Now, any attempt to speak on behalf of tens of millions of people shouldn’t be taken seriously, and this is no exception. In 2011, radical imams in Zakho, Dohuk Province encouraged Muslim Kurds to go on a riot and destroy Christian shops selling alcohol, places of worship, or anything else they wished. In total, 30 shops were ransacked and burned; a Chaldean Diocese in Zakho was attacked; an Assyrian Social Club in Nohadra besieged by a mob of 200 people; a Yezidi club, restaurants, hotels, and other various stores were shot at with automatic weapons. Fliers were then posted on all properties threatening more violence if reopened. “Coexistence” comes with conditions.

ISIS

In responding to how ISIS came about, Bayan Rahman says “Take ISIS in Iraq, it’s a marriage between ISIS […] and the Ba’athists […] the Ba’athists want to come back to power in Iraq, and ISIS want a caliphate. It’s a marriage of convenience.”

This glib, simplistic analysis ignored so much.

First, the policy of de-Baathification after 2003 completely wiped out any role the Sunni Arabs had in Iraq. This is because during Saddam’s reign, one had to be a Baath member to have any kind of life, or any kind of job in the public sector (including apolitical roles such as teacher or nurse). This meant huge swathes of Sunnis who did not care for the Baath party or its principles, and who were only members to secure themselves a livelihood, were immediately cast aside and smeared for the rest of their lives.

This is ironic, since if anybody wants any kind of livelihood in the KRG, they must join one of the dominant political parties, KDP or PUK, in an environment resembling a prison with competing factions vying for turf and numbers.

To add to the complete alienation of civilian Sunnis, the Iraqi army was disbanded in its entirety. This brought about a complete collapse of all security functions and several hundred thousand redundant soldiers, as perfectly outlined in this excerpt from a NY Times piece from 2004:

“An American special-forces officer stationed in Baghdad at the time told me that he was stunned by Bremer’s twin decrees. After the dissolution of the Army, he said, “I had my guys coming up to me and saying, ‘Does Bremer realize that there are four hundred thousand of these guys out there and they all have guns?’ They all have to feed their families.”

Fast forward to 2010 (and several thousand murdered Iraqis later). The Shia bloc headed up by Iyad Allawi which the Sunnis threw their support behind won the election. However, they were not allowed to form a government due to Iranian influence within Iraq and Iran’s very clear preference for Maliki to retain power. What then ensued was surprising by Allawi’s own testimony: the US, in the sake of maintaining whatever fragile stability they were newly acquiring in the region, advised Allawi to desist and let Maliki form a government.

The bloc which won the most votes and seats across Iraq, the bloc which included the alienated and disenfranchised Sunnis, were yet again forced out of government and away from any kind of power sharing.

ISIS have no doubt exploited this disconnection ordinary Sunni Arabs have felt since 2003, but to underplay the role de-Baathification had as a precursor to the horrible security situation is irresponsible. There is no doubt that hardline Baathists would like a return to power, but for once in this interview, I would have liked to see “complex” used here where it is actually appropriate, but instead, we are treated to a partial story.

Turkey

Dave Rubin then asks about Turkey and how badly they’ve treated the Kurds, including banning the Kurdish language, at which point Bayan Rahman smiles uncomfortably: “some letters were not allowed to be used because they were not in the Turkish alphabet, so that essentially meant Kurdish names were banned. But Turkey has made a lot of progress on these things.”

The reluctance to elaborate on this topic and the attempt to immediately try and shift the conversation into more positive territory is quite telling.

Dave Rubin: “So on one hand, they’re [Kurds] on the ground fighting ISIS, and at the same time, they’re being bombed by Turkey. I know it’s a complex relationship […] it seems Turkey is playing both sides”

Bayan Rahman replies “I think Turkey’s main focus is Syria. Turkey wants to be rid of Assad. That is President Erdogan’s priority. Many of Turkey’s actions can be seen through that prism. Turkey has a very large Kurdish population. Some people say 20m, some people say 30m […] those people demand their rights, as they should, but Turkey has made a lot of progress, particularly under Prime Minister Erdogan, when he was Prime Minister, Turkey decriminalized the Kurdish language, there is at least one Kurdish TV station which is state run, a lot of progress has been made. There was even a peace initiative started in 2012 […] we need Ankara and the Kurdish population in Turkey to have peace so that they can get on with things, but unfortunately, you have seen a reversal of many of those steps taken, and now there is a huge tension in Turkey.”

She further states: “A Kurdish party did very well in the elections and managed to get over the 10%. There has been a lot of progress […] We have to balance a cooperative relationship with Iran and Turkey. Our oil is exported through Turkey.”

The sheer distance Bayan Rahman, Barzani and the KDP puts in place between themselves and Kurds in Turkey would have you believe they were different people. And this praise—this relentless focus on “progress” (when neutral observers would claim the opposite)—and the spinning of the situation to depict a benevolent, noble Turkey dealing with Kurds who have good cause but are going about it in the wrong way isn’t realpolitik, it’s just cowardice and cynicism designed to appease Erdogan’s ruling AKP party.

It is the KDP and its supporters who put their party first and the Kurdish people second. I put it best in previous writing related to Barzani’s last interview with Al Monitor from March 2016:

As disgusting and awful as it is, I can understand why Barzani despises any non-Kurd who isn’t strictly with him, and wants to crush them, drive them away, steal their lands, or disempower and absorb them. It’s pretty a common drive among your standard tyrant, racist, supremacist. But Barzani is even worse than that, here’s another perspective or dimension:

What makes him extraordinarily repugnant is the fact that he praises Erdogan, a man whose country supported ISIS with freedom of movement, supplies, medical care, arms, money, and oil trade, a man who has imprisoned any Turkish legal official, judge, journalist, border guard, academic who has uncovered Turkish>ISIS support, a man who let ISIS militants across the border to slaughter Kurds in Syria and Iraq, a man who is still conducting massacres of Kurdish men women and children across Turkey, destroying entire towns and villages in the process, a man who simply staged another election because the Kurdish HDP party in Turkey received more votes than he wanted them to have, and then conducted a terror campaign in the interim to violently coerce more votes for his AKP – a party more focused on building mosques than schools and hospitals, a man who apparently had it all to give to the HDP had they entered into coalition with them, a decision not taken by the HDP which Barzani rues and disapproves of.

Erdogan is the man who Barzani celebrates as “understanding the Kurdish cause more than any other”, and against this, he paints as the victim – despite the streets in the South East of Turkey littered with the bodies of dead Kurdish children.

It is one thing to destroy Assyrians and Yezidis and others who do not identify with him, his party or the Kurdish people, but to forsake fellow Kurds and their families for the sake of politics, money and power – this really does speak of the man.

“Refugee” Crisis

“You’re sharing a border with ISIS and you are the ones fighting them?” Dave Rubin asks, coming back to Kurds in Iraq and their battle with ISIS. Bayan Rahman takes this is an opportunity to end on a plea:

“Yes we need more weapons, we need heavy weapons. We need protective gear for our Peshmerga. We are also facing a humanitarian crisis, our population is about 5m and it has increased by 30% […] They are all refugees, they don’t know anything, they can’t work, they have nothing, we have to provide everything. We used to have 24 hours of electricity, suddenly we don’t, because we have to share it […] The other crisis we face is financial […] we are trying to find a way for helping Kurdistan out of this financial crisis.”

This insatiable thirst for more (and heavier) weapons just betrays their intentions to have the best weapons available to their forces, securing their position in the region (reminiscent of the reality of the Middle East Bayan Rahman evoked, but mildly distanced herself from earlier).

And anyway, they haven’t used any of these weapons to defend the minorities they claim as Kurdistan’s before they were violently purged from their own lands (which are now suddenly Kurdistan too).

All in all, the whole interview was conducted without even mentioning the other “c” word: “corruption”. As if the KRG, now newly anointed in the media as the West’s “best bet”, this old “new Dubai” needs to find its feet again, and in order to do that, the West must funnel even more money and weapons to them as they take over more and more non-Kurdish territory. The level to which the West is now invested in the KRG has reached a limit where governments simply do not even want to hear about its failures and discretions.

The influx of “refugees” who “don’t know anything” are mostly Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) who know a great many things. Many of them were betrayed by the Peshmerga and had to flee their homes towards lands they knew their conquerors would defend.

Barzani and the KDP

Now onto Barzani, Bayan Rahman’s paymaster, and the Kurdish Regional Government’s recently announced referendum on independence (as well as all of the ugly present-day realities not mentioned by Bayan Rahman).

Barzani has said that he will step down after Kurdistan becomes independent, and you can read that in two ways: first, Kurdistan won’t be independent anytime soon, second, he will move for independence but then stay in power for another reason or another, as he has always done in the past. There will always be one more reason for dictators to remain in power—since his official term has ended, he is only now President by decree.

And here I have to mention heroic young Kurds such as Sardasht Osman, a university student who penned a satirical poem about the Barzani family hegemony and was shortly after kidnapped and murdered, his body found in a dumpster. His murderers were identified publicly and still walk the streets. If Barzani and his followers are willing to commit murder in the face of harmless creative dissent, what will they do when it comes to accession to real power? Countless Assyrian martyrs who proved to be emerging dissenting forces, such as Francis Shabo, know all too well.

The referendum card was played in 2011, and it came at the height of frustration in the Kurdish region when protests were breaking out and ordinary Kurds felt cheated by their government. This is a general breakdown of events then and (and in some ways, now):

Ordinary Kurds in Iraq are angry, poor, unpaid, lied to, and start protesting. Barzani threatens (or proudly declares, used interchangeably) referendum on independence. Ordinary Kurds calm down, get back to work, live somehow whilst being unpaid. Turkey makes a phone call to the KRG and asks them if they are actually serious, and the KRG duly reassures them they are not. Erdogan puts the phone down and continues to kill Kurds in Turkey. Issue becomes submerged, and ultimately forgotten, business as usual gradually commences. Back to (1), rinse and repeat.

Anyone who wants to understand the KRG must understand their economic situation as well as the often talked about political situation, so here are some very straightforward facts:

They are $25bn+ in debt and are touring the West, cap in hand, begging for money.

Pre-ISIS, the Kurdish Region produced 7% of Iraq’s oil and had a budget allocation of 17% from Baghdad, meaning they were heavily subsidized and relied heavily on Baghdad for even basic functioning. Since ISIS, Baghdad have stopped budgetary payments to the KRG because the KRG had begun making oil deals independent of Baghdad (with Turkey).

Under Iraqi law, all such oil deals must be sanctioned by the Federal Government, with all proceeds distributed centrally to the various provinces and regions. Given events, the agreement collapsed and the economy is now operating largely undocumented and unregulated. You can see the effects of this now in over six months’ worth of unpaid public sector salaries in the Kurdish Region, prompting emigration out by Kurds losing hope, and deserting Peshmerga no longer able to provide for their families.

The Kurdish Region has a public sector that comprises 75% of the whole region wide workforce—meaning 75% of all workers in the Kurdish Region work for the Kurdish government in some way shape or form. Even under Saddam, this figure was 40%. This is because a very, very low % of workers in the KRG (like under Saddam’s Iraq) produce most of the region’s revenue (via incredibly heavy reliance on oil trade with and through Turkey) and the rest are either in the Peshmerga or occupy jobs that simply serve as ‘padding’ for the employment market: i.e. they just pick up a pay check and do something menial.

This means the people are heavily reliant on the government for money, and the KDP and the PUK take advantage of this through a patronage system: you as an individual must demonstrate complete, uncritical loyalty to our political party, its aims and its rhetoric, and in exchange we will pay you primarily for this loyalty so you can eat and feed your family. As I stated previously, the system is very similar to Baathist Iraq, which nostalgists still pine for due to the heavily conditional ‘freedoms’ it bestowed on them.

In order to maintain this almost state-wide pseudo-welfare system, predicated on an incredibly unbalanced ‘get rich quick’ economy, and endemic corruption throughout all 19 wasteful government departments from the bottom to the very top, the KRG is driven to steal more and more resource rich land to feed their aforementioned, fatally flawed economic (kleptocratic) model.

Their second political project has involved nurturing a mutually beneficial master/slave relationship with Turkey, primarily to distance themselves from Baghdad, but at the expense of helping or expressing any real solidarity with fellow Kurds who are truly suffering under the yoke of Turkish nationalism. Barzani and the KDP have done almost everything in their power to acquiesce, praise, and endorse the Erdogan government, even throughout their terror campaign against Kurdish areas in the south east of Turkey.

In this affair, the KRG serves as little more than a province for Turkey and its interests in Iraq: nearly every military move the KDP adopts in Iraq via its Peshmerga is given with either the instruction or the blessing of the Turkish government. This is evidenced simply in how events have unfolded, and how they are unfolding with relation to Mosul: Turkey’s “Fulda Gap”, as expressed in an excellent article on the subject by War on the Rocks in December 2015.

Tensions are rising so much here that the PKK/YPG and the Peshmerga forces are actually competing to liberate Mosul: the PKK for influence in the region, and the KDP at the behest of Turkey, who mustn’t lose yet another corridor into what they vaguely believe is their old province, Iraq, given their failures in Syria and the emergence of the Kurdish Federal Region there.

That said, with the conquering of Kirkuk, the Nineveh Plains and Sinjar, the KRG might be in a position to offset losses incurred by completely surrendering subsidies and back payments from Baghdad since they can harvest the resources in these lands. But given the economic model they are maintaining, and almost complete reliance on Turkey for any economic prosperity, it isn’t sustainable and civil war will likely erupt once again as the money inevitably runs out and the prospect of conquering land that is better defended becomes more distant and remote.

And as always, with any such tension between local, warring political parties and their personal armies, defenceless Assyrians newly absorbed and robbed of any meaningful agency will suffer the hardest, being as we are captives under a flag that is not ours.