Iraq’s Kurds to vote on independence

U.S., UN condemn referendum over fears of regional destabilization

KALAK, Iraq — Iraq’s Kurds are set to vote today 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, 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 World War I, 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, Friday evening.

The Kurds have been a close American ally for decades, and the first U.S. airstrikes in the campaign against IS were launched to protect Irbil. Kurdish forces later regrouped and played a major role in driving the extremists from much of northern Iraq, including Mosul, the country’s second largest city.

“The Kurdish contribution to the ISIS fight, it can’t be overstated,” said U.S. Army Col. Charles Costanza, a commander at a coalition base just outside Irbil, using another acronym for the extremist group. “We couldn’t have done Mosul without the Kurds.”

But the U.S. has long been opposed to Kurdish moves toward independence, fearing it could lead to the breakup of Iraq and bring even more instability to an already volatile Middle East.