Can Kurds ever become independent?

Several million Kurds in Iraq have taken a symbolic step toward achieving a dream deferred since the end ofWorldWar I: establishing a homeland of their own.

But their step toward trying to declare an independentKurdistanhas angered the region’s biggest powers to the point of military action being threatened. And even the Kurds’ staunchest ally, the United States, has said it will not support independence.

Here is a look at howthe Kurds got to this point, and at theweb of strained international relations that surrounds them.

A fraught autonomy in Iraq

Lastmonth, 3millionpeople living in the semiautonomous Kurdish Region of northern Iraq voted overwhelmingly in support of seeking independence in a nonbinding referendum. The region, unofficially known as Kurdistan, has itsowngovernmentand schools and a security force known as the peshmerga.

The Kurds’ most important resource is oil. Irbil, the region’s capital, is an oil boomtown. And after the Iraqi military fled Kirkuk during the Islamic State’s offensive in 2014, theKurds were able to seize full control of that cityandits major oil fields. Independence would mean the Iraqi government losing any share of those lucrative resources — an outcome Baghdad has said it is willing to go towar to prevent.

Thedétente betweenIraq andtheKurds has onlybeen a relatively recent development, and has never been strong, eventhoughtheyare onthesameside of the fight against the Islamic State. In the 1970s, Iraqi leaders sentKurds to concentration camps and razed their villages. In the 1980s, when they sided with Iran in its war with Iraq, President SaddamHusseinkilledmore than 100,000 of them and attacked the city ofHalabja with poison gas.

A no-fly zone, imposed by the United States after the 1991 Persian Gulf War and a failed Kurdish uprising, protected the Kurds for years in northern Iraq. And after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Kurds and the Iraqi government essentially had to get along, under pressure from U.S. officials. But after the Kurdish referendum vote, Iraq has halted flights at the international airports and threatenedtosendtroopsto retake the Kirkuk oil fields and disputed areas.

Fear of a domino effect in Turkey

The Turkish government has long looked at any potential Kurdish state on its borders as an existential threat, possibly encouraging the millions of Kurds who live in southern Turkey — who have long been repressed by the government both culturally and militarily— to stage a breakaway of their own.

Those fears have been forged by years of violent conflict with Kurdish militants within Turkey thathas led to a death toll of 40,000 and rising. The militants — the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, better known as the PKK — are officially considered terrorists by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. The government in Iraqi Kurdistan has also publicly rejected them, butfromtimetotime, the Turkish government has made military strikes into Kurdistan, saying that PKK fighters were sheltering there.

Now, the Iraqi Kurds’ move to support independence has led to concern that Turkey might go as far as invading to stop the process.

Complex alliances in Syria

Syria’s civil war, and the global fight against the Islamic State there, has provided an opportunity for the country’s Kurdish population — estimated at 300,000 before the war — to find some autonomy in northeastern Syria, near the Turkish and Iraqi borders. Kurdish fighters therewere for years theUnited States’ ally of choice in fighting the Islamic State.

But those same Kurdish fighters in Syria are also generally loyal to PKK leadership, even though they take pains to use a different name.

In general, the Kurds in Syria have tried to stay roughly neutral when it comestothe governmentof PresidentBasharAssad. And Syrian forces, consumed with major cities in the heartland, have mostly left them alone. But now that the balance of power has shifted in Syria, with interventions from Russia and Iran helping Assad defeat the network of insurgencies against him, there is a renewed possibility that the government will not look kindly on an armed and autonomous Kurdish region within its national borders.

Friends and enemies in the United States

Washington has relied on Kurdish help in the Middle East for decades, but it has never officially backed plans for an independent Kurdish state.

That is because the United States is also heavily dependent on its alliances with Turkey and Iraq, two nations crucial to regional stability and to the coalition to defeat the Islamic State, butwhich have both sworn to prevent Kurdish independence.