transcript

'Invisible Nation' by Quil Lawrence

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MARCO WERMAN: Quil Lawrence is The World's Middle East correspondent. He's also an expert on Iraq and the Kurds. He's the author of “Invisible Nation: How The Kurds' Quest for Statehood is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East.” Quil, let's start with something very basic here. What is the status of the Kurds in Iraq at the moment?

QUIL LAWRENCE: They're an autonomous region. There are three provinces of Iraq which form the Kurdistan Regional Government. And under the Iraqi constitution, they have their own laws that inside their region supercede the federal laws. It's sort of a situation like a Quebec or a devolved Scotland. It's the way they see it. Of course, the rest of Iraq doesn't see it that way. There are a lot of people in Arab Iraq – the rest of Iraq -- who consider the Kurds to be some sort of secessionists.

WERMAN: There's a oil field in Kurdistan who is going to start production, thanks to a Norwegian company, very soon – next month, in fact. How will that work? I mean, will the Kurds then deliver a percentage of the revenues they get from that oil to Baghdad or are they just not going to give anything to Baghdad?

LAWRENCE: Well, this is the – gets to the crux of the agreement. In the constitution, and this is again according to the Kurds' interpretation of it. There's a compromise over old wells and new wells. The old oil, that is the Kirkuk oil fields that have been pumping for well, gosh, almost a century now – that all belongs to Baghdad regardless of the Kurds' claim on it. But new discoveries will be administered by the regions. Now, at the moment, the only independent region is the Kurdistan region. So the wells that they have found they get to administer, but they don't get to keep the oil. All the oil goes into the central kitty, and then there's a deal where the Kurdistan region gets roughly 17 percent of the oil revenue. That's their share of the Iraqi population, so they get that percentage of all of Iraq's oil revenue. So the Kurds say, “We're just going to pump more oil into the communal kitty. Everyone benefits from it.” But there are suspicions in the central government that that won't be the case. And there's been some serious showdowns about it. The other thing this gets to as well is that where the Kurds keep on saying, “We're guaranteed this in the constitution.” Well, some of the people in the central government have made remarks – including Prime Minister Maliki – to simply say, “Well, we don't like the constitution. The constitution needs to be changed, and so the laws we make now and the decisions we make now are going to be based on what the constitution is going to look like once we amend it.”

WERMAN: Quil, would you expect the Kurds to put up resistance – military resistance to attempts by the Baghdad government to bring them into the fold?

LAWRENCE: There will probably be no clashes in undisputed territories. There are some places along disputed areas in the eastern edges of even the city of Mosul and down along what the Kurds used to call “The Green Line”, where they have already come very close to shooting at one another.

WERMAN: Right. I mean, like last summer, the city of Khanaqin, the Peshmerga – the Kurdish military – faced down Nouri Al-Maliki's forces from Baghdad, and it sounds like it only stopped because US troops got in between them.

LAWRENCE: What's very interesting is that this conflict, back in August, where you had Kurdish militiamen refusing to vacate and you had the new Iraqi army coming in and saying, “We're carrying out operations in this area. We're going to enter this city.” It was actually a threat from the Americans not to separate them but to refuse to separate them. The commanding General at the time, Mark Hertling, essentially had unmanned aerial vehicles overhead. He was watching everything that happened. And he with the approval of the higher command, eventually, told them, “We're not going to get in the way. The two of you are going to have to settle this and you will be responsible for any of the blood shed.” And cooler heads did eventually prevail, but it was a very interesting threat because it might give us a view of what's to come if indeed the troops are significantly drawn down. Will that mean that these two sides learn to settle their differences without relying on an American referee, or will it mean that they start making other strategies realizing the Americans aren't going to be there? It could be the most important question about this troop withdrawal with these ethnic tensions on the rise.

WERMAN: The World's Quil Lawrence, the author of “Invisible Nation: How The Kurds' Quest for Statehood is Shaping Iraq and The Middle East.” Quil, thanks again.

LAWRENCE: Thank you, Marco.

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