The Kurdish people in Iraq suffered a series of genocides over the past century because they lacked a sovereign state that can ensure its people are protected under international law. So argued Kurdistan’s top security official Masrour Barzani when he advocated for Kurdish statehood in Washington this summer.

Thousands of Kurds in Halabja were killed in 1988 in the largest chemical attack ever carried out against a civilian population. The infamous Anfal campaign killed 182,000 Kurds. Just three years after Anfal, Iraq invaded Kuwait and the US mobilized a global effort to push back Saddam Hussein.

Masrour Barzani argued that if Kurdistan was a sovereign state, like Kuwait, the suffering of Kurds would have stirred more global action, instead of being treated as an internal Iraqi matter.

Just days before the September 25 vote, President Masoud Barzani said more women and children cannot be let to die in another genocide. He said an independent Kurdistan can achieve that. He argued that while they had hoped the new Iraq after Saddam Hussein would take a different path, they soon realized that in Baghdad “only faces have changed. Otherwise the culture of intolerance is the same.”


Rudaw