The Kurds’ recent successes on the battlefield against the Islamic State are raising the question of whether the United States should do more to help a stateless people realize their national aspirations.
Since the beginning of February when they seized three bridgeheads across the Tigris River north of Mosul, Iraqi Kurdish forces have advanced into territory once held by the Islamic State, cutting off the group’s supply lines into Syria and pushing its forces farther away from Kirkuk and its strategically important oilfields.
That success comes on the heels of advances by forces of the YPG, the armed wing of the Syrian Kurds’ Democratic Union Party, since they broke the Islamic State’s siege of the strategic border city of Kobani at the end of January.
The United States and its allies have supported Kobani’s defenders with an intense campaign of airstrikes against Islamic State forces arrayed against the town and are arming and training Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga units as part of a broader effort to reconstitute Iraq’s security forces for an eventual offensive against the extremists.
But the Kurdish fighters’ success has prompted calls for the United States to go further, harnessing their national aspirations in the fight against the Islamic State by supporting independence.
“The United States must help the Kurds translate their bravery into a true ability to defeat the Islamic State. They are America’s most reliable friends on the ground, and should be treated as such,” sociologist Scott Atran and Douglas Stone, a retired Marine major general and former deputy commander of multinational forces in Iraq, wrote in The New York Times on March 16.
The two are among the co-authors of a study by Artis, a nonprofit group that uses social science research to resolve intergroup violence, that found the Kurds’ will to fight matched that of the Islamic State — something that could be a strategic asset for the United States.
Some members of Congress, concerned that the Obama administration’s efforts against the extremists are lagging, find that argument attractive.
Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Republican presidential candidate, says the success of Kurdish fighters should inspire the United States to support Kurdish desires for independence.
“I think they would fight like hell if we promised them a country,” Paul told Breitbart News in an interview published March 10.
“I think any arms coming from us or coming from any European countries ought to go directly to the Kurds,” he said. “They seem to be the most effective and most determined fighters.”
But in reality, the U.S. relationship with the Kurds is too complicated for a clear-cut decision on supporting independence and is likely to remain so.
“In general, yes we should support the Kurds. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make some demands of them so we aren’t throwing money away,” Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official who has studied and written about the Kurdish issue for several years, told the Washington Examiner in an email interview.
The 40 million Kurds who live in parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran are seen as the world’s largest ethnic group without its own state. They have benefited from the U.S.-led overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the popular revolt against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to carve out autonomous, self-governing regions in those countries. But the main group for Turkish Kurds, the PKK, is seen as a terrorist organization by the United States, which has not welcomed their decades-long guerrilla war against the government of Turkey, a NATO ally.
Though the U.S. has generally supported Iraqi Kurdish autonomy within that country, its policy stops short of outright independence. There are concerns that the Iraqi Kurds, who have lingering territorial disputes with the government in Baghdad, might turn their U.S.-supplied weapons against that government once the Islamic State is defeated.
Kurdish independence would lead to the fragmentation of Iraq, which ultimately would hurt efforts to fight the Islamic State, George Washington University professor Mark Lynch told the House Armed Services Committee last month.
“The idea of allowing the Kurds to go their own way I think at this time is not a good one,” he said.
Rubin, now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who traveled to the region to meet with Syrian and Iraqi Kurdish leaders over the past year, notes that the rivalry between the two major political parties that dominate Iraq’s Kurds also is a problem.
“Take the seizure of Kirkuk,” he said. “When some people said the Kurdish peshmerga took Kirkuk, the reality was that the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan peshmerga loyal to [former Iraqi President] Jalal Talabani occupied the city. The peshmerga run by Kurdistan Democratic Party leader [and president of Iraqi Kurdistan] Masoud Barzani aren’t in the city, nor are they welcome there.”
Divisions among the Kurdish groups from country to country also are an issue, Rubin said, noting that the Iraqi Kurds, who have cooperated with Turkey against the PKK in the past, initially were reluctant to help the YPG in Kobani because the YPG is aligned with the PKK, though they relented once it became clear the YPG had gained the upper hand in its defense of the city.
“Ultimately, the Kurds need to get their own house in order,” he said.
