Stop blaming Saddam: Kurdish leaders are killing the Kurdish spirit

Stop Blaming Saddam: Iraqs Kurdish Leaders Are Killing the Kurdish Spirit — Illustrative Photo: Statue of Saddam Hussein, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Baghdad, 2023. With the flags of PUK and KDP party. Photo: iKurd.net/U.S. Army.

Sheri Laizer | Exclusive to iKurd.net

Twenty years ago, this month [1] Saddam Hussein was captured but it is the Kurdish leaders that are bringing their own house to ruin

# INDICT THEM FOR:

Drowning teenage girls for talking on their cell phones with a boy or falling in love.
Driving young women to burn themselves alive rather than submit to fathers, brothers, cousins or husbands.
Shooting, stabbing, decapitating, wives, sisters, daughters and cousins in the name of male ‘honour’.
Forced and arranged marriages to friends of the patriarchs and for money.
Polygamy – but just for men.
Daughters subjected to FGM as young as eight years’ old.
Threatening, torturing, imprisoning and executing protestors, journalists, critics and dissidents.
Stealing and confiscating the lands of rival tribes, the unaffiliated and other minorities like the Assyrians.
Doing business with Erdogan of Turkey while allowing thousands of Turkish Kurds to be harmed.
Doing business with Tehran while allowing thousands of Iranian Kurds to be harmed.
Providing the coordinates of the PKK and its supporters to Turkey for members to be struck down.
Aiding Turkish Intelligence (MIT) against Turkish Kurds in Iraq.
Aiding Iranian Ettela’at agents to murder opposition members and attack their bases [2].
Stifling Freedom of Expression and controlling the media.
Allowing Salafists to gather their flocks and preach hatred and mysogyny.
Building ever more mosques [3].
Internecine killings, blood feuds, and revenge killings – Brakuji not Brayeti.
Empowering tribalism and deadly ‘traditions’.
Secret drive-by shootings, raids on the workplaces and homes of opponents.
Torture in Asayish and Kurdistan Special Forces detention centres and prisons.
Secret deals cut with ISIS.
Betrayal of the Yazidis [4].
IDPs robbed and their women and girls raped, abused and sold in forced marriages.
Writers, artists, and musicians left to die in poverty unless they sing to the party hymn sheets.
Disseminating despair and revolt amongst the youth [5].
Enabling child labour to continue in the streets of Kurdistan [6].
Fomenting mental illness while undermining state healthcare.
Failing to prosecute Kurdish sorcerers and religious charlatans.
Subverting the police, judges and the law.
Maintaining corruption for two decades.
Killing the Kurdish spirit (Kurdayeti) and manipulating the past to remain in power [7].

Shall I stop – or merely pause?

Instead of addressing the societal woes within, these brave men and women in their yellow and green fiefdoms of the KDP and PUK steal the wealth of the state and parade it before their impoverished citizens while gloating over their own ‘success.’ One video in circulation promoted by KDP leaders shows the statue of Saddam being toppled, an early generation of peshmergas jumping about with guns and then the skyscrapers of Erbil or Sulaimaniya. Meanwhile they are killing the will of the people and Kurdistan itself faces collapse. Turkey and Iran have made such inroads if the Americans pull out the castle can crumble.

What success is that?

Where, too, is the social educational and cultural development? A few skyscrapers and ugly developments that benefit their business partners mean nothing when Iraqi Kurdish and Iraqi society is sicker than ever before. [8] The children of the leaders can buy their grades and degrees [9] while the leadership is driving away thousands of other disillusioned young people [10] and (older) citizens that risk their necks in deadly lorries, on the migrant routes plied by violent traffickers and the high risk of drowning in leaky boats.

Lying, cheating, and uttering threats of harm to critics has become the modus operandi. Do these vain, and filthy rich leaders [11] spare a thought for the kolbars (human beasts of burden) labouring through heat or snow with stupendous loads just to survive? These poor creatures face being killed every day by Iranian pasdars for plying a. natural trade between Iraq and Iran where once nomadic tribes and shepherds knew no. borders.

Do you think they feel compassion for the female fighters of the YPG [12], of PJAK, PDK-I, PAK, and Komala, raped, mutilated [13] or slain by Turkey and its jihadist proxies in Turkey and Syria [14] or their equivalent in Iran and Iraq [15]?

Do they care that Kurdish children are still begging in the streets, that a major prostitution racket operates in Kurdistan hand in hand with people traffickers and modern-day slavery is openly perpetuated? Do they speak out against the abuse of foreign workers paid a pittance – ‘if at all’ to serve them?

Do they take a stand against their Shi’a militia allies and clerics under the Coordination Framework government in Baghdad for selling little girls as young as eight for sex? [16]

Do they!

Tired of hearing “Saddam this, Saddam that!”

Before – and indeed, well after – the Anfal campaign at the end of Iraq’s war with Iran, followed by the failed uprising of 1991, the yellow and green banners of the KDP and the PUK flew against each other throughout the 1994-1998 internal war punctuated by the 31st August 1996 Barzani embrace of Mam Saddam. Now, they fly still higher as each of the party elites forges opportunistic alliances with the other’s enemies as with the last elections in Baghdad. Even cousins in the party leadership fail to get along because each wants more and more for himself.

Bafel Talabani with Nechirvan Barzani — Bafel Talabani (L) with Nechirvan Barzani (R) in Sulaimani city, Iraqi Kurdistan, May 22, 2022. Photo: Talabani’s FB

Contemplate, if you will, the late PUK leader’s heir, Bafel Talabani, clad in his trademark black combat gear as if he was the chief of the SAS but lounging on a throne of gold beside uncle, Latif Rashid, the paper President of Iraq. Behold cousins, Nechirvan Barzani and Masrour Barzani, ever in the company of obscenely rich Gulf moguls and the most corrupt Western leaders ignoring the demands of their own protestors or simply mowing a few down as in 2011 [17], 2015 [18], 2016, 2017 [19], deepening fears in 2019 [20] and gathering unrest between 2020 [21] to the present [22].

It is long past the hour for the Iraqi Kurdish leaders to turn around the mirror and see what it reflects. [23]

Ugly, isn’t it?

Saddam Hussein can’t be blamed for that.

1 US Special Forces captured and humiliated the Iraqi leader on 13 December 2003.
2 https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/09/29/iraq-iran-kurdistan-krg-puk-pmf-kdp/
3 https://wordpress-1318350-4815544.cloudwaysapps.com/mosques-built-iraqi-kurdistan-2023-03-28
4 https://new.thecradle.co/articles-id/7179
5 https://www.arab-reform.net/publication/understanding-the-roots-of-the-younger-generations-despair-in-the-kurdistan-region-of-iraq/
6 https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1694031/FULLTEXT02.pdf
7 https://tcf.org/content/report/iraqi-kurdistan-losing-place-center-kurdayeti/ See: Iraqi Kurdistan’s leaders continue to stake their political legitimacy on the basis of their past achievements in fighting for and building the foundations of the region’s autonomy. They rely on the past to compensate for their shortcomings in governance today. As Kurdayeti is increasingly reduced to an instrument of the leadership’s claim to power, it ceases to offer a shared sense of belonging for Kurdish society…
8 https://gpgovernance.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Economic-Drivers-of-Youth-Political-Discontent-in-Iraq-The-Voice-of-Young-People-in-Kurdistan-Baghdad-Basra-and-Thi-Qar.pdf
9 https://sirajsy.net/fake-degrees-for-sale/
10 https://cfri-irak.com/en/article/the-root-causes-of-kurdish-iraqi-migration-early-warnings-of-an-impending-youth-quake-in-the-kri-2022-07-13
11 https://ikurd.net/misleaders-corrupt-kurd-rich-2018-05-08
12 See, for example the Netflix film, Soeur d’Armes (Sister in Arms) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxkVMfa-jSg
13 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/02/syrian-kurds-outraged-over-mutilation-of-female-fighter
14 https://www.newarab.com/news/turkish-strike-kills-kurdish-women-fighters-north-syria
15 https://www.globalissues.org/news/2022/11/04/32330
16 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5ZqEWSeKj4 See also https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/iraq/
17 https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/03/07/iraqi-kurdistan-prevent-attacks-protesters
18 https://ekurd.net/protesters-attack-kdp-kurdistan-2015-10-10
19 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-41804717
20 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/11/11/why-are-iraqi-kurds-not-taking-part-in-protests
21 https://www.newarab.com/analysis/iraq-report-kurd-kurd-violence-protesters-clash-police see also https://www.reuters.com/article/iraq-protests-kurds-int/protester-killed-in-iraqs-kurdistan-region-after-days-of-unrest-idUSKBN28H21E/
22 https://www.arab-reform.net/publication/understanding-the-roots-of-the-younger-generations-despair-in-the-kurdistan-region-of-iraq/ See: The rage and rhetoric of the demonstrations, however, were also used as a pretext by the government to dismiss youth protests as illegitimate, further widening the gap between the youth and the authorities.Young people are not only expressing their frustration through street protests: steady streams are also risking their lives in the pursuit of a better life abroad. In November 2021, images of Kurdish migrants from Iraq, primarily the youth, stranded at the Belarus-Poland border grabbed the international headlines…
23 https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/iraq/iraqi-kurdistan-twenty-years-after

Sheri Laizer, a Middle East and North African expert specialist and well known commentator on the Kurdish issue. She is a senior contributing writer for iKurd.net. More about Sheri Laizer see below.

The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of iKurd.net or its editors.