Masrour Barzani, son of Kurdish President Masoud Barzani,repeats call for referendum on seeking Kurdish indpendence from Iraq, February 2016. Alice Martins / Press Association. All rights reserved.KRG’s President Barzani has recently intensified his efforts for independence. There might be many reasons for this. First and foremost, the state of Iraq is often regarded uncontroversially as a ‘failed state’, artificially designed by British and French colonisers in the aftermath of WW1, offering the Kurds nothing but a calamitous century-long history including genocidal attempts to eradicate Kurdish nationalism. Added to this, the domestic demand for the right of self-determination is well known to the Kurdish leadership. 98.8 percent of Kurdish voters said yes to independence in the Kurdistan independence referendum of January 2005.
The small region of Kurdistan, little more than an autonomous region of Iraq protected by a no fly zone before the overthrow of Saddam, has now become an international entity. The KRG has its own foreign relations apparatus with 34 foreign consulates operating in Erbil. It has also a vast economic reach mainly because of colossal oil and gas preserves in Kurdistan as well as its trade with neighbouring countries. This has convinced the outside world that the notion of a Kurdish state is no longer out of the question.
Since 2014 the Islamic State, (IS), has become another reason for the Kurds to speed up their efforts to secede from Iraq. Failing to defend Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul against IS assault, Iraq’s army also left the Kurdish city of Kirkuk, a troublespot between Arab Iraq and the Kurds for much of the last century. Taking advantage of the security vacuum, the Kurds sent Peshmerga forces into the city in order to prevent it falling into the hands of IS. This led to Kurds regaining almost all of 40 per cent of the territory that used to be considered, since 2003, “disputed areas”. In addition, rows between Baghdad and Erbil over the KRG’s oil policy reached a point of no return when in 2015 the Iraqi government refused to send its full share of Kurdistan’s 17 per cent of the national budget.
