Kurds benefited the most from the US invasion of Iraq

Irbil, located in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, is dotted with McMansions, fast food restaurants, real estate offices and semi-finished multi-storey buildings on both sides of the highway. Known as the ‘American Village’, many stalwarts of politics and business live in this suburban area. The houses here sell for an average of $5 million and the size of their lush green gardens can be gauged from the fact that they absorb about one million liters of water a day in the summer.

However, the scene is very different from what it was 20 years ago. At that time Erbil was a backward provincial capital with no airport. After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the picture of Erbil changed rapidly. Analysts say that Iraqi Kurds, especially Kurdish politicians, benefited the most from this invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein from power. However, for most ordinary Kurds, conditions are still almost as they were before. Corruption, the power struggle between the two main Kurdish parties and the tussle between Erbil and Baghdad (the Iraqi capital) have not helped them much.

The US invasion of Iraq had created an uproar in most parts of the country. Several political and sectarian communities have been trying hard to form a government in Baghdad as US forces struggle to deal with hardliners. But the Kurds, seen as staunch allies of the US, strengthened their political position during this time and attracted massive foreign investment.

Erbil quickly established itself as an oil-based emerging economy. Two years later a domestic commercial airport was built there with Turkish financial help. A few years later, Erbil also got its own international airport. Bilal Wahab, a fellow at the Washington Institute thinktank, says Kurds have traditionally “carried themselves out as victims and had a lot of grievances”, but in post-2003 Iraq “the narrative of the Kurds has changed. They have the reins of power in their hands and have become empowered.”

With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the 1920 Treaty of Sevres promised the Kurds the establishment of an independent Kurdish nation. But, the treaty was never recognized and neither was ‘Kurdistan’ established. Since then Kurdish rebels in Iran, Iraq and Turkey have been active against the government. Meanwhile, in Syria, Kurds have fought Turkish-backed forces. The Kurdish region in Iraq gained autonomy in 1991 when the US declared it a no-fly zone in response to Saddam’s brutal suppression of Kurdish rebels.

“We had created our own institutions, from parliament to government,” says Hoshyar Jabari, a senior Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) official who held the post of foreign minister in the first government after the end of the Saddam era in Iraq. He says, “We also had a civil war, but we overcame it.” He was referring to the conflict between rival Kurdish groups in the mid-1990s. “The change of power in Baghdad brought many benefits to the region,” Jabari said in an interview from his palatial mansion in the Massif.

Located in the hills of Massif Ibril, it is a developed city where most of the KDP leadership resides today. Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid, who belongs to the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, also expresses his opinion on the developments since 2003. He says that the goal of the Kurds was “the establishment of a democratic Iraq and they also wanted the right of self-determination for the Kurdish people.”

According to Rashid, after Saddam was ousted from power by the US, “we (the Kurds) achieved this…we became a strong organization in Baghdad.” The post-invasion constitution codified the semi-autonomous status of the Kurdish region. At the same time, an informal power-sharing arrangement was created, under which it was decided that the President of Iraq would always be a Kurd, the Prime Minister would always be a Shia and the Speaker of the Parliament would always be a Sunni. But, even in the Kurdish region, the post-invasion situation is complex.

While the two main Kurdish parties continue to struggle for power, Irbil and Baghdad are at loggerheads over territory and the sharing of oil revenues. Not only this, the Arab citizens of the Kurdish region and other minorities including Turkmen and Yazidis feel sidelined in the new system. In addition, the number of Kurdish youth moving out of Iraq in search of better opportunities has increased in recent years due to stagnating economic growth in the Kurdish region amid domestic issues and fluctuations in the global economy.

According to the International Labor Organization, in Erbil in 2021, 19.2 percent of boys and 38 percent of girls aged 15 to 24 were looking for employment after leaving school-college. Wahab says that Irbil’s post-2003 economic success has also been affected by rampant corruption.

Disclaimer:IndiaTheNews has not edited this news. This news has been published from PTI-language feed.

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