Iraq/Kurdistan: Kurds Say They’ll Give a Unified Iraqi Government One Last chance

Sep 5, 2014 | Roy Gutman, Miami Herald
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IRBIL, Iraq -- Kurdish leaders, acceding to U.S. demands, are postponing plans for an early referendum on independence and say they instead will devote their efforts to forging a new Iraqi government.

Years of tangling with outgoing Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, a Shiite Muslim, have left Kurds skeptical about their future in an Iraq of squabbling Sunni and Shiite Muslim Arabs. Doubts rose dramatically in June after Islamic State extremists, supported by local Sunnis, took over northern Iraq and the Shiite-dominated national army collapsed.

In early July, Massoud Barzani, the leader of the largely autonomous Kurdistan region, ordered his advisers to begin immediate preparations to hold a referendum on independence.

But now the Kurdish government has agreed to hold off. As Fuad Hussein, Barzani’s chief of staff, put it, using an acronym for the Islamic State: “We now have a priority: to clean the area of ISIS. ISIS must not remain our neighbor. When you have this priority, some other priorities will be delayed.”

Years of tangling with outgoing Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, a Shiite Muslim, have left Kurds skeptical about their future in an Iraq of squabbling Sunni and Shiite Muslim Arabs. Doubts rose dramatically in June after Islamic State extremists, supported by local Sunnis, took over northern Iraq and the Shiite-dominated national army collapsed.

In early July, Massoud Barzani, the leader of the largely autonomous Kurdistan region, ordered his advisers to begin immediate preparations to hold a referendum on independence.     

      But now the Kurdish government has agreed to hold off. As Fuad Hussein, Barzani’s chief of staff, put it, using an acronym for the Islamic State: “We now have a priority: to clean the area of ISIS. ISIS must not remain our neighbor. When you have this priority, some other priorities will be delayed.”