The Kurds

enterprise and human triumph over adversity.
The youth of Kurdistan have a limitless potential that deserves to flourish and thrive.
I pray they remain in their homeland to achieve their dreams.

They’re educated, they’ve embraced social media as much as any young generation in the West and as long as the brightest and the best remain in Kurdistan, and not be scattered to the ends of the Earth, then Iraqi Kurdistan will continue on the same trajectory, not as an independent nation - that can never work -but as a shining beacon of enterprise and human triumph over adversity.

When I got into conversation with young Kurds, I found they were find a generation, which looked forwards, not backwards to their parents’ and grandparents’ world of persecution and betrayal.

Even though Kurdish millennials live in a land of broken dreams run by a politically and financially bankrupt government, I need to end this book about the indomitable Kurds on a positive note.

With oil revenues at only US$30 million a month it meant one point two million Kurds on the government payroll wait months for their pay cheques; this as living standards rise and expectations rise faster, with families yearning for politicians to make good on promises of electricity, clean water, better health and educational facilities and access to employment.
The reality is an independent Kurdistan reliant only on oil revenues is a busted flush. It just can’t work.

there already.
Kurdish oil exports peaked at around 600,000 barrels a day in 2016, and have been in decline since, partly because the Kurds’ single export pipeline to Turkey is regularly bombed by groups like Islamic State and the PKK, or broken into by oil smugglers. The Turks also shut the pipeline down when they’re carrying out military raids against PKK guerrillas.

how could landlocked, independent Iraqi Kurdistan survive on its own when its economy is oil dependent?
The answer is it can’t, and the evidence is there already.

tween the PUK and KDP is wider than ever, with fears of the region splitting the region in two.’

The freedoms the Kurds had worked so hard to prioritise, have been taken away by politicians who always put their own survival first.
Kurdistan’s rulers only know one way to react: oppressing the people and setting them against one another. The divide be

m. We also need to empower parliament to be able to scrutinise contracts more and prevent kick-backs to the ruling elite.’
‘Until then, the ruling classes will continue to line their pockets,’ he added.
To the credit of the Kurdish media, which is broadly in the pocket of the ruling parties and individual politicians, corruption in high places is often the subject of local newspaper investigations, radio phone-ins and tv chat shows.
And recently, Prime Minister Masrour Barzani has been making noises about cracking down on graft, giving Kurds hope things might change.
When I was last in Kurdistan Barzani told a conference in Doha, ‘We have stopped corruption. Nobody can rely on a friend of a friend to get things done anymore.’