Why Iran Fears the Iraqi Kurds

While Obama and other countries rush to defend the Kurds, Iran is worried that if they gain their independence, and Iraq breaks up, Iran might be next.

At the end of June, Nechirvan Barzani, the prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan, visited Tehran along with a high-level Kurdish delegation to meet with Rear Admiral Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council.

Shamkhani is a moderate military figure and usually appears in public wearing civilian clothes, but when he met Barzani he was dressed in full navy uniform. “I intentionally met with Nechirvan Barzani in uniform so that he would understand that for us the integrity of Iraq is important,” Shamkhani said three days after the meeting.

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That a top-ranking Iranian official has resorted to sartorial symbolism reflects just how overwhelmed Iran has been by the twin crises of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki’s failed leadership and the Kurdish move to hold a referendum on independence. For Iran, an effective Kurdish secession from the Iraqi central government would be deeply alarming, with reverberations far beyond simply Iran’s reach across a fragmented Iraq.

“We have stated that violating the progressive and comprehensive constitution of Iraq and demands to overstep its provisions for a federal system would not benefit anyone,” Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, deputy foreign minister for Middle Eastern and African Affairs, told Al-Alam, Iran’s state Arabic news network.

On July 3, Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, asked the Kurdish parliament to form an independent commission to start organizing a referendum on independence. Less than 24 hours after the news was published, Abdollahian implicitly called Barzani unwise, saying that he was confident that “among Kurdish leaders there are also wise people who would not consent to the breakup of Iraq.”

The daily Jomhouri-e Eslami, run by a managing editor close to the former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, described Masoud Barzani on July 21 as an “emotional individual with secessionist slogans” and warned that “in schemes by people like Barzani, there are ridiculous territorial claims on some neighboring countries such as Iran.”

For almost a century since the end of World War I and the creation of Iraq from parts of the Ottoman Empire, both Iran and Turkey have worried that the creation of an independent Kurdish state in Iraq would encourage their own Kurdish political or paramilitary groups and citizens to join that independent Kurdish entity.

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If the Kurds worry Iran .. You know they must be doing something right.

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