WHEN a leader loses half his realm and his government’s main source of revenue and shatters his people’s dreams of independence, all in a couple of days, an apology might seem in order. But Masoud Barzani, the president of Iraq’s Kurdistan region, is not offering one. In the face of a lightning Iraqi advance, Kurdish forces retreated this week from territory they had occupied since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Mr Barzani blamed “traitors” and said he would fight another day.
The sudden collapse of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, and with them the Kurds’ cherished dream of statehood, contrasts awkwardly with the inflated promises Mr Barzani made before the rout. Last month he insisted on staging a referendum on Kurdish independence, not just within the Kurdistan region’s original borders, but also in areas his forces had captured in the war against the so-called Islamic State (IS) since 2014. These included the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which would have been the cash cow of...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2zBG25F
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