To understand how it happened, one must go back to the 2003 US invasion, which empowered the Kurds. By cutting the Kurds off from the rest of Iraq, which has fallen into chaos and mass killings, Kurdistan has emerged from the storm stronger than before. The stability afforded to the regional government in Erbil to complete these tasks may be attributed to an ironic turn of events due to the emergence of Islamic State. According to the result, then deal with the government and international community.” The government’s intention now is to hold regional elections in August and to write a regional constitution that would be completed in September. We must go to parliament and have a referendum. Now, we have a problem with the budget and recognizing the Peshmerga as part of the defense system in Iraq we have disputed areas. “Our understanding for our assessment in 1992 was to have federal Iraq with a region of Kurdistan. A former minister in the Kurdish regional government, who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the issues involved, recalls that since the 1990s, Iraqi-Kurds have set their sights on self-determination. Rival politicians Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Masoud Barzani of the Kurdish Democratic Party are the two most popular leaders. But they came down from the mountains, and in 1992, they elected the first parliament in Kurdistan. “In those days, in the mountains, we were alone,” he recounts. “My life is serving in the Peshmerga.” Sardar Karim, the deputy-general of the Peshmerga division in Talesskef – a Christian village north of Mosul – says that most of his commanders are veterans of the war against Saddam. “I lost 33 members of my family,” he reveals. One of our escorts, cradling a long-barreled Soviet-era Dragunov sniper rifle with a soft wooden stock, is named for his father, who was killed by Saddam’s army. Not only did Saddam embark on a genocide in the late 1980s that killed 180,000 Kurds and created a million refugees, he also kept the area poor and underdeveloped. Driving in the region of Dohuk, one can see old, square concrete fortresses constructed during the Saddam era to oversee the suppression of the Kurds. But they were greeted with silence from Washington, a fact many blame on Kissinger personally. We feel that the US has a moral and political responsibility towards our people, who have committed themselves to your country’s policy,” he wrote. “Our movement and people are being destroyed in an unbelievable way, with silence from everyone. Mullah Mustafa Barzani, the father of the Iraqi Kurdistan’s current president, Masoud Barzani, sent a letter at the time to US secretary of state Henry Kissinger asking for help against Iraq. In the 1960s and ’70s, Kurds in Iraq gained some autonomy under Saddam, only to find themselves sold out in a 1975 agreement that Baghdad signed with Tehran in Algiers. In the late 1920s, a short-lived republic in eastern Turkey was crushed by the Turkish army, and 1946-1947 saw the defeat of a Kurdish independence movement centered in Mahabad, Iran. They often say, “We have no friends but the mountains” – a reference to the number of times they’ve had to escape from onslaught, abandoned by the international community. Throughout history, the Kurds suffered a series of betrayals and false hopes. Whereas in Syria and Turkey, Kurds have been fighting just for the right to speak their language at official events or in school, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, the national language and the dream of an independent state are slowly being realized. But in neighboring Syria, Turkey and Iran, the same flag has often been banned. Today, Kurdish flags flutter throughout the countryside and cities they adorn stores and uniforms. Frantzman) FOR MANY Kurds, the current state of autonomy in Iraq is one part in a long history of struggle for independence. (function (a, d, o, r, i, c, u, p, w, m) ` (script) Ī Peshmerga soldier surveys the front line with Islamic State, at the Christian village of Talesskef, Iraqi-Kurdistan. Kurds tell Jpost: 'Just send us weapons to defeat ISIS' - The Jerusalem Post
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