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By
Stephen Hollingshead, August 27, 2017
ERBIL,
Iraq – This September 25, Iraqi Kurdistan will hold its long promised
referendum on independence from Baghdad. This move is controversial everywhere
except in Kurdistan; yet it presents a defining opportunity for U.S. interests.
President
Trump should ratify Iraqi Kurdistan’s overwhelming desire for independence – a
long overdue step toward healing the historical injustice of Sykes Picot and
also an opportunity to bring his Safe Zone policy to Iraq to reverse the ISIS
genocide of Christians, Yezidis, and Turkomen, many of whom have taken refuge
inside Iraqi Kurdistan. Moreover, those two steps would create a buffer against
ongoing Iranian efforts to build a land bridge to the Mediterranean.
The
Arab world still resents the arrogance of Sykes Picot, the Western powers’
century old revision of the map of the Middle East, drawn not along natural
lines of ethnic, religious, or linguistic communities but rather to divide them
in ways to allow the West to control resource extraction. But even more than
the Arabs, the Kurds have reason to chafe under the violence of Sykes Picot.
Moderate-majority Sunni Muslims, Kurds are the largest ethnic group on the
planet without their own country. They live as a majority in one contiguous
geographic area yet are divided by the map into Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran,
and so have been oppressed as an ethnic minority.
When
ISIS conquered large swaths of the region in 2014, many of the displaced,
especially Christians and Yezidis fleeing genocide, took refuge in Iraqi
Kurdistan, the most U.S.-friendly area of Iraq. While the U.S. and EU have
officially declared this to be a genocide, we have yet to do anything to
fulfill our treaty obligations to redress it.
As a
Peshmerga general asked me last year at his command post on on the front with
ISIS, “Don’t you Americans know that Iran is even more dangerous than ISIS?”
Genocide
is not merely about theft, rape, and murder: It is a scheme to eradicate a
people from a place. In that sense, genocide can and should be reversed.
President
Trump’s proposed Safe Zone in Syria is not merely realpolitik but is the
preferred policy of those I’ve spoken to in the camps – they want to go home.
That Safe Zone should include those areas of Northern Iraq adjacent to
Syria that are home to the victims of the ISIS genocide. Those areas also
border Iraqi Kurdistan, which has offered refuge to so many displaced by
ISIS.
President
Trump, who carried Michigan by fewer than 12,000 votes, owes his margin of
victory there to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians around Detroit
who supported him overwhelmingly. It is time to deliver his promise to make it
possible for their relatives to return home.
Safe
Zones only work when security fosters productivity. In addition to external
security, internal security and the rule of law (including the administration
of property rights) are absolutely necessary to achieve lasting peace and allow
people to return to the productive employment required to restore their sense
of dignity.
The
United States should enlist a coalition including Kurdistan, Iraq, and NATO
allies to secure the borders of the zone, but insist that internal security
forces and judicial administration be entirely indigenous, under international
training and observation. In other words, both the Shia militias Baghdad has
sent to the North at Iran’s instigation (who are already moving Shia into
formerly Christian areas) and the Kurdish Peshmerga forces who today compete
with them for control of these areas, must leave the zone. This is a deal the
Kurds are willing to make, and President Trump must be willing to bring Baghdad
to the table by holding hostage the prospect of any continued U.S. aid. A
united Iraq is a failed experiment, and our aid only goes to prop up a
government dominated by Tehran. As a Peshmerga general asked me last year
at his command post on on the front with ISIS, “Don’t you Americans know that
Iran is even more dangerous than ISIS?”
While
Baghdad has become enthralled to Tehran, Tehran is expanding its military
footprint, sending Shia militias into Iraq and propping up Hezbollah in Syria
and Lebanon. Iran’s long term strategy to pave a road to the Mediterranean is
plodding along without raising much alarm in the very West that strategy is
designed to threaten. It is time we do something about it. We might start by
helping our only friends in the neighborhood: The Kurds, Christians, and
Yezidis.
As
the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Minister of Foreign Relations, Falah
Mustafa Bakir, told me this week, “Kurds yearn for a long term strategic
partnership with the United States. We share the same values and principles,
and deserve the support of the US.” Let’s make a deal with the Kurds to protect
our other friends in the region and unite them against Iranian encroachment.
All they want is the same independence that made America great.
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