Stories from Kurdistan

Why This Kurd is Grateful for the 2003 Invasion of Iraq

2003 invasion of iraq

The below piece was originally published by Ranj Alaaldin in The Wall Street Journal on July 7th, 2016. 

The Chilcot Inquiry into Britain’s involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq has renewed the debate over the war’s legacy. The Coalition’s failures in planning, execution and intelligence are once more under a glaring public spotlight. But one group that hasn’t been heard from are the five million Kurds who welcomed the Coalition with open arms and continue to do so today. We are grateful to President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair for liberating us from Saddam Hussein.

Fleeing Saddam’s Iraq

I was one of the fortunate Kurds who fled Saddam’s Iraq. My family successfully claimed political asylum in the U.K. in the mid-1980s, when I was a year old. But for Britain, the country that I now proudly call my own, giving us refuge, we would have suffered the same fate as the thousands of Iraqi Kurds who weren’t as fortunate in the years that followed. Saddam killed more than 180,000 Kurds during his monstrous Anfal Campaign in the late 1980s, including 5,000 men, women and children who died instantly in the Baathist regime’s chemical attack on Halabja.

The Kurds are under no illusions. We have our grievances against the West. Various Western governments supported Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War, and it was the British who denied us an independent state in the peace settlement after World War I, even as they created several independent Arab states from the remains of the Ottoman Empire.

Kurds are conscious of a history that has often been less than kind to us. But we have embraced changes in an international order that is now far more favorable to us. The shift began in 1991, after the first Gulf War, when Saddam wanted to exterminate the Kurds after suffering defeat at the hands of the U.S.-led Coalition.

I was a 5 year old then, and with other Kurds in London my family visited former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at her home. We sought her assistance in making the case to John Major’s government for a no-fly zone. Soon after, the Iron Lady intervened and added important momentum to the campaign. Under Mr. Major’s leadership, the U.K., U.S. and France established a no-fly zone that prevented another genocide against the Kurds.

The no-fly zone is entrenched in the collective consciousness of the Kurds. The West came to our aid at our darkest hour, and the Kurds capitalized on this by engaging in state-building and democratic politics. This experiment was interrupted by a Kurdish civil war in the 1990s, but differences were mended to secure the Kurdish stake in the post-2003 Iraq.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a positive event for the Kurds

So far as the Kurds are concerned, Messrs. Bush and Blair finished a job that was started in 1991. While the rest of Iraq became embroiled in sectarian war, the Kurds developed a stronger economy, better foreign relations and a growing middle class thanks to oil wealth and stability.

Challenges remain. There is a fiscal crisis in Iraqi Kurdistan. And Islamic State lingers by the border. Our region is unpredictable. Even so, the Kurds are now the shapers of our own destiny, no longer shackled by despots and power politics. We have hope and prospects. We owe that to an American president and a British prime minister.

Mr. Alaaldin is a Middle East specialist at the London School of Economics and an associate fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, King’s College London.


Access the original article in The Wall Street Journal here.

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