The Middle East madness of the last three years has finally arrived in Kurdistan.
With thousands of Yazidis trapped by IS (Islamic State) on Sinjar mountain, and around 200,000 Iraqi Christian Arabs and Kurds in the north of the country fleeing the insurgent army, according to the UN, President Obama’s hand has been forced.
“Earlier this week, one Iraqi cried that there is no one coming to help,” President Obama told Americans on Thursday night. “Well, today America is coming to help.”
The President authorised limited airstrikes against IS. F-18 fighter jets already accompanied relief flights dropping water supplies and food to the hapless Yazidis on the exposed mountainside.
The question ordinary Kurds are asking in and around the Kurdish capital of Erbil is, “What happened to the Peshmerga? Where did they go?”
Good question.
For Kurds it is a given that their Peshmerga fighters will protect them no matter what. They defended them during the flare-ups of fighting with Saddam and have, until the last week, kept them safe from the violent anarchy that has engulfed Iraq in the decade since the Bush administration overthrew the dictator without planning what to do next.
In the first weeks after the IS invasion in June, the Peshmerga more than held the line against them. Kurdish forces secured Kirkuk and its oil rich environs—much to the Iraqi government’s chagrin. As IS headed south towards Baghdad, the Pesh kept them pushed back from the southern limits of Kurdish territory.
Read more:
Who are the Yazidis of northern Iraq?
Iraqi Kurdistan follows the arc of the mountains in the northeastern part of the country. These beautiful peaks march summit-by-summit east into Iran and north into Turkey. Kurdistan’s territory, historically, included the plains east of the Tigris and the foothills of the mountains.
It is from here that the Peshmerga disappeared in the last few days. To people who live in villages like Bashiqa, on the main road running east from Mosul to Erbil, the turnaround is inexplicable.
Many fled to Erbil in June after the initial IS advance, then returned to their villages when it became clear that the group was going to stay on the west bank of the Tigris. There was even a value for the east bank villagers to the IS presence (except for Mosul’s Christians) in that the group maintained order, without cutting people’s heads off. Order is something the Mosul region has not known for a decade and the population seemed willing to accept the group for bringing it to them.
But when the Peshmerga fled earlier this week, panic struck again and in time honoured fashion, families piled into their cars and flatbed trucks and headed for Erbil.
Why did the Kurdish fighters go? Several contacts from the area say the fighters were withdrawn so as to create this refugee crisis and force America to deal with IS.
The idea is to create images in the west of a desperate population and an outgunned and outmanned force in need of American military aid. Indeed, news reports from the region in the last 24 hours have had pictures of Kurdish men volunteering to join existing Peshmerga forces and being handed dilapidated Kalashnikovs.
That theory/rumour is as good as any. It is hard to understand why this is happening now. IS didn’t seem to have the manpower or the inclination to push eastwards toward Erbil when it made its first breathtaking sweep into Iraq. There was no strategic reason to do so.
Frankly, the Peshmerga are too strong and numerous a force particularly the closer any invading group gets to Erbil. The IS “army” is still reported to have not more than 15,000 men. And even with all manner of looted Syrian and Iraqi army equipment it couldn’t possibly take a city like Erbil, population 1.5m, whose people wanted to stand and fight.
That is still the situation. Given that the West’s attention has been focused for the last month on Israel and Gaza, as well as Ukraine, manufacturing a refugee crisis by withdrawing Peshmerga protection from the villages of the plain, might have been a policy choice designed to get attention refocused on what is happening in Iraq.
It might also be a useful way to remind the Obama administration of just how important the Kurds are to the region.
While IS has been rampaging around Iraq, the Kurds have finally been banging the drum for independence. For a decade, the Kurds have worked diligently within Iraq’s existing federal structure, to keep the country together. But the chaos which always surrounds the Baghdad government has reached epic proportions since parliamentary elections last April. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki may be on the way out. No one is sure who will replace him.
Meantime, a secure Kurdistan, has received billions of dollars in inward investment from the oil industry. The Kurds, much to the chagrin of Baghdad, have begun shipping oil from around Kirkuk through a new pipeline into Turkey and on to the Turkish port of Ceyhan.
It is ironic that just before this week’s refugee crisis began, the main headlines relating to Kurdistan were that a tanker loaded with a million barrels of Kurdish oil was moored off the coast of Texas. The Iraqi government had hired a bunch of Texas lawyers to prevent the oil being off-loaded saying it was the property of Iraq rather than the Kurds.
Read those last paragraphs again and think about all the geo-political implications they contain. You will have a good idea of why, putting aside the replay of medieval history between Muslims and Christians, the Kurdish question will now be front and centre in policy makers minds.
Michael Goldfarb covered the Iraq War as an unembedded reporter in Kurdistan and is the author “Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq”
