Final Report September 2013 Prepared for: Director, Office ...

Strategic Implications of the "Kurdish Spring"

Final Report September 2013

Prepared for: Director, Office of Net Assessment Office of the Secretary of Defense

Eric Brown, Abram Shulsky, Hillel Fradkin, Lewis Libby and David Ernst Principal Authors

Contract No. HQ0034-09-D-3006

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The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this report are those of the author, and should not be construed as being an official Department of Defense position, policy, or decision.

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Table of Contents

Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 2

I. The Kurdish Awakening .......................................................................................................... 4 Kurdistan Assembled........................................................................................................................ 12 The Rule of Four ................................................................................................................................ 14 Turkey............................................................................................................................................................... 16 Iran ..................................................................................................................................................................... 26 Iraq and Syria ................................................................................................................................................. 33 Kurdish Strategies ............................................................................................................................. 36

II. Strategic Kurdistan............................................................................................................ 41 The Kurdish Population Ascendency............................................................................................ 45 Iran's Imperial Problems................................................................................................................. 51 The Green Line .................................................................................................................................. 57 Turkish Strategies ............................................................................................................................. 60 Iranian Strategies .............................................................................................................................. 64

III. Strategic Implications of the Kurdish Spring ............................................................ 69 1. Turkish-Kurdish Condominium................................................................................................ 72 2. Iranian Hegemony......................................................................................................................... 81 3. Springtime of Peoples ................................................................................................................... 91

Appendix A: KRG Fieldwork Report..............................................................................102 Founders and Geopolitics ..............................................................................................................105 The Swiss Ideal.................................................................................................................................108 With God on The Arabs' Side ......................................................................................................112 "A Golden Handcuff" .....................................................................................................................117 The Devil Next Door........................................................................................................................123 KRG and the Future of the Kurdish Spring .............................................................................126

Bibliography............................................................................................................................ 132

Introduction

The Kurds have often been described as the largest ethnic group in the world without their own state. This is beginning to change, in ways that will have a major impact on the Middle East. This report discusses the ways the rebirth of Kurdish national consciousness will, along with other major changes underway in the politics of the Middle East, affect the region's strategic situation.

Despite the efforts of Kurdish nationalists to gain recognition for their aspirations at the post-World War I peace conferences, the Kurdish populations of the Middle East were divided among four states (Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran). Two of these states (Syria and Iraq) were entirely new creations, offspring of the secret Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France for the division of the Middle Eastern possessions of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey was a new republic, the (more or less) ethnically-based rump of the Ottoman Empire. Only Iran was a continuation of a pre-World War I polity, the Persian Empire.

The seventy years following the end of the First World War were, in general, a period of oppression and frustration for the Kurdish populations, as various efforts to achieve autonomy or independence were squashed by the four states, to the territorial integrity of all of whom Kurdish nationalism was a potential (or actual) threat. This did not prevent, at times, one of the states from trying to use the Kurds as a weapon against one of the others, but these machinations always ended badly from the Kurdish perspective.

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The Kurdish nationalism represented at the post-World War I conferences was probably a minority phenomenon of the Kurdish population, representing a new urban intelligentsia that was just beginning to emerge. The bulk of the Kurdish population remained rural and tribal in its perspectives. This meant, among other things, that intraKurdish differences were common, and sometimes violent. During the seventy year period following World War I, however, this began to change. The Kurds were subjected to various modernization efforts associated with the state-building efforts of the four states under which they lived. The results were similar to what had happened in eastern Europe and the Balkans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the Kurds began to develop a more modern national consciousness.

The turning point came in the aftermath of the First Gulf War, when, following the anti-Saddam Hussein uprisings, the imposition of a "no-fly" zone over northern Iraq created a de facto autonomous Kurdish zone. The overthrow of Saddam and the adoption of the new Iraqi constitution ? which granted extensive powers to the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) ? marked a further step in this direction. The current turmoil in Syria has also raised the possibility that the Kurdish regions of that country will gain de facto autonomy as well.

Equally importantly, the Kurdish region of Iraq has been able to use its de facto autonomy to improve its security and economic situation in a way that contrasts favorably with conditions in the rest of Iraq. While this development has been unbalanced in that it depends too heavily on oil revenues (as opposed to other forms of economic development), it still represents a remarkable achievement in a region that 25 years early had been devastated by Saddam's campaign of revenge and destruction.

This example of a dynamic and successful Kurdish polity is likely have a major effect on the politics of the Middle East as a whole. This report looks at the future of the

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Middle East with a major focus on the effect that the Kurdish national renaissance may have. To do this, it looks as well at the other major trends affecting the region:

The disintegration of the artificial "Sykes-Picot" states (such as Syria and Iraq), which have been unable to forge resilient national identities from their constituent parts. As a result, Turkey and Iran, whose state structures are stronger and more firmly rooted in history, are likely to define the political structure of the region, along with Saudi Arabia (and, to a lesser extent, some of the Gulf states), whose wealth and religious/ideological activism give them potential influence.

The demographic imbalances threatening Turkey and Iran due to the fact that the predominant ethnic groups (Turks and Persians, respectively) have lower birth rates than the minority groups (Kurds in Turkey; Kurds, Arabs and Baluch in Iran).

The potential change in the influence of outside powers, due in part to changes in the world oil market (i.e., the lesser importance of Middle Eastern oil to the United States, given increased oil and gas production in North America.)

The report lays out three possible futures of the Middle East, taking into account these factors.

I. The Kurdish Awakening

In modern history, the manifestation of Kurdish national feeling is a comparatively recent phenomenon. National sentiments currently rising to the fore in Northern Iraq have their roots in events that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kurdish nationalism is the dream of having the Kurdish people, currently divided between Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria form an independent country that encompasses the Kurds who live in all four countries. As the Ottoman order declined, and the states that took its place attempted to modernize, the way the Kurds viewed

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