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READ Middle East Brief 14 The Kurds and Regional Security: An Evaluation of Developments since the Iraq War Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson The Kurdish role in Middle Eastern politics has been a subject of much discussion since the 2003 Iraq War. Syria, Iran, and Turkey consistently present the Kurds as a wholly destabilizing force in the region owing to long-standing Kurdish interests in gaining autonomy or an independent state. A step-by- step analysis of circumstances affecting the Kurds, however, reveals the extent to which a series of external and internal developments have enabled and constrained Kurdish behavior, thus determining the Kurds’ role relative to regional security. In turn, such an assessment allows one to identify some of the trends likely to affect Kurdish futures in the postwar regional security environment. Threat Perceptions Preceding the 2003 War During the run-up to the Iraq War, the Syrian, Iranian, and Turkish governments were concerned as to how the postwar settlement vis-à-vis the Iraqi Kurds might affect their own Kurdish populations. As a whole, the region’s Kurds share a long-standing desire for a state of their own, and, since the 1991 Gulf War, had come close to realizing this dream owing to the existence of a democratic, economically developing, and autonomous Kurdish region (the Kurdistan Regional Government, or KRG) based in northern Iraq. This autonomy allowed the KRG’s main Kurdish parties—Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Masoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP)—to develop the political and military machinery needed to control Iraqi Kurdistan.1 As a result, Syria, Iran, and Turkey worried that the Iraqi Kurds would use the post- conflict power vacuum to, at a minimum, transform their de facto autonomy December 2006 into a de jure legality; at worst, the three feared that the PUK and KDP would No. 14 seize the opportunity afforded by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein to declare an independent Kurdish state. Such potentialities were viewed with intense apprehension as greater Kurdish freedom in Iraq could precipitate region-wide Kurdish unrest and thereby imperil regional security. The specific nature of the perceived security threat posed by anticipated Kurdish gains in postwar Iraq varied from state to state, however. In Syria, long-standing Ba’athist restraints on Kurdish access to the political system, along with a policy of Arabization that settled Arabs on confiscated Kurdish lands, had spawned a host of Syrian Kurdish opposition groups that were at once well organized and motivated to seek redress for Kurdish grievances.2 President Bashar Assad was sufficiently new to office, and his regime sufficiently weak, that the government perceived a type of existential threat should Kurdish groups take the lead in organizing domestic opposition to the Ba’athist state. The overarching concern was that an increasingly democratic and economically robust KRG on Syria’s border might arouse Syria’s Kurds to agitate in support of improvements – perhaps including demands for autonomy – to their situation in Syria, potentially inspiring similar demands from other disenfranchised groups, and thereby undermining the regime’s authority.3 To forestall this danger, Assad traveled to Syria’s Kurdish areas in September 2002 and promised that the government would consider granting the Kurds greater rights so long as they maintained “national unity.” As one analyst noted, Assad’s message was twofold: “Yes, we will look into your problems, but don’t use this as a card to press for more.”4 By way of contrast, Iran and Turkey focused not on Kurdish existential threats, but on the potential for Kurdish secessionist violence to imperil their territorial integrity. This concern resulted from past experiences with nationalist-inspired Kurdish violence. Iranian Kurds, for example, rose up against the state in a bid for independence immediately following the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980. Occurring at a time when the Islamic Republic was at its weakest, the revolt was not suppressed until 1984 following a two-year campaign by the Iranian army.5 Meanwhile, the 1984–1999 revolt of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey nearly succeeded in forming Joshua Shifrinson is a an independent Kurdistan in the Turkish southeast. Though the Turkish military had gained control of the military struggle by 1999, at a cost of nearly 35,000 Turkish and doctoral candidate in Kurdish dead, the conflict terminated only after the PKK declared a unilateral cease- the Political Science fire and retreated across the border to northern Iraq following the capture of PKK Department at MIT. His leader Abdullah Öcalan; in order to keep the peace, Turkey maintained thousands of troops in its southeastern provinces.6 Given such past encounters with Kurdish current research focuses nationalism, Iran and Turkey shared a concern that enhanced Kurdish autonomy, let on civil-military relations alone the emergence of an independent Kurdistan in northern Iraq, might rekindle and regional security in nationalist fervor among their Kurdish populations and spark renewed attempts at the Middle East. wresting Iranian and Turkish Kurdistan away from state control.7 Postwar Developments in Iraq: The Importance of the Transitional Administrative Law Significantly, an unambiguous Kurdish challenge to regional security did not emerge for over a year following the U.S. invasion in 2003. Concerns that the Iraqi Kurds would use the downfall of the Iraqi government to immediately declare independence proved unfounded, as the PUK and KDP emphasized their commitment to keeping Kurdistan part of Iraq and remained engaged throughout 2003–2004 in efforts to reconstitute 8 The opinions and findings expressed in this a central Iraqi government. Given a burgeoning United States–Kurdish partnership essay are those of the author exclusively, and within Iraq stemming from Kurdish support for the American invasion; promises of do not reflect the official positions or policies American support for Kurdish interests provided the Kurds remained engaged in the of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies Iraqi political process; and an oft-repeated threat of Turkish intervention in northern or Brandeis University. Iraq should the Kurds declare independence, the PUK and KDP were subject to both positive and negative external incentives to keep the KRG part of Iraq.9 Under such 2 geopolitical conditions, as Talabani himself noted in August the riots, as noted at the time, were inspired by “watching 2003, Kurdish independence was “impossible”; instead, to rights for Kurds being enshrined in a new if temporary be “realistic,” Kurds had to work to create a “democratic, constitution next door in Iraq.”15 Improvements to the Iraqi parliamentary, federative, [and] pluralistic Iraq” in order Kurdish situation contrasted with the failure of the Assad to secure “the tangible goals of the [Kurdish] people.”10 regime to make good on its 2002 rhetoric so that Syria’s Kurds, Accordingly, there were few manifestations of Kurdish as one European diplomat told the Christian Science Monitor, violence in Syria, Iran, and Turkey as the regional political “[saw] developments in Iraq as an opportunity to press for structure, with its inveterate hostility toward expressions more rights.”16 “Although,” as Gary Gambill observed in of Kurdish separatism and secession, remained essentially April 2004, “foreign provocateurs did not directly instigate unchanged as compared with the situation before 2003.11 any of the rioting,” growing Kurdish power, influence, and assertiveness in Iraq catalyzed Kurdish challenges to their As part of their participation in the negotiations leading situation within Syria.17 to the 8 March 2004 adoption of Iraq’s Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), the PUK and KDP—with Turkey’s Kurds were the next to avail themselves of the United States backing—secured approval for a federal changed regional conditions, when a faction of the PKK Iraqi state that offered a means of legally recognizing the renounced 1999’s cease-fire and resumed hostilities against de facto Kurdish state within a state in northern Iraq.12 At the Turkish Republic in June 2004. At the time, the PKK the same time, the TAL made substantial improvements claimed that Turkey’s failure to respond to the cease-fire to the Kurdish situation in Iraq by recognizing Kurdish as by improving Kurdish rights made perpetuation of the one of Iraq’s two official languages, guaranteeing the right cease-fire irrelevant and necessitated a renewed fight for of displaced Kurds to return to their homes, promising Kurdish autonomy and ultimate independence.18 One notes, the KRG a share of Iraqi oil revenues proportional to the however, the geopolitical circumstances underlying the country’s Kurdish population, and securing KRG control PKK move. In light of the autonomy afforded the KRG and of Kurdish militia forces (the peshmerga), with only nominal continued American backing for the Iraqi Kurds, together authority resting with Baghdad.13 Then, although rebuffed with the need on the part of the United States to avoid in their efforts to obtain control over Kirkuk and its oil destabilizing shocks to the nascent Iraqi government and fields—areas that were long claimed as part of the Kurdish the lack of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, the PKK found itself nationalist narrative but were equally sought by Arab and afforded a virtually free hand in operating against Turkey Turkoman groups—the PUK and KDP succeeded in gaining from its bases in Iraqi Kurdistan. The conflicting priorities a promise of a future referendum to decide control of the of the KRG, the United States, and Turkey interlocked in contested territory. Given the effectiveness of the peshmerga such a manner that Turkey could not attack the PKK for in maintaining peaceful conditions in Iraqi Kurdistan, past fear of destabilizing the Iraqi government and/or inviting PUK and KDP experience in administering the KRG, and clashes with the KRG, risking the ire of the United States a 2003 agreement between the PUK and KDP designed to in either case.
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