 2006 and 2007, has made a direct sectarian appeal to meet the ISIS threat.  It seems that the exigencies of a potential wide-scale intra-religious conflict is the most potent factor mobilizing the Shi’a in the south, rather than national sentiment. Economic grievances are also pulling at the tenuous links between the Basra governorate, for example, and Baghdad. Basra sits atop Iraq’s largest pool of oil, but it is also its poorest governorate. Local officials have long complained that federal authorities have thwarted the area’s ability to rebuild and have sought—in line with the Iraqi constitution—to establish itself as a “region” with powers independent of Baghdad.  Whereas the commitment to a federal Iraq with enhanced powers to pursue their own development strategies once made sense to Basra’s leaders, they may be thinking otherwise given the current turn of event in Iraq. With considerable parts of the country under ISIS’s control and the Kurds looking for ways to capitalize on Baghdad’s weakness to advance their own independence, why would Basrawis stay?  The area has so much black gold that it could look like Dubai if it was not saddled with Baghdad. Kurdistan, ISIS-land, and the state of Basra will not emerge effortlessly.  Iraq’s dissolution will be bloody and protracted.  The irony being that although no one wants to live in Iraq, the people there will fight over its remaining spoils—mostly oil. In the midst of this maelstrom, prominent voices will call for some sort of American return to Iraq.  Smart and well-intentioned people will propose aid packages, drone strikes, air strikes, special forces operations, political deals, envoys, and Special UN representatives none of which will help matters very much.  Iraq is broken and it cannot be put back together again.    

The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) just published this report that I coauthored with Jacob Stokes, Bacevich fellow at  CNAS, and my research associate Alexander Brock. "The Contest for Regional Leadership in the New Middle East” shows how, in addition to the historic political change occurring within the major states of the Middle East, there is a transformative process underway remaking the dynamics among the states of the region. The reordering of the geopolitics of the region has exposed rivalries among the contenders for leadership, as well as different ideological, economic, nationalistic and sectarian agendas. The report argues that Washington has sought to accommodate these changes in a way that continues to secure its strategic interests. What role the United States will play in a “new Middle East” is the subject of intense debate among Americans, Arabs and Turks. Nevertheless, it is clear that with all the problems regional powers have confronted trying to shape the politics of the region, American leadership will continue to be indispensable. See the full report here... I hope you find it interesting.  

Anne Barnard’s article explores life in Damascus while photographer Andrea Bruce’s photos capture it visually for National Geographic. Yerevan Saeed discusses the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) relationship with Baghdad for the Kurdish news service Rudaw. A history of seduction in Arab cinema.  

Iraq is going to break up.  It is already happening, but no one wants to acknowledge it because no one wants to be perceived as being responsible for the disintegration of a major Middle Eastern country. There is not much about the Kurdish region of Iraq that is Iraqi.  When you arrive at Erbil’s brand new international airport, there are no signs that welcome you to Iraq.  I am sure somewhere at the entrance to the airport there is an Iraqi flag, but I didn’t notice it.  The only hint that I was actually in Iraq was the stamp a Kurdish police officer put in my passport that says in tiny letters, “Republic of Iraq—Kurdistan Region.”  The Kurds have a foreign ministry (actually two, maybe even three, but that is another story), a military, interior ministry, intelligence services, a parliament, president, prime minister, investment authority, and a flag.  No one under the age of 30 speaks Arabic (English being the favored second language) and not a single person I met of any age believed themselves to be Iraqi.  Why would they?  What is the common idea that ties someone from Sulaimaniyah to someone in Basra?  There isn’t one. None of this should be much of a surprise to anyone who has even been paying half attention to Iraq over the last decade—or rather the last two decades when the Kurds quietly began building the institutions and structures of independence under the Anglo-American no-fly zone established after Operation Desert Storm. Beyond solemn declarations that, “the Kurds will not be responsible for breaking up Iraq” and not-so-believable assertions about the differences between “the dream of independence” and the constitutional reality of a unified Iraq, you get the sense that the Kurds believe that the environment for their independence is slowly ripening.  They have serious reserves of oil and gas as well as significant amounts of foreign direct investment from Turkey, the Gulfies, Lebanon, Egypt, the United States, Europe, and the Russians.  A lot of investment is in the energy sector, but not all of it.  There are, for example, more than 1,000 Turkish companies—both large and small—operating in the Kurdistan region.  Kurds are munching on Ulker biscuits, cooling off during the brutally hot summers with Arcelik air conditioners, and I stayed in the Koc family’s Erbil outpost—the Divan Hotel.  Speaking of Erbil, it is a bit dreary, but definitely booming.  The most oft-sighted bird in the Erbil sky is the “construction crane.” Combined with good economic times in Kurdistan is the pervasive dysfunction in Baghdad and the sectarian violence that threatens to tear the country apart.  Just yesterday (Sunday) there were ten bombings killing at least forty-one in Shiite majority areas of Baghdad. The death toll is up to 1,000 a month, which is not quite 2006 levels, but close. In contrast, the Kurdish area has experienced three bombings in the last decade, the most recent on September 29, the first major attack since 2007. In addition, the Kurds and the federal government—officials in Erbil chafe at the term “central government”—are forever in conflict over the electoral law, hydrocarbon law, and the Kurdish share of the budget, which is supposed to be 17 percent, but is always less.  People in Erbil and in Baghdad, I am told, wonder whether the effort to maintain the fiction of a unified, federal Iraq is worth it both politically and economically. As good as it looks for the Kurds, they still have serious challenges before realizing their ultimate goal.  The first is Kirkuk. The oil-rich region around the disputed city is in the central government’s hands, but the disposition of Kirkuk remains a powerful nationalist issue for Kurds. There have been censuses in the city in 1957, 1977, and  1997. And while there is agreement that the 1957 tally was the most accurate, no one actually knows the current demographic balance of the city. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Arab population surged as a result of Saddam Hussein’s Arabization policies and there continues to be a large Turkoman population that claims Kirkuk to be culturally Turkoman rather than Kurdish. Even if the non-Kurdish populations were considerably smaller, Kirkuk remains in the hands of Baghdad and there is no way the Kurds are going to “liberate” it without force, something that seems farfetched despite the apparent bravery and legend of the peshmerga. At least one Kurd said to me, “If we have a lot of oil and gas in other places, we do not really need Kirkuk.” He freely admitted that his view was not widespread. Second, the Kurds have their own internal political difficulties. Despite burying the wounds of a civil war they fought in the mid-1990s, it is clear that the two parties that have controlled the Kurdistan region—the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) eye each other warily. The PUK has largely controlled Sulaimaniyah, though a breakaway party called Ghorran (meaning, change) secured more votes than the PUK in recent elections.  The KDP has a virtual lock on Erbil and Dohuk, the other governorate that makes up the Kurdistan region located next to most of the Turkish border. The KDP and PUK form a governing coalition, but cooperation between and even within ministries between party members can be tough going. There are other more ominous outward differences. The security forces in Erbil, for example, wear different uniforms than those in Sulaimaniyah, which would not be a problem but for the fact that my non-government Kurdish interlocutors impressed upon me that these groups are loyal to different and competing power centers. Finally, even though the Kurds insist they will do nothing to break up Iraq, they want others—especially the United States—to approach the region in a way that reinforces the idea of the inevitability of Kurdish independence.  Yet for political reasons Washington will resist deviating from its “one Iraq” policy. This, of course, produces policies that are incongruous with reality, but when has that ever stopped Washington?  My favorite example is the American effort to encourage better relations between Ankara and Erbil.  There was a time not too long ago when observers feared that Turkey would invade Iraq to snuff out Kurdish independence. In order to forestall such an event, the United States has encouraged Ankara to shift its approach to the Kurdistan region and since 2008 the Turks have developed (as noted above) strong economic ties with the Kurds. A great American diplomatic success, except that it is apparently too much of a success. Washington now wants the Turks to back off of a deal that would send Kurdish oil directly to Turkey, bypassing the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline that Baghdad controls. Why?  Because the Turkish-Kurdish deal would demonstrate that the Kurds can act independent of Baghdad. Unlike the first two challenges to Kurdish independence, Washington’s position is a complication not a potential obstacle. Yet even accounting for Kirkuk and internal rivalries, it is likely that one day everyone is going to wake up and there will be a new country called Kurdistan. The Kurds will not have to declare independence, they won’t dance in the streets, there will not be a need for fireworks, or a founding date, though I am sure someone will make one up so future Kurdish embassies can invite people to their national day celebrations. No, the Kurdish state will just come into being. It is already happening.  

Joel Wing, writing at the Musings on Iraq blog, discusses the significance of the recent electoral results in Iraqi Kurdistan. An article from Ya Libnan warns of worsening sectarian violence in Iraq that could potentially result in a civil war. The Institute for the Study of War posts a map showing Iraq’s renewed sectarian violence.