Prepare for a Kurdish collision course

This editorial appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

The result of last week’s Kurdish referendum, which showed some 93 per cent voting for independence, was certainly no surprise.

The propulsion on the part of the Kurds to have their own country presents a conundrum for the national states upon whose territory Kurds live. The United States is heavily involved with most of them, as it is with the Kurds themselves.

The victim of Kurdish independence that would suffer most is Iraq, which would lose as further humiliation a big piece of land as well as, in principle, oil revenues. Kurds are about 20 per cent of the Iraqi population.

In the infamous Sunni-Shiite rivalry, in Iraq specifically, the Baghdad government is dominated by Shiites, allied with Shiite Iran, which also hosts a minority of Sunni Kurds. If Baghdad were to decide to try to use force to avert Kurdish independence, it could almost certainly depend upon Iran to side with it in any such conflict.

U.S. ally Turkey has an estimated 25 per cent Kurdish minority, which sporadically gives it trouble, including terrorist attacks by the Kurdish Workers’ Party in Turkey. Turkey would almost automatically be opposed to Kurdish independence.

The Syrian government of President Bashar Assad would certainly be opposed to handing over any of its disputed territory to Syrian Kurds, even though they have been active in attacking Islamic State forces in Raqqa in Syria, enemies of the Assad regime, and Sunnis.