Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has made no secret over the past few years of its intentions to expand its borders, and the deployment into Kirkuk was a big exclamation point on their intention to annex parts of Iraq into official KRG territory.
Those regions, which have been on the front line of the ISIS war, had significant Arab and Kurdish populations, often living side by side. In many cases, the civilians fled when ISIS came. When the KRG took the territory, however, not all returnees were created equal.
A new report from Human Rights Watch warns that the KRG has been harshly discriminating against the Arab civilian population of this newly seized territory, claiming “security” grounds for blocking Arabs from returning to their homes, while letting the Kurdish civilians back home.
That’s just the beginning of the problems, as HRW is reporting that they are also encouraging Kurds to move into the homes of Arab civilians who they are refusing to let back into the security zone.
The rights group warns that the KRG is going well beyond “a reasonable security response” and is engaged in “collective punishment” of the Arab population of territory that they intend to annex.
That seems very much the idea. In decades past, Arab civilians were encouraged to move into oil-rich Kurdish-dominated territory to give past Iraqi governments more control in the region. It seems the Kurds are taking a page out of Saddam Hussein’s book in this regard, and trying to use force to change the ethnic makeup of this territory.
Three state solution — Go for it
Such injustice, surely begs the question — why must the Western powers be so hell-bent on destroying the Islamic State, when both the Iraq government and Kurdistan are just as violent and to a greater extent more unjust?
For surely the West can give the Iraq government and Kurdistan all the guns and bombs they need to rule supreme, but what happens next? For if they can rule only with the help of Western powers, then surely the civil war will rage forever.
A better way, let there be a three state solution. And if Iraq, the Kurds and the Islamic State cannot agree on the borders, then let the fighting be confined to just the land in dispute. For then 95% of the land would be at peace and a final resolution would quickly follow.
If the stories on close ties and intense cooperation between the Kurds and Israel are in fact true, this behaviour is to be expected and even worsen and perhaps will also include targeting Turkmen. Because to create one unified state based around some ethnicity and fragmented history, it will be very important to expel the majority of those who are not complying to that image. Otherwise internal divisions will disrupt the dream prematurely if democracy remains the target. But the main problem of the Kurds always has been a lack of internal unity and leadership. It's the story of the state that was dreamed of but could not form in those times when nation-states formed like mushroom. And now in the post-nation-state age, the effort to move towards one becomes an exercise in self-indulgence, a pipe-dream only possible as project in Bizarro world. That said, the creation of semi-autonomous regions which can uphold Kurdish tradition and history is within reasons as they always existed. The danger right now is the poisonous dream that is modern nationalism — around 75 years too late for those projects to go anywhere but militarism, endless schisms and finally depletion of their own resources and those of anyone trying to support it materially.
It was helpful of you to point-out that Kirkuk was traditionally a Turkmen city – not exclusively, but under legitimate Iraqi governments where Arabs, Turks and Kurds lived together. However, the presumption that the dissolution of the Iraqi state (and Syria?) was and is historically inevitable and represents something like progress, ignores the many decades of diligent labor by the US, Iran, Israel, the Gulf theocracies and other Western allies or puppets to destroy Iraq (and Syria). Saddam made his mistakes, too which made their task mush easier. The "original sin" was Britain and France's decision that it would be better to arrange the post-Ottoman Arab world as an easily manipulated "empire on the cheap" rather than the independent, unified Arab nation the Allies had promised and the Arab nationalists fought for.
What we are witnessing is decay and putrefaction – as a consequence of the failure of Arab national aspirations – attracting various vultures, jackals, blowflies and stinking microbes raised on farms and in petrie dishes by Western mad political scientists; the same scientists that have been trying to kill the noble animal for nearly a century.
Expulsion of ethnic / religious minorities and apartheid for those who remain, well documented for Israel, and now for their allies, the Kurds, and hard policy in ISIS-controlled areas. To what extent is this common practice throughout the mideast? We don't hear much about this in the remaining semi-secularized nations, but as more adopt Islamist governments, is ethnic / religious intolerance on the rise?