Towward a united Kursistan

The Kurds were the only consistent friends of the US during the long Iraq War.  The US owes them something, and that something is oil-rich Kirkuk, which they now occupy.

The Iraqi constitution provides that Kirkuk should belong to whomever wins a plebiscite in that City, and Kurds would surely win.  So the Central Government has refused to hold the plebiscite and has held on to Kirkuk until now.

Many Kurds live in Turkey and Iran.  Many want  the independent nation of Kurdistan promised by the 1920 Treat of Sèvres, at the conclusion of WWI.  Britain and France broke the Treaty  and carved Kurdistan into subordinate three parts.

Kurds have as long  history, as long as any people on earth.  They remember.

Kerry, do the right thing.  Let Turkey and Iran, both with big Kurdish populations, become friends of our friends, the Kurds.

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From the New York Times

Kerry Implores Kurdish Leader to Join a Government and Not Break Away

By MICHAEL R. GORDONJUNE 24, 2014

ERBIL, Iraq — Secretary of State John Kerry urged the president of Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region on Tuesday not to seek his own state and instead help form a government in Baghdad.

“I am going to bring up the elephant in the room,” Mr. Kerry told the president, Masoud Barzani, who serves as the leader of the Iraqi Kurds, a minority who have long sought independence. “This moment requires statesmanship.”

Mr. Kerry’s statements, shared by a senior State Department official who attended the meeting, were prompted by recent comments by Mr. Barzani in an interview with CNN about what he called the need for Kurdish self-determination.

Mr. Barzani neither withdrew those comments nor said that he would take concrete steps to pursue self-determination during his meeting with Mr. Kerry, who traveled to Iraq on Monday as part of an emergency effort to help deal with a growing Sunni insurgency threatening to partition the country.

But Mr. Barzani made no secret of his disdain for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite. Mr. Barzani also bluntly expressed his sense that the gains by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the Sunni extremist group known as ISIS, had changed the political landscape.

Photo

Secretary of State John Kerry and Masoud Barzani, the president of Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region, on Tuesday in Erbil, Iraq. 

Credit

Pool photo by Brendan Smialowski

“We are facing a new reality and a new Iraq,” Mr. Barzani said at the start of his meeting with Mr. Kerry.

Mr. Kerry’s trip to the Kurdish regional capital, Erbil, was his first as secretary of state. He met with Mr. Barzani after meetings in Baghdad on Monday with Mr. Maliki and rival Shiite and Sunni politicians. (The last secretary of state to visit Erbil was Condoleezza Rice, in 2006, at the height of the American-led Iraq occupation.)

After ISIS members took over the northern city of Mosul two weeks ago and began to move south, Kurdish security forces responded by seizing Kirkuk, a city in an oil-rich region that has long been divided between Arabs and Kurds.

The Kurds’ expansion has put them in a position to demand more autonomy in political talks over Iraq’s future. But it might also complicate the effort to cobble together a new Iraqi government, particularly one that does not include Mr. Maliki, long accused of autocratic tendencies by Iraqi politicians.

American officials have made clear privately that they would support the selection of a new prime minister if Mr. Maliki’s rivals would unite behind an alternative. But it is uncertain whether Sunni and Kurdish political parties can find enough common ground in forming a new government now that the Kurdish militia, known as the pesh merga, has taken control of Kirkuk.

“Ousting Maliki will require the cooperation of all the other blocs,” said Ramzy Mardini, an expert on Iraq and a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, an independent research organization based in Washington.

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How Kurdistan might look under the Treaty of Sèvres:

Wikipedia