At an elite private school in Iraq‘s autonomous Kurdish region, children learn Turkish and English before Arabic. University students dream of jobs in Europe, not Baghdad. And a local entrepreneur says he doesn’t like doing business elsewhere because the rest of the country is too unstable.
In the decade since U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq, Kurds have trained their sights toward Turkey and the West, at the expense of ties with the still largely dysfunctional rest of the country.
Aided by an oil-fueled economic boom, Kurds have consolidated their autonomy, increased their leverage against the central government in Baghdad and are pursuing an independent foreign policy often at odds with that of Iraq.
Kurdish leaders say they want to remain part of Iraq for now, but increasingly acrimonious disputes with Baghdad over oil and territory might just push them toward separation.
“This is not a holy marriage that has to remain together,” Falah Bakir, the top foreign policy official in the Kurdistan Regional Government, said of the Kurdish region’s link to Iraq.
A direct oil export pipeline to Turkey, which officials here say could be built by next year, would lay the economic base for independence. For now, the Kurds can’t survive without Baghdad; their region is eligible for 17 percent of the national budget of more than $100 billion, overwhelmingly funded by oil exports controlled by the central government.
Since the war, the Kurds mostly benefited from being part of Iraq. At U.S. prodding, majority Shiites made major concessions in the 2005 constitution, recognizing Kurdish autonomy and allowing the Kurds to keep their own security force when other militias were dismantled. Shiites also accepted a Kurd as president of predominantly Arab Iraq.
Still, for younger Kurds, who never experienced direct rule by Baghdad, cutting ties cannot come soon enough.
More than half the region’s 5.3 million people were born after 1991 when a Western-enforced no-fly zone made Kurdish self-rule possible for the first time by shielding the region against Saddam Hussein. In the preceding years, Saddam’s forces had destroyed most Kurdish villages, killing tens of thousands and displacing many more.
Students at Irbil’s private Cihan University say they feel Kurdish, not Iraqi, and that Iraq‘s widespread corruption, sectarian violence and political deadlock are holding their region back.