Kurdish officials in northern Iraq have been inviting oil companies to start exploration of untapped reserves in the region—a direct challenge to Baghdad, said the Associated Press February 3. The Kurdish regional government also began new oil drilling on three other sites, said the January 14 Washington Times.

Iraqi government officials are not happy. “Any contract for exploration or production of oil and gas without the consent of the federal ministry of oil is contractually void,” said Hussain al-Shahristani, deputy speaker of Iraq’s National Assembly, according to a Dow Jones news wire in December.

Adnan Mufti, speaker of the Kurdistan regional assembly, contends, however, that the country’s new constitution adopted last October allows Kurdish authorities to go ahead with production of their own oil. The Kurdish regional government estimates oil reserves in the region at 45 billion barrels.

Kurds in Iraq are an oppressed nationality. They also live in neighboring regions of Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Armenia. Kurds took advantage of the 1991 U.S.-led war on Iraq to establish autonomy in Iraqi Kurdistan. Since the Baath Party regime of Saddam Hussein was overthrown with the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, Kurds have pressed to consolidate and expand their autonomy.

Most Kurdish teenagers in the region have never lived under the Arab-dominated central government in Baghdad. And after 14 years of Kurdish education in the area, almost no Kurds under 30 speak Arabic, noted a feature article in the January issue of National Geographic. In one section of the region administered by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), one of the two main Kurdish parties, the magazine said its reporters saw no Iraqi flags or any other semblance of the central government’s authority.

In an informal poll in Kurdistan held during the January 2005 national elections, 98.7 percent of Kurds voted for full independence. Largely in response to that sentiment, the two main Kurdish parties—the KDP and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)—signed an accord to form a single administration in the region. Until then, the two ran separate sections of the territory.

A larger proportion of women have jobs in the Kurdish region compared to the rest of the country. Women appear to face fewer social restrictions in Kurdistan, and they are more integrated into the government and military, according to National Geographic.

The peshmerga is the Kurdish military, which was formed in the guerrilla war against the former Baathist regime. Today the group continues its autonomous existence, while its members also make up a disproportionate number of the Iraqi military and police in the region. The National Geographic reporter said he was greeted by the chief of police in oil-rich Kirkuk wearing the insignia of a peshmerga major on his uniform. Kurds were expelled from the city en masse under Hussein but are now returning and are trying to become once again the majority there. Halfway through the interview, before a delegation from Baghdad arrived, the police official replaced the peshmerga insignia with one for a captain in the Iraqi army. Most police under his command are peshmerga veterans and he refused an order from Baghdad to replace them with Arab policemen.

In Mosul, also in the north, two Iraqi battalions are now responsible for sections of the majority-Arab city that were formerly patrolled by U.S. troops. U.S. commanders are concerned with the overrepresentation of Kurds in those units, said the February 2 Washington Post. One unit on patrol with U.S. forces reportedly consisted entirely of Kurds who spoke no Arabic and many of whom had Kurdish flags sewn on their uniforms despite regulations prohibiting such insignia.

Construction patterns also reflect moves toward de facto independence. Much like Shiite-dominated southern Iraq, the Kurdish cities are a maze of cranes and half-finished apartment blocks, office buildings, and commercial centers. Hundreds of miles of roads are rapidly being built through the region’s mountains. The new roads link the Kurdish cities to each other and to the borders with Turkey, Iran, and Syria. The roads leading south, toward Baghdad, however, remain in a state of advanced disrepair, National Geographic reported.
 
 
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