Iraq’s Kurds are set to vote Monday in a referendum on support for independence that has stirred fears of instability across the region as the war against the Islamic State group winds down. The Kurds are likely to approve the referendum, but the non-binding vote is not expected to result in any formal declaration of independence, reports the Associated Press.
The United Sates and the United Nations have condemned the referendum. Turkey, which is battling its own Kurdish insurgency, has threatened to use military force to prevent the emergence of an independent Kurdish state, and Baghdad has warned it will respond militarily to any violence resulting from the vote.
Initial results from the poll are expected on Tuesday, with the official results announced later in the week.
Denied independence when colonial powers drew the map of the Middle East after World War I, the Kurds form a sizable minority in Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq. They have long been at odds with the Baghdad government over the sharing of oil revenues and the fate of disputed territories like the city of Kirkuk, which are expected to take part in the vote.
The Kurds have been a close American ally for decades, and the first US airstrikes in the campaign against IS were launched to protect Irbil. Kurdish forces later regrouped and played a major role in driving the extremists from much of northern Iraq, including Mosul, the country’s second largest city.
But the US has long been opposed to Kurdish moves toward independence, fearing it could lead to the breakup of Iraq and bring even more instability to an already volatile Middle East.
During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the Kurds sided with Iran against Saddam Hussein, who punished them with a scorched-earth campaign involving chemical weapons that killed an estimated 50,000 people. A no-fly zone imposed by the US in the early 1990s largely halted the killings, and allowed the Kurds to develop de facto autonomy, which was formalised after the 2003 US-led invasion.
In the years after the American invasion, the Kurdish region emerged as a rare success story. The peshmerga insulated the region from the insurgency and sectarian killings that plagued much of the rest Iraq, and oil revenues fuelled an economic boom, leading to talk of a new Dubai.
That all changed in 2014, when IS rampaged across northern Iraq, at one point approaching within a few miles of Irbil. The collapse in global oil prices later that year led to a severe economic downturn, exposing a government riddled with corruption and an economy dominated by a bloated public sector.
Meanwhile, as the peshmerga halted the IS advance and then began to push back with the help of US-led airstrikes, they seized territory equivalent to 50% of their autonomous region, further raising tensions with Baghdad. The oil-rich city of Kirkuk, with large Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen and Christian communities, is divided over the referendum and has seen low-level clashes in the days leading up to Monday’s vote.
