Thera- I made a (very) short) video on my Fabled City Youtube channel about the failed Kurdistan independence referendum which was now nine years ago. Hard to believe 2017 was that long ago. I had just got back to Erbil from covering the siege of ar-Raqqa next door in central Syria to where being back in the KRG zone of control was a massive sigh of relief in terms of managing my stress levels. The KRG was pushing hard for what turned out to be a very poorly thought out referendum to secede from the Republic of Iraq. This was something the federal government then led by PM Haider al-Abadi was, to say the least, not pleased with this prospect.
I recently found a dash of footage from this heady time in Iraq and felt like posting a quick throwback compilation.
I wasn’t working on this story per se because I was too backed up with finishing up Syria work on the SDF’s fight against IS. But I happened upon some joyous moments both before the ill-fated vote and the night of when a virtually unanimous Yes vote had been tallied and spread across social media in the city. The KRG led by the legendary Barzani clan had so much to lose. After federal Iraqi forces had fled huge swaths of northern governorates south of those offically controlled by the KRG in mid-2014 terrified of the IS onslaught, large numbers of peshmerga troops had advanced both west and south into adjacent governorates where they seized control of lucrative oil installations.
When the referendum vote backfired badly, the KRG’s peshmerga were forced to retreat from these areas-often referred to as the ‘Disputed Territories’-as federal forces advanced northward in a major revanchist push to reclaim land once humiliatingly lost. The city of Kirkuk-the Kurdish Jerusalem-being recaptured by Iraqi forces on behalf of Baghdad on 16 October of that year sucked the oxygen out of whatever was left in the air in Erbil, Sulaimaniyyah, and Dohuk.
If this vote had somehow succeeded and the ruling Barzani and Talabani families were to have created an independent Kurdish state, what would that have looked like today? We’ll never now. It’s hard to imagine Turkey ever willingly accepting such a development. How would oil rich, landlocked Kurdistan have come to an accord with its neighbors? I don’t think a sovereign Kurdish nation-state is beyond the realm of possibility in this Hobbesian world of ours. But I can’t see it happening anytime soon in the authoritarian neighborhood in which the semi-autonomous KRG exists. The long calcified views toward any form of Kurdish national aspirations remain firmly entrenched in Ankara, Damascus, Baghdad, and Tehran.
Jin. Jiyan. Azadi.