On our television screens, and through our social media, we see the carnage of a nation embroiled in a seemingly inexplicable complicated civil war. Australians had formally partook in the global war on terror by deploying Australian military personnel to assist in the global effort in dealing with the Islamic Jihad problem.
What has been recognised is the after the draw down of the coalition war machine another war raged from the Arab Spring insurrections that had spread throughout the Middle East. The present Syrian civil war was the product of this Arab Spring and the Islamic State had emerged as the Champion of the Saddam Hussein’s legacy of declaring a mother of all battle, a interpretive allusion for a global Jihad,[ Hale Alexandra, Mother of all battles, 2003, http://www.halexandria.org/dward256.htm ] as promised in the first Persian Gulf War in in 1991, a one hundred day war which ended with a proper thrashing of a Sunni warlord. Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi,[ Wikipedia.com, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Bakr_al-Baghdadi ] the self declared Caliph of the Islamic State, had inherited the vision of his predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,[ Wikipedia.com, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Musab_al-Zarqawi ] for such a Sunni Caliphate, however, it was in truth, Saddam Hussein’s vision as initially proposed in 1991 which seemed to have come true today. However, such a vision may indeed only be considered ephemeral but more significantly would act, instead, as a catalyst for yet another paradoxical outcome for the Sunni Muslims. Whilst the Islamic State would realise Saddam Hussein’s “Mother of all battles” narrative, by coercively establishing a Sunni Caliphate, in truth, however, as the twist of political fate will have it, the Islamic State presence, would create a conducive environment for helping forge a hastened transition towards a new independent Kurdish state.
Australian involvement in redrawing of the Middle East map.
In Australia, by the end of August, 2016, the forty fifth federal parliament, was officially opened by his Excellency, Lt. General Cosgrove, the incumbent Australian Governor General, in his speech he reaffirms the Australian commitment to reconciling a constitutional anomaly with the indigenous people of Australia by formerly announcing a proposed referenda to formerly recognise the indigenous people of Australia in the Australian constitution. In the same speech, multiculturalism and the indigenous issues regarding the delicate race relationships within a modern, vibrant, well informed, and a tolerant Australian society was challenged with the formal recognition attempts of the Australian indigenous people within the Federal Australian Constitution, on the one hand, and, a proposal to amend the Racial Discrimination Act, 1975, with the amendments proposed for 18c of the Act, which deals with the definition of racially motivated hate speech infringing upon individuals and institutional freedoms of speech within formal public Australian functions and institutions.
Meanwhile, a progressive social dynamic of multicultural Australian society has been counteracted by political and cultural skirmishes within far away and exotic places, like Syria, which has been brought home, at our doorsteps, as part of a universal global war on terror narrative. An Australian society, like in America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, the threat level of asymmetrical global warfare, has been brought home, with domestic acts of terror.
After September 11, 2001, the war on terror, was a noble casus belli for America and its allies to launch a seemingly justifiable war against the perpetrators of an unprovoked act of terror against America and an attack against the free world. Australia would enjoin in this war most willingly. Little did many Australians know that some decade or so later more non-Australian Defence Force Australian citizens would be included in the war casualty statistics not only in official conventional combat zones within the Middle East, but, would be radicalised as domestic terrorists within Australia. A new challenge to Australian multicultural society had emerged after September 11, 2001. A political legacy that would reveal a global political shift from a centrist and liberal realpolitical world view, to veering more right wing, reactionary and xenophobic world. An increasingly insecure society which has been justified with a global war on terror morphed not only becoming a strategic mission creep in another pocket region in the world but a war now being fought right at our neighbourhoods.
Australians joining the war zones in the Middle East: The Islamic State the political strategic picture.
In 2013, after the draw down of formal military proceedings from Afghanistan and Iraq by Australia’s commitment to the global war on terror seemed to concluded Australia’s decade long commitment to the global war on terror.
In Brisbane, Australia, in 2013, a 27 year old Australian man, Ahmed Succarieh, (Raymond Succarieh), an ex-Runcorn State High School student, in Logan City, South of Brisbane, would become Australia’s first suicide bomber in the Syrian civil war. Ahmed Succarieh (aka Abu Asma al-Australi)[ Sales, Leigh, ABC, http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2013/s3889609.htm ] drove a truck, ladened with high explosives, into a Syrian Army checkpoint killing thirty five people.
Raymond Succarieh (aka Abu Asma al-Australi) (School photo, google)
A year later, in September, 2014, his older brother, Omar Succarieh[ McKenna, K, Courier Mail, 2014, http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/crime-and-justice/war-on-terror-brisbane-terror-accused-omar-succarieh-denied-bail/news-story/3eb6c0cdd5deea86966957325144760b ], a Logan City Islamic bookstore owner, during a nationwide Australian counter terrorism law enforcement sting, involving the Australian Intelligence Community, the Australian Federal Police and State Police joint operation, was arrested and charged under counter terrorism laws, with providing financial aid to the Al Qaeda linked terrorist organisation, Jabhat Al Nusra ( now known as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham).
Other notable Brisbane based arrested terror suspects, included Ahmed Succarieh’s older brother, Omar Succarieh, (Al Qaeda linked Jabhat al Nusra financier), Agim Kruezi (Logan City resident recruited into the Jabhat Al Nusra recruit), and, over one hundred known Brisbane and Logan City based Actuals and Suspects.
Presently, in August, 2016, Ahmed Succarieh’s older brother, Omar Succarieh, remains remanded in the Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre, in Wacol, Brisbane, still awaiting his trial for terrorism law offenses. The Succarieh siblings are amongst a growing number of radicalised Australians still being lured into the conflicts in the Middle East and some even more frightening for the Australian community, having failed in their ambition to enjoin in the Middle Eastern Conflict, would resort to homegrown acts of terror. The asymmetrical nature of the global war on terror has brought what seems to be a conventional foreign war right into our neighbourhoods and to our doorsteps.
The global war on terror at our own doorstep.
At the grass roots level, the present global war on terror has inculcated an unprecedented cultural conditioning beyond the scope of immediate significant and peer persons radicalisation of local citizenry. More pervasive is the fluidity of access to information through the digital age. Radicalisation for a potential Islamic Jihadist terrorist is no longer limited to social gatherings in physical known places like Mosques, Islamic schools, or even Islamic bookstores, but, the internet is more pervasively accessible to individual and more particularly to potentially radicalised individuals and individual groups.
Young people from ethnically disadvantaged groups, particularly, from the Islamic cultural backgrounds, have traditionally become culturally isolated within most Western societies and Australia is no exception. Typically, minority groups, with their culturally unique traditions, whether they are from a middle class, or working class, socio-economic backgrounds, if culturally estranged, isolated and disenfranchised, may be susceptible to the social dysfunctionalism and often will become your regular angry juvenile delinquent. Some become unemployed and disaffected and would remain your typical disillusioned unemployed job seeker, within a West Sydney suburb, or, in Logan City, in Queensland.
What is more complicated, however, is the overarching ideological narrative which would threaten the very fabric of a harmoniously multicultural Australian society, which is the indelible threat to a seemingly harmonious multicultural Australian society brought about by a particular cultural and ethnic group of individuals bringing with them their particular baggage which only serves only to marginalise these individuals, their peers, and their kin, even further, within an Australian multicultural society. The ascent of the xenophobic societal attitude has found their raison de’ tre with the inadvertent assistance of the domestic radicalised Islamic Jihadist.
However, as in the case of Ahmed Succarieh and other Islamic radicalised homegrown terrorist elements, was easily groomed into Jihadist radicalisation by his peers, and social networks. Subsequently, he would willingly sign up to enjoin a deadly adventure, or a misadventure, as the case may be. The scenario seems unsophisticatedly simple, in so far as, understanding how an angry young man or a religious zealot may become radicalised to the utmost extreme that they would be more than willing to forfeit their own lives for a cause they consider more important than themselves. A person placed in such a conducive environment for radicalisation will be groomed to become the worse case scenario for any national security risk assessment.
With the seemingly futile attempt at curtailing the cornered cat against the wall cultural isolation for many Islamic Australians, the never shall twain shall meet cultural estrangement has been assuaged with citizenry responsibility and community goodwill. Unfortunately, in the vexatious complicated world we live in sometimes as Gore Vidal book entitled “Perpetual war, for Perpetual peace”,[ Vidal, G, 2002, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How we got to be so hated, https://www.amazon.com/Perpetual-War-Peace-How-Hated/dp/156025405X ] the global war on terror a conflict to quell the global spread of the Islamic Jihad since September 11, 2001, had morphed into an inter-generational mission creep.
Social mass media and mainstream media flaming the Jihadist narrative.
People engage each other on their laptops, recruitment for lone wolves are in individuals homes they are accessed by the advanced digital age. The digital age technology and, in particular, the accessibility to the social media networks, has changed the dynamics of conventional engagements and conflicts.
What seems disturbing to the uninitiated laity is the media information overload streaming pictures of war atrocities on our television screens, and viewing the child victims with blood streaked smears, disorientated and disheveled. The immediate response of the unaffected is how can man possibly inflict such an atrociously violent act against a child? Then, as we pan further out from the fragile scene of an innocent victim of war, we view the war torn rubble and realise the location of the recent barrel bombing and find out the city’s name, Aleppo, a major Islamic State stronghold within in a place called the Rojava region, in Northern Syria. Still, the unaware viewer at first glance will not be able to see the connection between the child who has obviously been caught out in the cross fire of a complicated civil war. Whilst the child is being attended to at a medical emergency triage station, the viewer will side with the journalist’s assessment of the situation and insodoing would form a negative opinion of the Syrian government’s rules of engagement against their Sunni enemies. For the part of the Syrian government the Shia backed government forces is undoubtedly supported by a religious narrative which would elevate the conflict to religious fervour. The justifications for conflict for many combatants is sourced at some myopic religious rite of passage which is Islamic sectarianism at its most violent expression. The Alawite Shia backed Assad regime, has found a common ally with the enemy of my enemy makes me your friend, alliances with Russia, augmenting a traditional Shia ally with the most powerful Shia Islamic nation Iran, would ensure that the Shia Muslim would consider the present global war on terror not as a conflict against religious infidels, but a conflict waged against another Muslim sect. The Shia whilst accruing only around 30 per cent of the world’s Islamic followers, have, indeed, become a potent tour de force and a religious sect wedge within the Sunni dominated world.
The Global War on Terror mission creep.
From a military and politically strategic standpoint, the endgame for the present global war on terror did not end when the United States President, George W Bush, landing an aircraft on board a US Aircraft Carrier, and he would triumphantly declare “Mission Accomplished”,[ CNN, May 2, 2003, http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/05/01/bush.transcript/ ] in May 2003. Nor when President Obama’s Operation Geronimo Seal Team Six culling of the world’s most wanted terrorist and with the eventual draw down of American and Coalition of the willing forces from official military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead, a released former detainee within the Bucca Camp,[ Parks, B, news.com.au, May, 31, 2015, http://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/how-a-us-prison-camp-helped-create-isis/news-story/00f2cef93d3b00dd05354d68f4ef2e2e ] in 2004, (US military prison in South of Iraq), whom would declare himself the Caliph of the Islamic State Caliphate, cumulatively would reaffirm the mission creep strategy in endeavouring to transform the Middle East region and to change the Sykes-Picot contrived Middle Eastern map.
With it comes the notion that the perpetual war for perpetual peace will indeed further demonise the prevailing hegemonic forces, led no doubt by Russia and the United States of America, having the vicarious responsibility for allowing the present global war to continue. It may be analytically accurate to surmise that the strategic designs at ending the global war of terror has morphed into a Geo-spatial strategic military and political mission creep. The strategic mission creep in the war against terror has bestowed a can of worms inheritance to the present and future military and political leaders in what seems to be conundrum endless rabbit hole.
Meanwhile, at the conventional war fronts within Syria and the Levant region, Shia Islamic military forces, both from Iran and the Kurdish and Shia backed Iraqi government forces at the moment making sure that the perpetual war of attrition against an overwhelmingly omnipresent Sunni Islamic Jihad which has been spearheaded by the Islamic State, and by the dissenting Rebel Sunni forces and particularly by the Al Qaeda backed local militias, including the aforementioned Jabhat Fateh al-Sham,[ BBC, August, 1, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-36924000 ] in which, some of our local Brisbane Australian Jihadists have willingly traveled afar to join in the bloodletting, and, in doing so, stoking the flames for a perpetual global Islamic Jihad which, at present, still continues unabated.
The Middle East theatre, a continuation of Western and Russian proxy engagements.
Meanwhile, the participation by Western and Russian military forces in the region, has not only fulfilled a retribution against Sunni terrorism, through years of conflict against Sunni Jihadists from Chechnya, but, the unlikely alliance of Russia, and the Shia Islamic world, with the Shia Syrian Government forces and the Iranian government forces, Russia is able to continue with their traditional proxy theatre of war against Western backed Sunni forces which are presently engaging the Shia Syrian government regime of President Assad. The Russians have inadvertently supported a Shia led military force which has fought a war on two fronts the IS forces and the Al Qaeda network as the Sunni religious foe, and to a lesser extent, the forces of the Peshmerga, or the Kurds, on the other.
Overall, what appears to be adjunct Arab spring Sunni instigated rebellion led by an artificially contrived Rogue Fedayeen mercenary Army flying under a Sunni Islamic State black flag, would become a catalyst in hastening the path to Kurdish statehood. On the face of it all, the participation by the Russians and other externalised military elements with their bombing sorties have been welcomed by the Syrian government. Meanwhile, putting the proxy war aside for the Russians versus the NATO forces, the willingness of the local political and military establishment of the foreign stabilisation elements has augmented their dwindling resources to continue their resistance the able to use their military weapons and ordinances to ‘fire for effect’, against their vowed religious and ethnic enemies.until, eventually, Syria, like Iraq and Afghanistan, has sufficiently been reduced to failed state status.
Within the Levant region triangle of conflicting forces: The Kurds, the Sunni, and the Shia.
The Kurds are engaging their regional enemies:
Sunni Armies from both the rebel forces, predominately led by the Al Qaeda network with their subsidiary affiliates;
The Islamic State, led by the self proclaimed Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.,
The Turkish armies converging from the Anatolia region to the north of the Rojava region.
As well as, and to a much lesser extent for the moment, with having to engage the Assad Shia regime from the South West Syria.
August-September, 2016: Tactical military operations in the Levant: Turkish invasion of the Rojava region, and the Shia and Kurdish liberation of Mosul.
Tactical approaches to local skirmishes have centred upon the Kurdish Syrian area of Northern Syria, known as the Rojava region. Paradoxically, within the Rojava region, which is traditionally a Kurdish region, has instead become the declared Islamic State Caliphate, with the cities of Aleppo and Raqqah, presently, considered as the capital of the Islamic Caliphate [ Syrian War, Wikipedia.com, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_civil_war ]
2016 Syrian Civil war: The fragmentation of political, military control and command.
(Syrian Civil War 2016, Wikipedia)
Turkish military incursion into Syria (August-September 2016)[ Associated Press, Foxnews.com, http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/08/27/kurdish-led-syrian-forces-report-turkish-air-raids-on-bases.html ]
Meanwhile, adding further to the confusion is the conflict between the Turkish Sunni Army presently converging from the Anatolia region, Turkey, making an incursion into the Eastern Rojava region.[ Rojava conflict, Wikipedia.com, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rojava_conflict ] It seems as though the with the spate of recent terrorist attacks in Turkey, the Turkish military have considered the Kurds and the Islamic State responsible for the spate of terrorist attacks within Turkey. The overall military strategic designs of the operation no doubt is to nullify the battle effectiveness of the Kurdish terrorist cells emanating from the Rojava region, and to eliminate the Islamic State menace, also suspected of procuring terrorist cell incursions within Turkey, as surely as militarily possible. This military operation engagement is presently unfolding in September, 2016.
Meanwhile, at the same time, to the East of the Rojava region, within Iraqi Kurdistan, the Islamic State forces, presently garrisoned in Mosul, are about to be overwhelmed by the Iraqi Army, the Peshmerga Kurdish forces, and the Popular Movement Front (PMF), made up predominately of Shia Muslims fighters, and Al-Malaki loyal Sunni tribes from nearby Baghdad. The resistance still remains stoic.
The Kurds reclamation of the Kurdish Syria, the Rojava Region, from the Sunni Islamic State, the Syrian Rebels, and the Syrian Government forces (Red dots within Rojava Region), led by Kurdish military groups within the Peshmerga, YPG, and the PKK, with Aerial support from mainly the US Airforce.
(Rojava, Wikipedia)
The Independent nation State of Kurdistan: The Sykes-Picot Agreement: The endgame for The Islamic State.[ History.com staff, 2009, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/britain-and-france-conclude-sykes-picot-agreement ]
Whilst the present skirmishes are presently unfolding within the Rojava region within Kurdish Syria and within Iraqi Kurdistan, and in ineluctable wake of the demise of the Islamic State, the Assad regime will almost certainly be replaced. However, what seems to be the successful outcome to come out of the Islamic State’s paroxymic influence within the Levant, is not in the creation of a Sunni Caliphate to replace the Sykes-Picot agreement from 1916-18, but, in the creation of an official Kurdish Nation State presently within the Rojava and Iraqi Kurdistan region. In many respects, this will proffer and strategically palatable resolution to the present crisis within the Middle East region. From the political and war torn chaos, what seems to be a most likely outcome from the seemingly delusional Islamic Caliphate would not be a return to the Sykes-Picot Middle Eastern Map of the Levant region but a hastened transition for the creation of a new nation that is will proffer a Geo-political and sectarian cosmopolitan independent nation state of Kurdistan. Paradoxically, Islamic Caliphate, which was initially envisioned by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, and, realised by the self declared Islamic State Caliph, Abu Bakr Al-Bagdadi, would bequeathed instead not an Islamic State, for such an artificially contrived Sunni Islamic State can not evolve in a vacuum, through a sudden coercive event such as the Sunni Islamic State being created without the intrinsic cultural superstructures already entrenched within the local polity. Local political and cultural and tribal infrastructures, which is traditionally Kurdish and most are not Sunni Islamic in origin, have to be culturally transmitted from one generation to the next, it is absent in the present IS Caliphate. In the absence of such superstructural institutions and cultural elements the vision of a Sunni Caliphate within a Kurdish dominated region is simply delusional.
Instead, what has always been the regional and social-political cultural superstructure of the region that being the Kurdish people, and their culture, notwithstanding, their respective peculiar cultural practices the coercive influence of Jihadist aggression, albeit, Shia, or Sunni, will eventually dissipate as the prevailing cultural elements of the indigenous cultures with the overwhelming superstructures embedded will prevail.
Perhaps, understandably so, then, the crux of the present crisis may be sourced at the post Great War Sykes-Picot agreement, then drafted, and ratified, by the victorious European Allied powers, carving up the Ottoman Empire amongst themselves.
What seems significantly noticeable from the carve up of the Ottoman Empire was the absence of a Kurdish Sovereign State. Such a fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire, since 1916, has sown the seeds of disenfranchisement for a very significantly unique ethnic culture of people. Understandably, then, with the unlikely outcome of the Islamic State artificially contrived regional paroxysm, will eventually lead to the creation of an independent Nation State status for the Kurdish people. A historical anomaly will be rectified with the formal recognised existence of a unique ethnic culture whose overall ethnic population of around thirty million which undoubtedly represents a significant ethnic cultural representation within the Levant and Asia Minor region.
Sykes-Picot division of the Ottoman Empire within the Levant creating the modern day Middle Eastern nation states. (1916-19)
Illustratively, the Kurdish region whilst it had been absorbed within the Ottoman Empire would continue to be absorbed and partitioned into four Nations within Asia Minor. With an absence of a Kurdish nation in the twentieth century seemed to have defied the cultural superstructural[ Wikipedia.com, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure ] local knowledge of hundreds of generations of Kurdish cultural existence and a geographical connection and affinity within these particular part of the Asia Minor region. To visually realise the Geo-spatial expanse of the Kurdish cultural superstructural sphere of influence would, therefore, reduce the present territorial map for four Middle Eastern and Asia Minor nations; Turkey, (the South East Anatolia region of Turkey); Syria, (Rojava region), as West of Kurdistan; Northern Iraq, as Southern Kurdistan; and, West Iran, ( Rojhilat, or within the Kermanshah region), as East Kurdistan.
(Google)
Ideally, a new Kurdish nation illustratively will encompass a significant geo-spatial and political area of four Asia Minor nation states, effectively shrinking each of their geographical territorial boundaries quite significantly. Indeed, in terms of practical nation building considerations such a nation will present a daunting international political overreach. For the present moment, in the wake of the Islamic State ephemeral presence, realistically, such an immediate Nation state forged out of four separate geographical and Sovereign National Borders, would be considered as a political and logistical ambitious delusion, even for the most ardent megalomaniac Caliph to conceive in such a momentary notice.
Realistically, however, the present transitory government of the Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government has in place the cultural superstructural, and infrastructural institutions, already established that would make such an eventual transition politically manageable and smooth. Moreover, an eventual Independent sovereign nation status for the Kurdish people and their political representation under its own President. President Barzani being the current incumbent Iraqi Kurdistan President may easily assume the mantle as a head of state.
Another considered question is the Iraqi Kurdistan eventually becoming an Independent nation perhaps as a lesson from the systemic failures from the Syrian regime in Raqqah and Aleppo, the eventual inclusion of the Rojava region within a new Kurdistan State may curtail the seemingly unstable Rojava region and the susceptibility to being overwhelmed so easily to prevailing foreign forces. With the inclusion of the Rojava region from Northern Syria into an Independent Kurdish State, an international resolution for appeasing the regional unrest may finally be attained.
With a Kurdish Nation state a Geo-political and territorial Buffer State will provide a physical and religious and political barrier that would help create a safety zone from conflicting sectarian conflicting factions within the affected region. In a practical sense such a buffer zone for all intents and purposes presents the most acceptable reconciliation for a region that has been historically oppressed by the overwhelming forces of the Shia and Sunni sectarian, ethnic, and tribal oppression and conflicts.
Kurdish ethnic and religious minorities. The Yezidis from Sinjar.
At present, the world can not accept a Sunni theocratic Islamic State Caliphate regime maintaining its outrageous occupation of a region which has historically been considered as the purview cultural influence of a disenfranchised ethnic population overlapping four nations. With this historical malaise a perpetual source of tension and instability has ensued in the last century since the demise of the Ottoman Empire within the region since the Sykes-Picot agreement. No doubt, this history of Kurdish oppression would predate the Sykes-Picot agreement for the oppressed Kurds even during the reign of the Ottoman Sultanate rulers, the Kurds were oppressed. Needless to say, the historical acts of ethnic oppression and even before the invention of the term in modern day coinage, ethnic cleansing committed against the religious minority like the Yezidis, by the regional Muslims, was well known and documented well before the Islamic State was ever conceived.
The traditional Yezidi Kurdish region.
The most recent attempt to ethnically cleanse the Yezidis by the Muslims, and the usual suspects were the Sunni and other occasions the Shia would enjoin in the attempting to cull the purported Devil Worshipers. As part of the Yezidi syncretic religion, which seem to include pre-Islamic religious rites and icons culminating with a worship of seven Angels in which one in particular, the Peacock Angel, Melek Taus, is considered by Islamics and Christians alike comparatively similar to Lucifer, or Jin (Koran) as the fallen Angel. Melek Taus, is especially revered by the Yezidi. Unfortunately for the Yezidi race their revered Peacock Angel would become perhaps the single source for their grief and persecution even to this day.
In the latest attempt to ethnically cleanse the Yezidis, was as recent as the August, 2014, Sinjar massacre. On August 3rd, 2014 around five thousand Yezidi men were executed by the Islamic State. Their women and children along with the rest of the fifty thousand or so Yezidi who had survived the culling fled to the mountains. The ISIS forces simply prevented the Yezidi from returning to their homes starving them in the process. Food drops from the US Airforce and by Iraqi Army saved many from certain starvation.
Military Operation movements into Mosul September 2016. The path towards Erbil.
The inevitable demise of the Islamic State seems obvious. Mosul, will eventually, be liberated and in the eyes of many Kurds, the menacing scourge of the Sunni Salafist invaders will, eventually, retreat. Presently, the Kurds have found an ally in the Shia, if only, for all intents and purposes to rid the enemy of my enemy makes me your friend, makes the Shia the perfect bedfellow for the Kurds in this present crisis.
Meanwhile, at the head of this eventual liberation of the Iraqi Kurdish region is the Peshmerga forces, a military force made up almost entirely of local Iraqi Kurds. The Peshmerga, more than any of the participant forces, the Popular Movement Front (PMF) included, would be very eager to not only expel the Islamic State, but, insodoing, and, more importantly, in the wake of the expulsion of the Islamic State, the Peshmerga, will turn their attention to the political ramifications of their expected victory by consolidating their expectant gains by paving the obvious road map, not to Baghdad, but, to Erbil. As the Kurdish Regional Government capital, Erbil, will, undoubtedly, be the converging hub through which all Kurdish international diplomatic decision making are to be made and not in Baghdad.
The greater Kurdish nation: Kurdish nationalism overreach.
By enumerating the proximate regional Kurds within the four Asia Minor nations of Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq, cumulatively speaking, the Kurdish population would aggregatively number well above twenty eight million Kurds. Certainly, collectively speaking, this Kurdish population would form a significantly powerful nation in their own right. However, in conceiving such an ambitious vision of uniting the Greater Kurdish collective into forming a single union and a single centralised government with a federation system would nearly be impossible due to the history of separate development. Perhaps, a conceivable Confederation of Kurdish states could be a possibility in a distant future. For the moment, a Greater Kurdish United Nation of sorts would be considered as strategic nationalism overreach. Meanwhile, for the immediate future at least, the Kurdish self determination impetus must be advanced from Erbil.
(Iraqi Kurdistan, google)
A catchcry emanating from Erbil for declaring Kurdish independent nationhood status
Whilst comparatively speaking as President Barzani from the Iraqi Kurdistan may accurately point out that the estimated strength of the Islamic State fighters are close to two hundred thousand strong, the Kurdish population of twenty eight million or so from the four nations would easily overwhelm any ephemeral presence of IS occupiers of Kurdish territory. The problem, then being, is uniting the seemingly disparate and self serving interests of the myriad of Kurdish tribal and geographically unique areas of the greater Kurdish region.
(Syrian Kurdish region (in yellow), within the Rojava region)
A formal attempt at establishing a United Kurdish Nation from the four Kurdish regions within the four separate nations, into a unitary Kurdish soveriegn state may be considered a political impossibility, at least, for the immediate future post IS.
A more realistic Kurdish nation, may, instead, be forged between a confederated union betweeon the Iraqi Kurdistan region, and the Syrian Kurdish region of Rojava, within Northern Syria, which may be considered less ludicrously impossible to envisage.
In conclusion
As the current Islamic Jihadist narrative continues to blur the secularist political resolution to the current Middle Eastern malaise, and likened to most Levant political matters, there seems to be an absence of a tangible, substantive political solutions to the current cultural impasse. The political impasse is beyond restorative justice resolution and instead a revision of former political decisions made a century ago must be revisited and astute political minds, and dare I suggest it, a secularist solution will proffer a more sound resolution to the Middle Eastern political malaise.
Tim Tufuga
1st September, 2016
