Incidentally, Mosul is the city where Arab terrorists are still hunting down Christians.

I think that is quite noteworthy because it is one of the reasons for the Kurdish authorities to act as they do. (For some reason these details are never mentioned when Arabs suffer from border controls somewhere.)

I would have loved to visit Mosul but it was too dangerous, but not because of the Kurdish militia.

 

I see the Kurds point in a way, keeping the area safe; however all Iraqis, should be Iraqi first and Kurdish second. Maybe I'm spoiled here in the US (and there are those here that don't want outsiders in "their area"), but I like to be able to travel freely in my own country.Cultural diversity is fine for fairs, holidays, and history books. People should be proud of their ancestors, and who they are as a people, but went it gets to the point of being divisive then you have a bigger problem. Like I said, I'm mixed on this one, it's natural for people to turn inward when security is an issue, hope it improves.

The Kurds don't see Kurdistan as an Arab country that Arabs should move freely in. After decades of oppression they finally want some freedom and security.

The Iraqis are still arguing about whether Mosul is Arab or Kurdish. It was Kurdish before Saddam cleansed it as far as I know.

 

It's not really the kite-flyers fault or - necessarily - the governor's either. Kurdistan should have been granted indepedence, but for short-sighted realpolitik reasons the appeasement of Turkish genocide was more important than giving Kurds a homeland.

If Kurdistan is going to be an Iraqi state, then it should be treated like any other state. Borders between states should not inhibit free passage of goods, services or people. Anything else is a denial of Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi unity.

In my view the Kurds should end the ridiculous charade and declare independence themselves. They should have done it years ago, before the rest of Iraq stabilised, but even doing it now might do them some good.

The problem was created after WWI when the colonial powers penned the borders of the middle east. The Kurds main problem is not Iraq, its that they claim parts of Turkey and Iran, both of whom do not wish to give up sizable chunks of their territory. Personally, I'm a bit sick of everyone that must have their own homeland, and everyone else is excluded. As long as your neighbor is a good one, who cares what ethnicity or religion they are, as long as they are not pushing it down your throat. Imagine if the US had to divide the country up by ethnicity and religion, the former country would be a thousand bickering tiny nation-states that could get nothing done themselves and probably require aid of some sort. Then one group wouldn't be happy with the piece of land they got, and on and on.

The Kurds are not Arabs, but they both need to learn they are Iraqis and start thinking of the country as a whole. If there was no oil there would this even be as big an issue as it is? If that were the case, Kurdistan would be another resource poor, third world country with the kind of despair that attracts extremists, and another money pit for the bleating hearts in the West to throw cash at.

As it stands IMO, the worst thing they could do is separate from the country. Land-locked and bordered by less than friendly nations is not an ideal situation. They probably need Iraq more than Iraq needs them, even with the oil there. If they spent half the effort into building better relationships as they do highlighting their differences the whole nation would be better off.

It's not the kite-flyers' fault. But it should be mentioned WHY it happened, not just THAT it happened. The Kurds are not just errorising Arab kite-flyers for the heck of it.

Unfortunately western media have a very pro-Arab attitude and tend to focus on what is done to them, but they rarely discuss why it is done (and what usually happens when it isn't done).

 

If they did that, Arab terrorists would create hell on earth in Kurdistan, regardless of whether it is independent or not. The Kurds are in the same position as the Jews.

 

They did. And the Iraqi constitution recognises them as sovereign over Iraqi Kurdistan. They are, within Iraq, completely independent, even have their own immigration (they accept Israeli passports etc.).

 

That's not how it works in the middle east.

The Europeans handed over everything to the Arabs (for some reason) and called it "decolonisation".

The Arabs then started to "arabise" everything. They forbade the use of native languages, slaughtered the odd people, sold into slavery whomever was black enough, flooded the land of others, and attacked whomever was left (Israel).

And at least since the 1970s the western media support them for some reason. The world somehow accepted that Assyrians must be ruled by Arabs. And the same seems to go for Berbers, Kurds (until 1991/2003), Jews, Somalis, Nilo-Saharan tribes and other peoples. And the result is that most people now find nothing wrong with the idea that Syria is an "Arab country".

Every people their own homeland is the only solution I see. The Arabs can remain where they are but they will have to stop thinking that they and only they ought to rule the entire middle-east and northern and eastern Africa.

And instead of being the rulers of 22 countries while all the other peoples are strangers at best and slaves at worst, there will be Arab populations in non-Arab countries. The experiment of handing over a colonial empire to the Arabs has failed.

 

I didn't know that! That puts everything in a new light. I knew they were an autonomous state, but I figured it was the meaningless label it is in most 3rd world states. The article certainly suggests border control is by unauthorised thugs.

So is the pesh merga a component of a broader Iraqi civil service/police force, or is it just a component of the Kurdish authority?

It's usually more accurate to blame ignorance than malice in these cases, but the fact that the land is in dispute - rather than being explicitly autonomous territory - means the article is at least mostly correct. The Kurds don't have a right to control villages that fall under a different province. They should be pursuing their territorial claims in the courts, not with armed guards in the villages.

The Peshmerga are indeed authorised by the Iraqi constitution to defend Kurdistan's borders. They are an official instrument of souvereign Iraqi and Kurdish government (albeit under purely Kurdish control). Note that the Shiites in the south have little sympathy for the Sunnis the Kurds are facing and usually vote to keep Kurdistan privileged.

They are absolutely not unauthorised thugs. They have uniforms, name tags, standard weaponry, and strict procedures. I was myself questioned by them at a border post for a few hours when I was there. (Questions were regarding why a European Jew would travel through Iraq without a passport or visa. They were completely professional even if a bit stunned after they stopped laughing.)

My guess is that the author of the article has never actually met those border patrols he is writing about. But that wouldn't stop him from describing them in a certain way. And that's my problem with the article.

If the land is in dispute the (Arab) governor's actions (calling his armed guards) constitute the same kind of behaviour. However, the Kurds have a better track record in anforcing just law. The governor's base (Mosul) is famous for Arab militias hunting down (Assyrian) Christians. The Kurdish base (Arbil) is famous for being terror-free and having a working Christian quarter. (And from my own experiences I can also confirm that there is no anti-Semitism in Arbil that I could detect.)

Even if the Kurds are not souvereign over the disputed area, it would still fall under an umbrella of "Kurdish occupation", which means that enforcing border controls is still not the same as random thuggery.

And if the Kurds pursued their claims in the courts rather than in the villages, the area would be Christian-free within a year (and the Kurds would lose any local elections about whether Mosul should be part of Kurdistan).

When I spoke to Kurds in Arbil the only common complaint about the Christians was that they don't speak "Christian" any more. By "Christian" they mean Aramaic. The Kurds, from all I have heard, love multikulturalism (under Kurdish control) and were very proud of hosting Christian populations. The Christians (Assyrians) are the original native population of northern Iraq before the Arabs or even the Kurds took over.

(Incidentally, I don't know if the elections the Arab governor won took into account the fact that the Assyrians, i.e. the native population, was fleeing towards the mountains at the time. I'd rather see the Kurds rule over the Assyrians than the Arabs. I have heard horror tales from Assyrians about the Kurds as well, but it never approached what I heard from Assyrians about the Arabs.)