Kurds Voted for Independence. Here’s Who Else Has a Say.

  • 6 years ago
Kurds Voted for Independence. Here’s Who Else Has a Say.
Syria’s civil war, and the global fight against the Islamic State there, have provided an opportunity for the country’s Kurdish population
— estimated at 300,000 before the war — to find some autonomy in northeastern Syria, near the Turkish and Iraqi borders.
That is because the United States is also heavily dependent on its alliances with Turkey and Iraq, two nations crucial to regional stability and to the coalition to defeat the Islamic State,
but which have both sworn to prevent Kurdish independence.
The Turkish government has long looked at any potential Kurdish state on its borders as an existential threat, possibly encouraging the millions of Kurds
who live in southern Turkey — who have long been repressed by the government both culturally and militarily — to stage a breakaway of their own.
The White House this week called the independence referendum in Iraq "provocative
and destabilizing." Brett H. McGurk, the United States special envoy to counter the Islamic State, described it as "a very risky process" with "no prospect for international legitimacy."
The government in Iraqi Kurdistan has also publicly rejected them,
but from time to time, the Turkish government has made military strikes into Kurdistan, saying that P.K.K.

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