One such confrontation was avoided when an Iraqi army unit was prevented by the peshmerga (Kurdish militia) from entering the town of Makhmour in northern Iraq with its majority of Kurds more than a month ago. It is known that day-long negotiations between the KRG and US forces resulted in the withdrawal of the army detail. The KRG has maintained its control over the area, but there are other unresolved issues between Baghdad and Arbil on vital issues like the status of Kirkuk, oil and disputed territories.In the meantime there are reports that Iran is increasingly becoming a favorite hideout for Turkey's Kurdish terrorists (the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK). The Iraqi Kurdish administration's political cooperation with Turkey in deterring unlawful armed elements in the former put more pressure on the PKK. Being a PKK adjunct, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK) has long been in a struggle with Iranian security forces in order to carve out a piece out of Iran.
The Kurds are not the only rebellious elements in Iran. The Baluchis on the opposite side of the country have distracted Iran's rulers at a time when the current regime has been questioned from within. The PKK has found this uncertain situation quite appropriate to come and beef up the Iranian opposition. More and more PKK militants are coming to settle in PJAK camps in Iran along its Turkish and Iraqi borders.
Another destabilizing factor in the region is the Kurdish insistence on holding a referendum in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk in order to determine whether the city is Arab or Kurdish. If unsettled, this dispute has the power of triggering a civil war between Arabs and Kurds.
Despite the propagandistic bombardment of American media emphasizing how much the Kurdish region of Iraq was democratic and run justly and efficiently, recent elections proved that reality was not quite as such. The opposition polled higher than expected and acquired approximately 20 percent of the vote in Iraqi Kurdistan. This outcome was consonant with pre-election polling (July 2009), exposing popular sentiment. Iraqi Kurds thought the biggest problem in Iraq was political corruption, mismanagement and lack of political, financial and judicial accountability. In the background lay disenchantment with aging Kurdish politicians. The opposition ran exactly on these platforms and left its mark. Other public opinion surveys have indicated that the public was more interested in economic development and less interested in fighting against Arabs within and the Turks without. Corruption, of course, plagues the developing world.
Turkey has lately launched a democratization initiative in order to end injustices done to its Kurdish citizens and to include them in the political system as equal citizens. Yet the PKK does not stop its offensives on Turkish security forces. PKK mines, roadside bombs and ambushes take lives that upset the country and lead people to question the democratic initiative. Some analysts claim that Turkey's efforts to proliferate its dams on its trans-boundary rivers, namely the Euphrates and the Tigris, will keep the PKK in action because its downstream riparian countries -- Syria and Iraq -- are not happy. It is no secret that Turkey has problems with the financing of its dam projects. At the moment Iraq is objecting strongly to a new dam project on the Tigris (the Ilısu Dam project). That is why Iraq is lobbying several financial institutions (most of them European) to withdraw funding for the dam. Iraq, which is suffering from a drought, also wants Turkey to release more water into the Euphrates River that leaves Turkey, travels through Syria and reaches Iraq after it loses most of its headwaters.
It seems that the stability of the region, the elimination of armed factions that threaten more than one country's security and ending inter-ethnic groups will be quite a challenge. However, there seems to be another factor that may enrich the list of conflicts, and that is competition over insufficient water resources. We will be hearing more about the issue in the near future.
