A Fraught Autonomy in Iraq

On Monday, three million people living in the semiautonomous Kurdish Region of northern Iraq voted overwhelmingly in support of seeking independence in a nonbinding referendum. The region, unofficially known as Kurdistan, has its own government and schools, and a security force known as the pesh merga.

The Kurds’ most important resource is oil. Erbil, the region’s capital, is an oil boomtown. And after the Iraqi military fled Kirkuk during the Islamic State’s offensive in 2014, the Kurds were able to seize full control of that city and its major oil fields, too. Independence would mean the Iraqi government losing any share of those lucrative resources — an outcome Baghdad has said it is willing to go to war to prevent.

The détente between Iraq and the Kurds has only been a relatively recent development, and has never been strong, even though they are on the same side of the fight against the Islamic State. In the 1970s, Iraqi leaders sent Kurds to concentration camps and razed their villages. In the 1980s, when they sided with Iran in its war with Iraq, President Saddam Hussein killed more than 100,000 of them and attacked the city of Halabja with poison gas.

A no-fly zone, imposed by the United States after the 1991 gulf war and a failed Kurdish uprising, protected the Kurds for years in northern Iraq. And after the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Kurds and the Iraqi government essentially had to get along, under pressure from American officials. But after the Kurdish referendum vote, Iraq has halted flights at the international airports and threatened to send troops to retake the Kirkuk oil fields and disputed areas.