At first sight, it may seem that more than the Kurdish issue, it will be the Sunni-Shiite divide that will determine Iraq’s fate as a unitary state. After all, the whole purpose of the increased American war effort in 2008 was to stop a Sunni-Shiite fratricide. As Fareed Zakaria argued in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago: “The surge in Iraq was a success in military terms. It defeated a nasty insurgency, reduced violence substantially and stabilized the country. But the purpose of the surge was, in President George Bush’s formulation, to give Iraq’s leaders a chance to resolve their major political differences. It was these differences -- particularly between Sunnis and Shiites -- that fueled the civil war in the first place. If they were not resolved, the war might well begin anew or take some other form that would doom Iraq to a breakup or a breakdown”Yet, it remains very important to recognize that the Kurdish issue is potentially more daunting since there is no shared ethnicity and language between the Arabs and Kurds of Iraq. To make things even more complicated, Iraqi Kurds control three of Iraq’s 18 provinces but lay claim to three important cities just across the border from Iraqi Kurdistan that have mixed populations. The Kurdistan regional government has evolved into a quasi-independent state and regularly ignores Baghdad’s central authority regarding oil contracts. It has negotiated more than 25 oil deals of its own and blocked the flow of oil out of the Kurdish region. And finally, there are major disputes over the drawing of boundaries and election rules that have for months stalled the election calendar. It was not a surprise that the Kurdish regional government remained the most difficult obstacle for the elections now scheduled for March 2010 until the last minute of negotiations. It took nothing less than a phone call from President Barack Obama to convince Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdish regional government, to withdraw his objections to the election legislation, removing the final obstacle.
America’s involvement at the presidential level is clearly demonstrated in New York Times’ words that “the bitter discord between Iraq’s Kurdish regional government and the Shiite-Arab-dominated central government -- over land, oil and the power of the central government -- is the most dangerous fault line in Iraq today. It was also an acknowledgment that if these conflicts are to be settled, or at least kept from igniting a new civil war, there must be deft and sustained American involvement.”
So what do the Kurds of Iraq want? The short answer is more political power and more land. Kurds claim more than a dozen disputed towns and villages in three border provinces: Kirkuk, Nineveh and Diyala as their own.
The most fiercely contested is the multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk and its surrounding province. Since 2004, the regional Kurdish government of President Barzani has tried to bolster its claims by encouraging more Kurds to move there. This is hardly surprising given the oil resources of the region. Iraqi Kurdistan has already 10-15 percent of Iraq’s oil reserves. Kirkuk, on its own, has as much as 25 percent of all of Iraq’s oil sources. In April of 2009, the United Nations briefed Iraqi officials on a report outlining possible solutions, including a proposal that Kirkuk become an autonomous region run by Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen. Yet, according to the New York Times, “given the heated environment, the report has never been made public and American officials decided there was no chance for serious negotiations before the election.”
By all accounts, Kirkuk and the oil are the most daunting challenges facing Iraq’s future. For Washington, the clock is ticking. The Obama administration knows that an orderly withdrawal of American troops by the summer of 2010 in large part depends on Kurdish cooperation that leaves Iraq with a chance of staying unified, sovereign and democratic. Time will only tell whether the Iraqi Kurds will show enough flexibility.
