Iraq’s Kurds to vote on independence

Non-binding vote on Monday is not expected to result in any formal declaration

KALAK, IRAQ — “For the sake of the sacrifices and blood of the martyrs, let’s all say yes for Kurdistan independence,” reads a large billboard in the centre of Kalak, a small town in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region. “Independence is not given, it’s taken!” reads another banner hanging below a cluster of red, green, yellow and white Kurdish flags.

Iraq’s Kurds are set to vote Monday in a referendum on support for independence that has stirred fears of instability across the region as the war against the Islamic State group winds down.

The Kurds are likely to approve the referendum, but the non-binding vote is not expected to result in any formal declaration of independence.

The United States and the United Nations have condemned the referendum. Turkey, which is battling its own Kurdish insurgency, has threatened to use military force to prevent the emergence of an independent Kurdish state, and Baghdad has warned it will respond militarily to any violence resulting from the vote.

Initial results from the poll are expected Tuesday, with the official results announced later in the week.

Denied independence when colonial powers drew the map of the Middle East after the First World War, the Kurds form a sizable minority in Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq. They have long been at odds with the Baghdad government over the sharing of oil revenues and the fate of disputed territories like the city of Kirkuk, which are expected to take part in the vote.

“There are pressures on us to postpone, to engage in dialogue with Baghdad, but we will not go back to a failed experiment,” Masoud Barzani, the Kurdish regional president, said to roars of applause at a rally of tens of thousands in Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish region, on Friday evening.

But beneath the sea of flag-waving, the Kurdish region continues to be plagued by endemic corruption and economic decline.

Among the portraits on Kalak’s main street is that of Amen Jadr Mahmoud’s 18-year-old son, Gaylan, one of the more than 1,500 Kurdish fighters, known as the peshmerga, killed in the fight against the Islamic State group. “His death was noble, he died fighting for Kurdistan,” Mahmoud said.

But even Mahmoud, a diehard nationalist who lost four other relatives to fighting with Iraqi government forces decades earlier, has misgivings about the Kurdish region’s political leadership.

“If we have a state then we will build institutions that will let us change the faces of the main parties,” he said. “Once we have a state we can get rid of them or at least prevent them from stealing so much.”

Hoshyar Zebari, a longtime Kurdish political figure and former Iraqi foreign minister, acknowledges that the referendum is partly an attempt by Kurdish leaders to cement their legacy, but says it is also rooted in Baghdad’s failings and in Iran’s growing influence over the central government. “The new Iraq is broken,” he said. “If we miss this opportunity for independence, it will never happen again in our lifetimes.”