Catalonia and Kurdistan couldn’t seem farther away. One is nestled in the peace and prosperity of Western Europe, the other swims in the chaos of a dissolving Middle East.
Yet the two independence referendums of these would-be nation states are revealing. Both raise questions about the meaning of their regional orders and have provoked pushback from the status-quo world. (more…)
Like Spain’s, the central government of Iraq is determined to prevent an independence vote for its largest majority. But like the Catalans, the Kurds are determined to vote anyway.
Iraq’s parliament voted on Tuesday to stop a referendum in its Kurdish region and instructed Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to preserve national unity.
Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy has vowed to do “whatever is necessary” to prevent a referendum on secession in Catalonia. At his government’s request, Spain’s Constitutional Court has suspended the Catalan referendum law.
Catalan regional authorities are pressing ahead. So is the Kurdistan Regional Government, which controls the northern part of Iraq. (more…)
Since Iraqi troops seized back Mosul last month, the self-proclaimed Islamic State has been reduced to the area around Raqqa in Syria. Predominantly Kurdish forces are attempting to take the city, protected by Western airpower. Authorities estimate the number of Islamist fighters has dwindled from the thousands to the hundreds.
As soon as the caliphate falls, governments will face another challenge: the reconstruction. (more…)
Both the Catalans and Iraq’s Kurds have announced independence referendums this week over the objections of their central governments.
The two might seem a world away. Catalans have virtually no security concerns. The Kurds are waging a war on two fronts: one against Turkey to the north and another against the self-proclaimed Islamic State to the south.
Yet they have things in common.
Both are economic success stories. Catalonia has only 16 percent of Spain’s population yet accounts for a fifth of its economic output, giving it an economy the size of Denmark’s. Kurdistan has Iraq’s lowest poverty rates and, thanks to its oil reserves, is increasingly self-reliant.
Both have desired more autonomy for years and both have been rebuffed by their national authorities, leaving them with little choice but to press for unrecognized votes on independence. (more…)
As David Downing reported here on Sunday, Mosul could make a quick economic recovery once it is entirely liberated from the self-declared Islamic State by Iraqi government forces.
Not only is the city, once Iraq’s second largest, a hub for northern Iraqi industry and trade; it’s also situated close to major oil and natural gas reserves. The potential for further economic expansion could be close at hand.
The battle will not be over quickly, though. It has been estimated it will take another three to five months to rout the Islamic State from eastern Mosul.
Once the militants are defeated, internal and sectarian divisions could resurface. A Shia-Sunni divide seems inevitable. Mosul being a Sunni majority town doesn’t help the cause for peaceful settlement. Friction between religious groups can hurt reconstruction efforts, especially with the involvement of Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi’s sanctioned Shia fighters. We are looking at a “game of thrones” mentality where a balance of factions in this enclave becomes quite a task. (more…)
Mosul is a tale of two cities.
Eastern Mosul, situated on the left bank of the Tigris, has been fully liberated and a sense of normalcy is returning there. The first schools recently reopened, giving some 16,000 children access to education again. Residents are cleaning and clearing the streets.
Western Mosul, on the right bank of the river, remains under Islamic State control.
Military preparations are underway to retake the rest of the city. Iraqi government forces, supported by the West, have set aside six corridors for displaced people, of which they estimate there will be 250,000 to 300,000.
For now, Islamic State militants continue to use Western Mosul as a base form which to lob missiles at the eastern half of what used to be Iraq’s second largest city. (more…)
There are some 100,000 troops involved in the conquest (or reconquest, depending on your perspective) of Mosul. On the surface, the battle is meant to restore the Iraqi government to its full writ; a Baghdad-united Shia and Sunni realm, a nation state on the way to functionality. In other words, a normal country.
Ah, dreams.
Careful observation reveals a more wretched future. The Islamic State may be doomed, but that hardly means peace for Iraq. There are too many who want a piece of this particular pie.
Many players there are. Let’s start with the greatest of powers, who define the broadest outlines of geopolitics in the Middle East. (more…)
As battles go, it was a real shocker: less than 1,500 Islamic State fighters defeating perhaps 30,000 Iraqi police and troops. In the course of six days, from June 4 to June 10, 2014, IS militia conquered Iraq’s second largest city using little more than suicide bombers and pickup trucks. They should have been butchered: Iraq’s troops were well-equipped and theoretically well-trained by the Americans. Should have, yet weren’t; instead of victory, Iraq lost its biggest battle since the American invasion in 2003.
It taught us a lot about Iraq, about how states develop and how quickly they can unravel.
Now Iraqi forces gather for the counterattack. From the ashes of the upcoming battle, we’ll learn even more. (more…)
Iraq’s morass of violence and smoke has confounded peacemakers since the American invasion in 2003. No one — not the Americans, the Europeans, the Iranians, the Gulf states or even the Iraqis themselves — have yet to sustainably overcome the failures of the occupation. Which makes geopolitical silver bullets all the more tempting, because when solutions refuse to present themselves, we collapse inward to thoughts of get-peace-quick schemes.
In Iraq’s case, that has long been the argument for partition. If the Sunnis, Shias and Kurds won’t get along, well, fine. Make three nations from one and walk away with a job-well-done feeling.
This is not wholly wrong, but it’s not wholly right either. Silver bullets are tempting, but people often presume their magical nature mean it doesn’t matter where they hit. Yet even silver bullets can graze and not kill; in Iraq’s case, the overarching problem is not whether partition or federalism work, but that nobody, the incumbent government included, is treating the Iraqis as they expect.
Let me emphasize the “nobody” part of that: not a single force in the Iraqi geopolitical arena is acting the way a successful ruler of Iraq must. (more…)
The secession of the Kurdish Autonomous Region from the Iraqi state increasingly appears to be a matter of when, not if. It is already essentially de facto independent, as the Kurds conduct their own foreign policy and trade deals from their capital in Irbil with little regard for Baghdad’s wishes.
It is therefore unsurprising that early last month, Masoud Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, reiterated calls he previously made in 2014 for a referendum on the independence of Kurdistan.
While there are no immediate plans for actually carrying out such a referendum, it is worth considering the impact that an independent Kurdish state would have on the Middle East. (more…)
After almost a century of broken promises and political strife, the Kurdish population of the Middle East seems to be coming into its own. Kurds in Iraq and Syria have been essentially the only force to persistently enjoy success in combating ISIS and have provided enclaves of relative stability as their respective states have crumbled.
The Iraqi Kurds have been especially successful. Since the formation of the Kurdish Autonomous Region following the American invasion of Iraq, the Iraqi Kurds have essentially created their own state based around their capital at Irbil, complete with a largely autonomous income from oil sales and trade with Turkey. Due to a variety of domestic, regional and international factors, the time is now ripe for Iraqi Kurdistan to formally declare independence and sever the ties which bind it to Baghdad. (more…)
Even before the Tuesday morning assault into Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, by hundreds of militants affiliated to Al Qaeda, the Iraqi security forces were stretched thin across the country.
Last week, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), the breakaway Al Qaeda faction that has solidified a presence in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, swept into Samarra in a renewed attempt to spark widespread sectarian conflict. While the Iraqi army was quickly dispatched to the city and managed to reclaim neighborhoods previously taken by ISIS fighters, the operation sent shockwaves in the hearts of Iraq’s political officials and once again raised the question of whether the country’s security is at all better since American troops left in 2011.
In yet another reminder of how potent militancy in Iraq has become — and how ineffectual the Iraqi government’s response to terrorist attacks has been — the Sunni extremist group took a large swath of Mosul with little to no army resistance. Banks were looted of what are rumored to be millions of dollars in stolen funds, military checkpoints and police stations were taken, civilians were forced to flee to the Kurdish regions of Iraq and the city’s residents awoke to new overlords. (more…)
For the first time since American troops withdrew from Iraq, the country voted on Wednesday to elect a new parliament. With an estimated twenty million Iraqis registered to vote, millions were expected to trek to their nearest polling station to cast their ballots. Yet many were as concerned about the threat of violence as they might have been excited about having a say in their country’s political future.
Monday’s early balloting was an uninspiring indication of things to come. Members of Iraq’s security forces were allowed to vote two days earlier than the general population. Twenty-seven of those soldiers and policemen did not return to their families: coordinated attacks from eight suicide bombers struck polling places in Baghdad and elsewhere. Thirty Iraqis were killed in the northern city of Khanaqin when a suicide bomber blended in with a crowd of Kurds watching a video of Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, who is in Germany recuperating from a stroke. By the end of the day, 57 people were dead. Twelve more were killed on Tuesday. (more…)
For billions of people worldwide, the start of the New Year is an opportunity to look ahead at the year to come and hope that it will bring about greater peace and prosperity for friends and family alike. For the people of Iraq, such hopes seem futile when their government is incapable of suppressing the violence that, according to Iraq Body Count, a database that tracks civilian casualties in the country, has claimed over six hundred lives in the first half of this month alone.
In the capital city, Baghdad, thousands who live in dangerous neighborhoods leave their homes unsure if they will return at the end of the day. And while violence is certainly nothing new in Iraq, the regeneration of Al Qaeda and its resurgence in the last twelve months — helped along by the civil war in neighboring Syria — is once again proving to be the main accelerant driving the country’s mayhem.
The bloodiest day in Iraq for months occurred just two days ago when over ninety Iraqis were killed in a series of car bombings, suicide bombings and shootings across the country, targeting security forces personnel, anti-Al Qaeda militiamen and scores of innocent civilians. Nine bombings exploded in Baghdad alone, most of which were deliberately targeted to claim the lives of Iraqi Shia. Over forty people were killed in those explosions. (more…)
