Opinion: Is Kurdistan good for Turkey?

Though always bubbling under the surface, the Middle East’s sectarian polarization has increasingly boiled over in recent years. Military coups, simmering rebellions and full scale civil wars affect countries stretching from North Africa to Iraq. Turkey, held aloft as the nation in which political Islam could manifest itself in a truly democratic system, has been equally buffeted by these events.

Turkey’s decision to back the nascent opposition movement against Syrian Alawite President Bashar al-Assad has, though unintentionally, helped widen the schisms across the Middle East. As the civil war in Syria intensified, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Sunni-majority Justice and Development Party (AKP) opened the border to refugees fleeing Syria. The AKP has also turned a blind eye to the mainly Sunni militants moving south to fight the largely Alawite Syrian government forces. Unwittingly or not, Turkey opened the floodgates to jihadists from across Europe.

Those fighters now make up some of the more extreme militant groups, particularly the Islamic State (IS). Bolstered by its combat experience in Syria, IS staged a lightning fast military offensive in western and northern Iraq in early June. The group, which subsequently declared itself an Islamic Caliphate spanning Iraq and Syria, stormed the former’s second largest city, Mosul. The capitulation of that regional capital directly impacted Turkey, as 81 of its citizens were taken prisoner by the militant group and its Iraqi Sunni allies. (Yeginsu, 'Militants Storm Turkish Consulate in Iraqi City, Taking 49 People as Hostages,' The New York Times, 11 June 2014.) Forty-nine Turkish citizens, including Turkey’s consul general for Mosul, Special Forces soldiers and other diplomatic staff remain captive, though 32 truckers were released on July 3.
While the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki flailed ineffectively in reaction to the onslaught, one group was able to hold IS forces at bay.

Peshmerga forces of the Kurdish Regional Government of Iraq (KRG) filled the security vacuum left in parts of northern Iraq as government forces disintegrated. The Peshmerga are among the most competent fighters in the Middle East, and are reflective of a people who have been besieged by the region’s powers for decades.

The KRG’s ability to stand on its own in the face of IS – especially in light of the al-Maliki government’s reliance on Shia militias to shore up the rapidly vanishing armed forces – is a positive for Turkey’s leaders. The savvy political minds in the AKP have capitalized on the rise of the secular KRG under Massoud Barzani in Iraq, partnering, to the chagrin of Baghdad and Washington D.C., with the nominally autonomous region over the past few years.

Under Prime Minister Erdogan, the AKP has made an effort to break from the reactionary Kemalist nationalism that typified previous Turkish governments’ stances toward the country’s Kurds. For more than a year and a half, a peace agreement has held between the Turkish government and the outlawed Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), the Kurdish separatist group. Though the PKK’s leader Abdullah Ocalan sits in a Turkish prison, his continued participation in peace talks has given Erdogan room to maneuver at home and abroad. ('Ocalan thanks Turkish Parliament for Kurdish peace talks bill', Today’s Zaman, 10 July 2014.)

Domestically, Erdogan and the AKP have benefitted at the ballot box from placating the Kurdish BDP party, a small but significant actor in the Turkish Parliament. The peace talks have also required that PKK fighters remain in their redoubts in the Quandil Mountains of western Iraq. This has lead to stability in Turkey’s southeastern provinces, where Kurds are the majority in many places.

Despite Ocalan and Barzani being opposites in the world of intra-Kurdish politics, the Turkish government’s conciliation efforts have also paid off across the border in Iraq. In post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, the KRG under Barzani has consolidated its resources and established a solid political foundation.

That structure, honed in decades of armed combat with Iraq, has proven effective in countering Iraq’s other power brokers, the Sunnis and Shia.
Since taking power in 2002, the most significant source of the AKP’s success has been its stewardship of the economy. Turkey has experienced record economic growth under Prime Minister Erdogan. That record is even more impressive considering the 2008 recession, the near implosion of the neighboring Eurozone and the challenges of bordering Syria, with its raging civil war.

Yet that economic growth is fueled by oil and natural gas imports. According to the International Energy Agency, Turkey imported 93 percent of its oil and 98 percent of its natural gas in 2012. Fulfilling Turkey’s energy needs has become the key to Kurdistan’s increasing autonomy. Turkey’s dependence on energy imports has been a major factor in Ankara’s conciliatory stance towards the KRG’s break with Baghdad over Iraqi energy profits in recent years.

In December 2013, Turkish energy firm Genel completed a pipeline from Kurdistan to Turkey that CEO Tony Hayward predicted would be fully commissioned by the fourth quarter of 2014. ('Genel Energy completes pipeline from Kurdistan Region of Iraq to Turkey', Oil Review Middle East, 14 February 2014.)

In a friendly and independent KRG, Turkey has a ready energy supplier and Kurdish middle man, despite the Ocalan-Barzani rivalry, to speak with should peace talks with the more militant PKK break down. Even more promising is that while many of the region’s conflicts are religiously driven, the Kurds, though mainly adherents of Sunni Islam, are secular. Women are front line fighters in Peshmerga forces in Syria and Iraq, while the PKK counts females amongst its founding members.

In early July, Barzani said that he would ask the KRG’s parliament to vote on an independence referendum later in the year. After years of strained relations with the autocratic regime of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s Kurds have had enough. They now fully control the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which has a large Kurdish majority.

Barzani put it best: "The Kurds did not bring about the dangerous situation [that threatens] the integrity of Iraq. We did not create the situation in which Iraq finds itself today. We have not partitioned Iraq. Rather, it was others who brought about this catastrophe and broke up Iraq into pieces.”

However, the KRG has not pushed its luck. Despite having the ability, Peshmerga forces did not move on Mosul. This was primarily for two reasons. The first was that, with control of Kirkuk, KRG leaders saw no need to be drawn into a protracted and large-scale fight with IS in order to save an al-Maliki government that has continued to alienate them. The second, and more telling, is that KRG leaders were hesitant about attempting to govern a Mosul that is a majority Arab. Under the KRG, Iraq’s Kurds have prospered in the areas under its control. So have the region’s minorities, like Arabs and Turkmens, as a consequence of the stability its governance has brought. But governing Mosul is a whole other matter, and the KRG rightly declined to take on such a monumental task.

Turkey, though, still concerned with the well-being of its remaining 49 hostages from the Mosul consulate, has privately told Barzani that the time is not right for independence and that the territorial integrity of Iraq is still in the region’s interest. (Unal, 'Ankara Tells Barzani Timing Not Right For Independence Drive', www.DailySabah.com, 15 July 2014.)
Significantly, this message was delivered in private, whereas Turkey has been known to deploy several battalions of soldiers when it did not appreciate the direction of events in northern Iraq. ('Turkey Crosses a Line', The New York Times, 23 March 1995.) Its caution is understandable, with Ankara not wanting to set any precedents for autonomous Kurdish regions that could come back to haunt it.
However, Iraq and Syria have proven that ethnic and religious tensions are too wide a schism to surmount for some of the region’s countries.

The long anticipated (or dreaded, depending on one’s perspective) independent Kurdistan may soon become a reality as the post-WWI Sykes-Picot Treaty which partitioned the Ottoman Empire is torn asunder by the realities of the contemporary Middle East. A strong, secular, energy exporting partner is good news all around for Turkey and more generally, the region as a whole.

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