ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – The debate on resolving the future of Iraq’s “disputed” territories during the country’s present crisis should not ignore Islamic State – “the elephant in the room” – according to a speaker at the opening session of a three-day think tank forum in Erbil on Tuesday.
“A bigger problem is the presence of ISIS in the disputed territories,” said Gareth Stansfield, Middle East politics professor at Britain’s Exeter University. He said Iraq was in a Catch-22 situation in which ISIS could not be dealt with until the territories dispute was resolved, but it could not be settled until ISIS was defeated.
Stansfield was among speakers on a panel discussing the territories at the first forum staged by the Erbil-based Middle East Research Institute.
Kurdish Peshmerga moved into Kirkuk and other areas the Kurdistan Regional Government claims as its own when the Iraqi army fled an ISIS offensive in June. The KRG concedes that the final status of Kirkuk, which has a mixed community that includes Kurds, Arabs and Turkomans, will be decided in a referendum.
Mohammed Ihsan, former KRG minister for the disputed territories, said the failure of successive Baghdad regimes to abide by agreements on settling their status had created “unsecure pockets” that had now been exploited. Baghdad had to realise that all outstanding issues, including security and oil, were related to the territorial dispute.
“A huge part of Iraq has been handed to ISIS, and one of the reasons for the current situation is the failure to implement Article 140,” he said, referring to a constitutional provision to reverse Saddam Hussein’s forced Arabisation of Kirkuk before a status referendum is held.
Hassan Turan, head of the Turkoman Front Coalition, noted that even as the debate was going on, ISIS was changing the demographics of the territories. “Among the Yezidis and Kurds and Christians [who had been displaced], how many of those will be able to go back to their original homes. It’s a big challenged and it obliges us to be united.”
Regarding Kirkuk, Stansfield said the city had fallen too long between two administrative stools – Iraqi and Kurdish. There was a need for a special status arrangement for the city but this could not be done unilaterally but through intense negotiations. He believed the KRG’s leaders knew that.
Former KRG minister Ihsan acknowledged that there had to be power-sharing in Kirkuk, even if Kurds there constituted a big majority.
“Unless this is sorted out, there will be no more Iraq and there will be a war in this area worse than [that of] the Daash [ISIS],” he concluded.
