When, Not If?

By Amberin Zaman

Amberin Zaman is a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where she is working on Kurdish issues. She is also a columnist for the independent Turkish online news portal Diken as well as for Al Monitor, a Washington DC based online news outlet covering the Middle East. She was previously the Turkey Correspondent for The Economist.

For much of the past century, the Kurds have rebelled against their respective rulers only to be brutally crushed each time. The 21st century is proving less cruel. More than two decades of upheaval unleashed by Iraq’s ill-fated invasion of Kuwait and accelerated by the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the Arab Spring, has weakened regional states’ authority over their own borders and allowed the Kurds to begin to shape their own destiny. And no more so than for Iraq’s four million-plus Kurds, whose leaders say independence is no longer a question of “if” but “when.”

But it is the “how” part that will prove critical when determining whether a Kurdish state carved out of Iraq can truly bolster regional stability, as the Kurds argue, or will only fuel the conflict engulfing the Middle East. The former requires striking compromises with Baghdad over new borders and oil resources, and just as importantly, convincing Turkey and Iran that separatist feelings among their respective Kurdish minorities will not be stoked.

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