L-R Jason McCartney MP, chairman of the APPG, Karwan Jamal Tahir, UK High Representative of the KRG, and the author. Image: Gary Kent. All rights reserved.
The Queen's Birthday Party at the poolside of a classy hotel in the simmering summer heat attracted business and political leaders as well as Arab, Iranian, European and American diplomats. What made it different was we were in Erbil, the capital of the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan and just 25 miles from fierce fighting between the Islamic State and the Peshmerga.
A diplomat at another such party once accidentally toasted the President of the Kurdish Republic but that slip of the tongue may prove prescient. Nearly a century after failing to achieve nationhood in the post-Versailles period, the Kurds are now on the move. A greater Kurdistani nation-state taken from the four countries where Kurds are minorities is improbable, although greater autonomy is growing within Turkey and Syria if not Iran, and an independent Iraqi Kurdistan is becoming more likely by the day.
