​Kurdish autonomy under threat in Iran War: local refugees speak out for sovereign Kurdistan

By Jeff Armstrong

Despite a history dating back many centuries and a reputation as fierce resistance fighters, the Kurds remain the largest stateless nation in the world. Divided by colonial post-WWI borders and subsumed into four nations — Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria — at least 30 million live in their contiguous indigenous homeland, which they refer to as Kurdistan. Another two million live in refuge in the U.S. and Europe, where many of them continue to agitate for diplomatic recognition and international solidarity.

They have a complicated relationship with the U.S. that has been strained by its recent wars and maneuvers in the Middle East. Kurds fought alongside the U.S. military in the first Iraq war and established an autonomous territory in the wake of Iraq’s military defeat in 1992. Yet the U.S. failed to include the liberated Kurdish territory in its no-fly zone in its dictated terms of surrender, and the Kurds had to resist continued incursions by the defeated government of Saddam Hussein, while the U.S. largely sat back on the sidelines.

It was reminiscent on a much smaller scale of what was known by the Kurds as the Anfal (in Arabic, the spoils of war), a vicious counterinsurgency war waged by the Iraqi regime against the Kurds after a favorable conclusion to its eight-year war on Iran in 1988. A 1993 report by Human Rights Watch concluded that Iraq was guilty of the highest international crime of genocide in the Anfal, citing a conservative estimated civilian death toll of 50,000 civilians, including through numerous instances of chemical warfare, forced relocation, massacres and destruction of entire villages and families under perverse bureaucratic regulations. Iraq was a de-facto U.S. ally at the time against the revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran, which had just overthrown the dictatorial Shah of Iran, whom the U.S. had helped put in power in 1953 in place of a democratic government that had the audacity to nationalize its own oil reserves.

Yet the Kurds endured, obtaining recognition in the Iraqi constitution in 2005 as the Kurdistan Regional Government, an autonomous region somewhat akin to a U.S. state. The KRG has until recently been a relative oasis of stability in the region, despite internal civil disputes over democratic practices and civil liberties among a people very much aligned with traditional western values. On Sept. 25, 2017, the KRG responded to a movement for an independence referendum by sponsoring a vote in which more than 92% of three million voters, including non-Kurdish residents of Iraqi Kurdistan, voted for full sovereign independence.

Although the 2017 independence referendum received no international recognition, the U.S. has implicitly acknowledged it by maintaining military bases in the Kurdish region, despite commitments to withdraw from Iraq that were accelerated by recent attacks on U.S. facilities outside the autonomous region that have now been vacated since the recent United States-Israeli military campaign in Iran.

The Iran war has placed the Kurds in an increasingly precarious situation, with the U.S. pressuring them to join the war on its behalf, and Iran issuing warnings that it will hold the KRG responsible for any attacks originating from its territory. Iran and its affiliated Iraqi paramilitaries collectively known as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) have launched hundreds of missile and drone attacks on the KRG. Iran has gone so far as to issue threats to crush the Iraqi Kurdistan government if it collaborated in any incursion into neighboring Iran.

This threat weighs heavily in light of the recent U.S. betrayal of its Kurdish allies in Syria, where the Kurds had aligned with the U.S. to defeat ISIS and govern the liberated territory they refer to as Rojava since 2012 in accordance with their cultural principles of grassroots democracy and what westerners might refer to as libertarian socialism heavily shaped by feminism. Last January, the U.S. stood passively by while the interim government of Syria, led by a man who at the time of his takeover had a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head for his past leadership role in Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates, seized the vast majority of Kurdish territory and freed thousands of ISIS captives the Kurds had held prisoner in many cases for more than a decade.

President Trump has done the Kurds few favors since the war with Iran began. In early March, he encouraged Kurdish groups based in Iraqi Kurdistan to launch cross-border attacks in Iran, only to discount the prospect a few days later. About a month later, in April, Trump said the U.S. funneled arms for Kurdish groups to deliver to anti-government demonstrations last December in Iran that became violent. This month, Trump repeatedly claimed the Kurds kept the weapons for themselves, despite a May 11 article in the Jerusalem Post claiming Trump denied recommendations to deliver arms to Kurdish groups in the pre-invasion unrest.

Kurdish groups strongly denied receiving any U.S. weapons. In any event, it is hard to interpret Trump’s comments as serving any purpose other than to provoke Iran into forcing the Kurds into its battle.

It was in this context that I spoke with Dr. Azad Berwari and Kawar Farok, Executive Director of the Kurdish American Development Organization (KADO), for insight into the Kurdish perspective on current events in the region.

Berwari left Iraqi Kurdistan for Sweden after the first U.S.-Iraq war, later attending North Dakota State University on a student visa. He wrote his master’s thesis in sociology on the movement for a Kurdistan independence referendum, before going on to receive his Emergency Management Ph. D. and U.S, citizenship in the same week in 2012.

Farok was born in a refugee camp in Turkey after his family was forced out of its homeland in the genocidal Anfal campaign. He worked as a banker before heading up the Moorhead-based KADO, which he describes as a “one-stop shop” serving Fargo-Moorhead’s 3,500-strong Kurdish refugee community.

Farok and Berwari said the January conquest of the Kurdish autonomous zone in northeast Syria was a devastating blow to the Kurdish freedom struggle, but they pointed out that it also brought Kurds around the world together in solidarity. Much more than the Iraqi KRG, which has had to maneuver between competing hostile powers, Rojava was the purest expression of Kurdish cultural values and self-determination rights.

Formally known as the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, Rojava was founded on the principles of grassroots democracy, ethnic self-governance and women’s liberation. The role of women fighters was indispensable in the historic 2014 battle of Kobane, where the Kurds stemmed the seemingly inexorable tide of ISIS forces sweeping through Syria and Iraq. Farok said the women fighters knew they had to resist to avoid the fate of the Yazidis in Sinjar, of whom some 9,000 women were taken as “sex slaves.”

“They were able to break this mythological being of ISIS. And the moment that happened, Kurds from everywhere realized they’re not going to beat us,” Farok said. “Kobane’s significance is that it is the first time this mythological creature that cannot be defeated was defeated. That city (Kobane) is the epicenter of feminism. People in America sometimes don’t understand feminism to a full degree. Feminism is when you’re completely under control [of men] one year, and then two years later or one year later, you’re leading a battalion of men.”

At its peak constituting nearly one-fourth of Syrian territory, Rojava was defended by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an army of as many as 100,000 soldiers, reinforcing and reinforced by a contingent of some 2,000 U.S. troops. The leading force in the SDF is the YPG (People’s Protection Unit in Kurdish), but the militia also included Arabs and other ethnic groups. The SDF umbrella reflected the Kurdish commitment to multi-ethnic democracy, but also served as cover for the U.S. to support an affiliate of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), a Turkish-based organization that remains on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations despite having abandoned armed struggle and committing to disarmament.

When the Syrian Army of the interim government launched a full-scale offensive in January, many of the Arab SDF soldiers fled or defected to the invading forces. Farok said some SDF troops even shot their former comrades in the back. Meanwhile, the U.S. “just watched what was happening,” according to Berwari.

The Syrian forces proceeded to free at least 10,000 ISIS war prisoners, incorporating many of them into the national army, according to Farok and Berwari.

“America supported [the Syrian Army] or, if not supported, turned a blind eye to them attacking Kurds with Arab tribes,” said Farok. “If not for international pressure, that would have been a genocide into itself.”

Farok said the U.S. abandonment of the Kurds of Rojava in Syria to its jihadist rulers ensured that they would not participate with the U.S. in the Iran war, despite their longstanding opposition to the Iranian regime.

“That’s the reason why Kurds told the U.S. this time, ‘we’re sorry,’ because they saw what happened in January,” Farok said. “We’re not talking about what happened 30 years ago. We’re talking about the current president, the current year in January, when Kurds were the ones that sacrificed 17,000 soldiers in not only Syria but also Iraq, Kurdistan Iraq,” he said, referring to the critical role Kurdish fighters played in the military defeat of ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

“They fought for the world’s safety,” said Berwari, “not just their own safety.”

Despite a tenuous ceasefire in Iran, the last fully remaining Kurdish enclave in Iraq continues to be targeted by missile attacks from Iran and allied Iraqi militias. Farok and Berwari say the Iranian strikes are primarily aimed at outlawed Iranian Kurdish groups, while attacks from the PMF are more indiscriminate and reflective of a general hostility toward the existence of the KRG.

Berwari said he has little optimism about the immediate future for the Kurds and few inclinations of what will come next. “Anyone who wants to predict anything for the Middle East is either a really great genius or stupid — nothing in between.”

Farok said the Kurds will continue to appeal for international support, but will in the end be forced to rely as they have for centuries on their own resilience and force of will.

“If the Kurds didn’t have a culture of resistance, we wouldn’t exist today,” Farok said.

Reach the author at jeffrey.armstrong@my.nhcc.edu.