Iraq was founded by the British in 1921 as one of the new states formed as a result of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire following WWI. From the outset, this new state has been founded on an artificial basis out of three Ottoman wilayets (provinces) - Basra, Baghdad and Mosul - with no coherent cultural and economic ties to one another. The Basra wilayet, the population of which was predominately Shia Arabs, had closer trade and commerce links to its south, the Persian Gulf and the Indian peninsula, than to other Ottoman wilayets. Baghdad wilayet, home to both Shiite and Sunnis, enjoyed prosperous commercial links to Iran because it included within its borders the two holy Shiite pilgrim sites of Najaf and Karbala. The Mosul wilayet, with a predominately Kurdish population according to Arnold Wilson’s Loyalties Mesopotamia London 1914 – 1917, was culturally and commercially closer to the Aleppo wilayet, now a Syrian province, than to the wilayets to the south. Disregarding the desires and opinions of the population of these three wilayets, the British forcibly put them together to establish a new state to which they gave an old geographical name, Iraq. Worse, the British imposed a Sunni minority government on a majority Shiite population. Worse still, they brought a Sunni Arab prince, Faisal, from another Ottoman wilayet, Hejaz, now part of Saudi Arabia, and made him king of Iraq. Thus Iraq was an amalgamation of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds on the top of which was a king from Hejaz. As a matter of fact, until about the end of WWI in 1918, the British colonialists had in mind to establish the new Iraqi state out of the two Basra and Baghdad wilayets they occupied at the beginning of the war in 1914 - 1915. The Mosul wilayet was not captured until the end of the war in 1918. Even after the occupation of the Mosul wilayet, this Kurdish province became a hot issue because, on the one hand, its Kurdish population wanted to establish their own independent Kurdistan State and the Ottomans, on the other hand, knowing that they were losing the Arab wilayets, insisted on retaining Mosul within their new borders. After the discovery of oil in Kirkuk, which lay within the boundaries of Mosul vilayet, the British decided to attach the province to the Basra and Baghdad provinces and establish the new Iraq state out of the three former Ottoman provinces. The British had three goals in mind when they made their decision: first, to own the newly found oil wells because, according to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 between Britain and France, Iraq would fall under a British mandate; second, to increase the Sunni vote in Iraq (the Mosul wilayet is Sunni Kurdish) to balance the Shiite refusal to accept a Sunni king brought from Hejaz; and third, a state with bizarre mixture of ethnic and sectarian diversity would best serve the colonial principle of divide and rule. The new state of Iraq was proclaimed in 1921, became a member of the League of Nations in 1925, and virtually no decade has passed since without a Kurdish revolt against this forceful annexation of their country to an Arab State. "We ask the new civil administration not to allow the Turks to return to our country and not to let the Arabs to rule us." These were the conditions the two Kurdish delegates, Khorshid Agha Dizeyee (the uncle of the author) and Ahmed Effendi (the husband of this author`s aunt), who represented the Kurds in Erbil, gave to the British Political Officer in Erbil, Arnold Wilson, in return for their support of the British, according to Wilson. Kurdish hopes were dashed and southern Kurdistan was annexed to Iraq. Soon after, the new Arab rulers started to dismember the cohesiveness of the Kurdish area. They detached the Kurdish towns of Duhok, Zakho, Akre, Sheikhan, and Sinjar from the Kurdish area and annexed them to the new administrative unit of Liwa Mosul, dominated by Arabs. They detached Khanaqin, Mandali, Badra, Jassan, Hayy, and other townships from the Kurdish area and annexed them to the newly established Arab provinces of Liwa Diyala and Liwa Kut. Furthermore, they started bringing Arab tribes to the oil rich areas of Kirkuk, mainly in the Hawija area south of the city. All this was done without asking the Kurdish population of these areas. The frustrated Kurds resorted to arms struggle until the monarchy was toppled in a military coup in 1958 and a republican system was established. The Kurds supported the new regime hoping their dreams would finally come true. Frustrated anew, they were treated brutally by successive republican governments including with chemical weapons used by the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein in 1988. Iraq as a state collapsed on April 9, 2003 as a result of the US-led coalition attack. The government was dissolved, the armed forces were disbanded, and even the Iraqi flag was no longer acknowledged by many communities, on top of them the Kurds. Now, the Iraqis are in the process of building a second Iraqi state. Kurds have said they want their own independent homeland. In an unofficial referendum in 2005, 98 percent of Kurds supported independence and in an official referendum in 2017, more than 92 percent voted for independence from Iraq. They are bitter about the double standard policy of the US-led alliance that Iraq must remain as a unified country. They are asking: Why was it right for Palestine to be split to two? for the Soviet Union to be dissolved? for Yugoslavia to be dismembered? for Czechoslovakia to be divided into two? for East Timor to separate from Indonesia? for Eritrea to quit Ethiopia? Thus, the Kurds are asking what would be wrong for the artificial state of Iraq to be split into two states, Iraqi and Kurdish. The Kurdish leaders, though discretely sharing the views of their compatriots, are obliged to look at the issue from a more pragmatic angle. They know that neither the US-led alliance nor the neighboring countries are willing to allow the birth of a separate Kurdish state in the Middle East. They therefore have suggested a loose federal system for the second Iraqi state that would be based on two main nationalities, Arabs and Kurds, with defined geographical boundaries. They gave as examples for such a federal system Canada, former Czechoslovakia, Belgium, and Switzerland. All of them have two or more nationalities living on their own historical territories. The Kurds, rightly, want for this federal system to be a voluntary union. As the first Iraqi state collapsed because it had been built on false, unrealistic foundations, the Iraqis and the world community should realize that a second Iraqi state will share the same fate unless the Kurds get their full legitimate rights, including the right of self-determination enshrined in the new constitution. The ills of this country are its Kurds. They have been behind Iraq`s compromise of territory to Iran at Algiers in 1975, the Kurds were behind the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 - 1988 when Saddam Hussein thought his country was strong enough to recapture the territories lost to Iran in the Algiers Agreement; the Kurds were behind the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 as a consequence of the Iran-Iraq war. To conclude, is it not time for the world community to realize that the Kurds, in all parts of their divided homeland Kurdistan, deserve an independent state of their own? Homer Dizeyee is a former journalist with Voice of America and was political advisor to former Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
