The U.S. Must Listen to Iraqi Kurds

The U.S. Must Listen to Iraqi Kurds.

Iraqi Kurdish strategy has paid off. The Kurds spent the past few years working to strengthen the Kurdistan region while keeping a wary distance from the rest of Iraq. They didn’t trust Baghdad, neither to deal with them fairly, nor to survive as a secular, democratic state. The Iraqi Kurds were proved right. Baghdad consistently tried to weaken the Kurdistan Regional Government through fights over oil money and deals – and now the Iraqi state itself is under threat from the radical Islamist ISIS.

 The Kurds are in a strong position precisely because they ignored United States pressure to accommodate Baghdad.

The Washington approach of putting the Kurds second should finally end. The U.S. should recognize the importance of the Kurds to a stable Middle East.

That's why the Washington approach of putting the Kurds second should finally end. The U.S. should recognize the importance of the Kurds to a stable Middle East.

It’s not just Kurdish strategy that’s paying off in Iraq. So is Kurdish pragmatism and a sense of unity, no matter how fractured at times. Just last month the Kurdistan Regional Government was digging ditches to block off Syria’s Kurdish region from Iraqi Kurdistan. The president of Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, was angry that the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (P.Y.D.), the dominant player in the Syrian Kurdish areas, wouldn’t share power with his allied parties in Syria. Barzani also didn’t trust the P.Y.D. because of its connections to the main Kurdish party in Turkey, the P.K.K., with which he has fought over the years. Now Barzani has reopened the borderand the P.Y.D. has said it will defend Iraqi Kurdistan if necessary. These are not an empty words — the P.Y.D. has been battling ISIS and other Islamic radical groups inside Syria for over a year.

The ISIS offensive in Iraq has so far bypassed Kurdistan, but there’s no telling what the Islamist radical fighters would do if they secure their hold over the northwestern part of the country. Nor is it clear that the region’s states are going to welcome the surviving Kurdish region, especially with the newfound Kurdish unity.

The U.S. has never had an independent Kurdish policy. Instead, it’s always indexed its approach to the desires of states in the region. The U.S. has refused to engage seriously with Turkish Kurds because of Turkish opposition to Kurdish rights within its own border. U.S. support for Syrian rebels blinded it to the importance of Syria’s Kurds and their willingness to stand up to Islamist fighters. Washington’s insistence on propping up Maliki and opposing Kurdish moves to strengthen their own region didn’t pay off.

nytimes